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I want to post about this, because it's such big news right now.

I wish I had more to contribute, but I just don't see anything but a terrible situation.

I don't really fault Obama for going in under the circumstances, though I can see why you'd not, if you could do it over again.
I didn't fault Trump for leaving, although I can see why you'd change that decision if you could go back.
I don't really fault Biden, as there doesn't seem to be anything that can fix it.  I don't really see any options that he has to do anything differently.

If we had hindsight, what do you do differently?  All of these choices were shitty.  But they were in a sea of other shitty choices.

What do you do now?  Where do you go from here?  I hate to be completely isolationist and allow religious extremists take over a nation and destroy civil rights.  But I don't even know how you help, unless you're going to stay there forever.

How awful.

We should've done what we did with Iraq.   Set up a Western style government.

It was Bush that went in, not Obama.

This could have been prevented if the United States didn't help create the Taliban in the first place to fight against "atheist" soviets.

Religion is the problem. If the taliban was a strict christian or jewish organization people wouldn't give a shit.

There's nothing for us to do there, leaving is the best decision. While we're at it, lets get out of the korean peninsula as well.

I think we kinda did set up a western-style government, but it got overthrown the second we left.

Oh yeah, I guess that's true.  My point remains.

I don't blame Bush for going in.  Obama for staying in.  Trump for leaving.  Or Biden for getting stuck holding the bag.

The whole situation sucks and religion is the culprit, you're right.  There's a fine line between helping democracy build naturally and trying to institute it to regions that are going to fight against it in greater numbers than will fight for it.

Just as a point of clarity:

Trump didn't leave (although he had four years to do so).  In the waning days of the 2020 campaign, he ordered the military to prepare for a full withdrawal effective May 2021.  So if he got reelected he could have done whatever he wanted (another surge, etc.), and if he didn't, it's somebody else's problem.  Typical Trump.

There is a group of people who will try to blame Biden for all the (unfortunate, but probably unavoidable) deaths and misery in Afghanistan over the next few months, while also crediting Trump with "ending the war." Trump didn't end the war; he did what he always does, which is shirk responsibility while performing theater.

Let's not draw equivalencies between Afghanistan and South Korea.  The latter is a stable and functional democracy, and there isn't a sizable chunk of South Koreans who culturally believe that the North Koreans have moral authority in their cause.

As to Afghanistan itself: the mission SHOULD have been to get in, deal with Bin Laden, and get out.  But when Dubya decides that Bin Laden was no longer that important and went off to invade Iraq, that was the beginning of the end.  We've spent 20 years there; it was time to get out, and whether we re-enacted Saigon today or 5 years from now, it was almost certain to happen.

Once Biden was elected he could have done whatever he wanted also. Trump isn't president anymore, you can't blame him for bad decisions that were made while Biden is in office. This fuck up is on Biden and his administration. What next, you gonna blame Gase for our shaky looking Oline in 2021.

Oh, I think Biden made the correct choice to get out of Afghanistan.  The difference is that I actually assign that choice to him.

Who do YOU assign it to?

I'm glad we agree who made the bad choice. And with that choice comes all the all the deaths and misery in Afghanistan over the next few months. Hell even most of the left wing media is dragging him over the coals. The Biden administration is a disaster

So just to clarify: you blame/credit Biden (and not Trump) with the decision to leave Afghanistan, then?

Maybe you haven't been keeping up with current events. It's not specifically about leaving Afghanistan. It's about the manner in which it was carried out by the Biden administration. Both Trump and Biden were adamant about withdrawing all US troops from Afghanistan, and both were right. It's not our country and the US can't run it forever. But the idea that that this humiliating botched withdrawal plan belongs to anyone but Biden is preposterous. You can criticize the withdrawal while generally supporting ending the war effort in Afghanistan. Only a child could not understand this.

So much for your silly theory about a civilian population with small arms taking on nuclear powers. Looks like Afghanistan is 2-0 and beaten the 2 biggest kids on the block. And that's after smacking the British around before nuclear technology was invented LMFAO

In contrast, the manner in which Trump "carried out" our exit from Afghanistan was beyond reproach: he left it to someone else.

I wouldn't say that Trump was "adamant" about doing a thing that we both agree he didn't do.  That's like saying Bush was "adamant" about privatizing Social Security or that Obama was "adamant" about closing GTMO.

Last I checked, Biden was still in the White House and his regime remains in control of our country.  Perhaps you believe the Taliban invasion is coming shortly?

I'll give the Taliban this, though: they did better than the Confederacy.  But I guess if you're the kind of person dedicated to cheering on American military defeats, you take what you can get.

I think HOW we left Afghanistan is fine. We left, what more do you guys want? We told them we were leaving, we even delayed it a bit. Then we left. End of story. How would leaving in 3 months or 3 years be any different than what happened today.

This is like when it's time to get your child to leave a party and you tell him it's time to go and he throws a tantrum and yells and screams. So you leave anyways, he realizes it and starts chasing you back to your car cause now you're serious about leaving.

I think the Afghani government took the US presence for granted, didn't take training up their army seriously. Probably took funds meant for training and equipment and pocketed 60% of it into swiss bank accounts and dipped when the Taliban started this offensive.

It is not the responsibility of the US to babysit corrupt regimes. The people in Afghanistan who didn't like the Taliban are obviously outnumbered by the people that do. So again I ask, what's the problem here? People who are now out of power are going to have a tough time? Yep, and that's not any of our concern. I don't see any outrage on this board or in the media when IDF forces beat children in the streets or demolish Palestinian homes to make way for illegal settlers. Not a peep for that apartheid regime that won't even allow people of 2 different religions to marry. The only difference I see here is that Muslims are the aggressors here, so obviously there should be outrage.

This is an American military defeat the same way a guy loses a fight because he walked away after knocking some other guy out cold on the street. By all measurements the US military won this war in every possible way. And then we left because we'd been there long enough.

Contrary to your radical agenda and extremist views. You could say Biden did something wrong without making it a trump v Biden thing. Trump is not in office anymore. Biden made the decisions and the buck stops with him.
 
You know that has absolutely nothing to do with what I said, you're deflecting again. You claimed:
Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and other countries have disproven your point. Small arms have proven very effective against nuclear powers. Afghanistan in particular has defeated Russia and the US. And before nuclear technology, the British. You're just wrong.

Just stating facts. Sorry you are allergic to them. But then again, I really don't give a fuck

No, we're more like a boxer quitting in his corner between rounds late in the fight because he doesn't want to fight anymore. At that point you lose. Especially when we have to scramble to emergency exfil our own people and allies out before the TALIBAN gets their hands on them and starts the tortures and beheadings. The Taliban hasn't been knocked out by any stretch of a rational persons imagination.

Germany, Japan, and the Confederacy are examples of "wins". We beat them into submission and they didn't want to fight anymore. Make no mistake, we lost in Afghanistan. Just like we lost in Vietnam and Korea. We were beat into submission through time, money, and political pressure. Spin it how you want if it makes you sleep better at night.

I'm not going to say much about this because this topic is highly personal for me.  I deployed to the Sandbox quite a few times although most of them were to Iraq and not Afghanistan.  Lost several friends and saw far too many others die in front of me.  Anyways, all I'm going to say is that I give Biden a partial pass on this one.  Although he is handling it terribly, a complete pullout had to happen sooner or later and no matter who the sitting president was when it happened and no matter how it was done, it was going to be a complete shitshow and anyone who served in Afghanistan would have told you that the nanosecond we left, that void would be immediately filled by whichever murderous bunch of Islamo-loonies could intimidate the Afghan military (who were mostly cowards who never fought in the first place no matter what the spin doctors in the Pentagon and DC might have said) the fastest would take over within weeks.  Nothing other than a permanent large US military presence there forever (no thanks) was going to stop this from happening. 

When we first went boots on the ground there for anything longer than a 2 month scorched earth visit, I'm sure Putin was laughing his ass off and thinking, "Good luck to you dumbass Americans. Apparently you've never read history books about Afghanistan.  Did you really think it would go better for you than it did for us?"

How many times do I have to say "I agree with Biden's decision to pull out"?
You are apparently under the impression that I believe if only we had stayed there A Little While Longer the outcome would have been different.  From the moment we decided to invade Iraq without first pulling out of Afghanistan, this was always going to be the outcome.

I think it is worth mentioning that if Biden had not been Obama's VP, we would not have withdrawn.  But Biden was sitting there first hand for eight years of "We just need to train a few more Afghan troops" and "We need a few more months of building up the country."  The generals have been singing this song for two decades.  It was time to get out.

The point YOU have been trying to make is that "small arms" can completely overthrow the government of a nuclear state and remove its leadership from power.  That is what YOU need to happen in order for nutjob 2nd Amendment whackos to have a chance: you have to completely overthrow the US government.

The Vietcong didn't do that.
The Taliban didn't do that.

You are trying to compare the US government losing interest in a foreign war halfway across the world to the US government abdicating power in its own seat of government.  This is like trying to cite "American colonists kicked the British out of the US" as evidence that "Actually, American colonists could have conquered Great Britain."

It's ridiculous.  Those two things are not remotely alike.

Again, it's not specifically about leaving Afghanistan. It's about how it was carried out. If I had to guess, most people support actually leaving Afghanistan, including me. However, anyone could predict that if you remove your soldiers before you evacuate civilians, you’d create a logistical disaster after an imminent takeover. This was predicted by many before it even happened and Biden's administration still went forward. I'm sure everyone here already know's that if this was Trump and the situation was reversed, your extreme hypocrisy would have arguing the exact opposite.

No, the point I'm making is that you and your opinion are wrong. And you know you're wrong and are simply trying to spin attention away from your nonsense claim.

Just FYI, your specific claim was:

That is your claim and these are your words, not mine.

Were Afghanistan and Vietnam ineffective fighting against the United States? Yes or No?

The fact is that Afghanistan and Vietnam with their handguns, rifles, and small arms were very effective against a nuclear power. Multiple real world results have proven it over and over.

I think it's disingenuous to stick this to any one individual politician.  It's more a symptom of general American military positioning in the world.  There is good an bad with that.

You can pin the rate of the withdrawl on Biden, but what can the guy do.  The military advisors thought the Afghans could hold ground longer than they did.  They were wrong.  To try to save people, we're keeping troops there to help evacuate.  What can you do?

I think the end result is the same.

I gave Trump a pass on this, too.  Check the tape.  I didn't know if it was the right call, but you have to leave at some point or else you essentially have to occupy a part of the world to maintain stability forever, it seemed.  This was kinda like pulling off a band-aid.  It was gonna hurt, no matter what.

And I don't even really know what lessons we learn from this.  You can't be isolationist.  You need to step in when you're attacked or when there is oppression preventing good in the world.  I guess we gotta be more careful about picking sides when it's two factions warring and they're both bad options.

Please spare me your lecture about hypocrisy.  If Obama had met with the Taliban and arranged for America to leave Afghanistan 4 months into Trump's presidency, not only would you be blaming every single death in Afghanistan directly on Obama, you'd probably be calling for him to be arrested for treason.  I'm old enough to remember when 4 Americans died in Benghazi and Republicans investigated that for years.

As for my specific claim about rifles vs. nuclear powers: clinking through to the thread you linked will show that the discussion was about overthrowing the US federal government.  And you have no example of a nuclear power being overthrown by guerrillas with rifles.  Because there isn't one.

Once again: it is your claim that the federal government of these United States can be deposed by civilians with rifles and handguns.  The very idea is absurd.  That's why you keep making references to occupied countries: you apparently cannot understand the difference between ending a foreign occupation and overthrowing a domestic government.

Yes.
This is like asking, "Was France ineffective at fighting Nazi Germany in World War II, YES OR NO?"  Sloppy questions get lazy answers.

The Taliban, in particular, already controlled Afghanistan at the outset of this war.  They lost 21 soldiers for every 1 American they killed... all just to get back to the starting point.  By your logic - the same logic you are using to defend the idea of handguns as a weapon against a nuclear state - if I break into your house, beat the hell out of you, kill your pets, throw you out, and use your home as a flophouse for twenty years, and then you eventually manage to kick me out and make me go back to my own perfectly intact home that you never even got near, it is YOU that has "defeated" ME.

Now, let's be clear: the United States did not accomplish all of its political and military goals in Afghanistan.  But that's not even remotely the same thing as "The Taliban won"... especially since we did kill Bin Laden, whom they went to war to protect.  The Taliban is, by any metric, worse off today than they were on September 10, 2001.  War is not zero-sum.

Pond, I have trouble believing that you're having this conversation in good faith.  It's pretty clear that you're critical of Biden in a way that you wouldn't have been if these things had happened under a different administration.

I think it's fair to criticize someone...not sure if Biden is the one...for the miscalculation about how fast things would crumble.
But the fact that things did crumble -- that was surely going to happen once we decided to go in.

I went back and grave-dug my old threads about going into Afghanistan.  I was against it at the time, funny enough.  I don't hate it, in hindsight, but the one thing I really don't like is that there wasn't a defined goal.   We did beat back terrorists and we did eventually kill Bin Laden, but there's never a good exit strategy for this kind of stuff.

I guess the lesson here is that religion is poison, so far as governments that are run by them, and so long as that's what we're dealing with, you can't really have a good outcome with Western values.

I honestly think this is a pretty out there opinion. Many Republicans trashed Trump when he started pulling out Troops. What is happening in Afganistan is ridiculously bad. there is nothing in Trump's presidency that even slightly compares. Trump was and is an arsehole but he didn't hand over a country and billions of dollars in weapons to one of the most evil groups alive today.

Nothing that even slightly compares!

Why Trump Abandoned the Kurds, Explained (https://www.gq.com/story/trump-erdogan-kurds-syria)

Looking forward to your pending complaints about Biden's "catastrophic increase of the national debt."  Totally unprecedented!

Trump literally made the deal! (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-51689443)

Afghan conflict: US and Taliban sign deal to end 18-year war

The US and the Taliban have signed an "agreement for bringing peace" to Afghanistan after more than 18 years of conflict.

The US and Nato allies have agreed to withdraw all troops within 14 months if the militants uphold the deal.

President Trump said it had been a "long and hard journey" in Afghanistan. "It's time after all these years to bring our people back home," he said.

I almost missed this gem!


hahahahaha no

Does Biden bear some responsibility?  Yes.  But not much.  About the same amount that of responsibility as Ford had for the fall of Saigon.  It happened on his watch, but mistakes made my his predecessors made the situation inevitable. 

There just never was going to be a good way to pull out but it had to be done. The real blame for bad decisions should go to all the administrations that didn't start the process sooner.

Yeah, it was going to happen sooner or later.  How many years have we been six months away from a self-sufficient Afghani government?

I think if any other candidate had won, we wouldn't have left.  As I mentioned before, Biden had already heard all the excuses and rationalizations.  And let's be honest, here: Biden has the leeway to take actions that a President Sanders, a President Warren, or a President Harris would not.  It's "Only Nixon could go to China" redux.

That right there.  Exactly.  100%.   The void of our absence was going to be filled by the Taliban or some other variation of them no matter when we left.  It was inevitable.  Training the Iraqis was damn near impossible when I was in Iraq because they weren't very bright and they weren't very brave.  But training the Afghanis was 10 times worse. It was like trying to teach discipline and military techniques to 10,000 full on retarded 5 year olds.  You can try to teach a rock to swim for 20 years and spend a billion dollars on teaching that rock to swim.  But a rock isn't going to swim no matter how much money you spend or how long you spend training it.   What the Taliban lacks in high tech equipment and high level military tactics, they more than make up for in a religious fanaticism and devotion to their cause that made it impossible for us to completely eradicate them and that makes the Afghan military utterly useless against.  Nobody is more motivated than someone who is so dedicated to their particular deity that they would rather die than live and if they can take a few infidels with them, all the better.  9 virgins in heaven  can be pretty tempting to lunatics with the IQ of a turnip who have never had sex with anything on two legs.  We were guilty again for about the 1,000th time of being so naive and arrogant as to think that cultures that are the polar opposite of our own want nothing more than to be like us.  When the fact is, they want to be as far away from our culture as they can possibly be.   If you go back and read some of the writing of Bin Laden in the time leading up to 9/11 and in the months after 9/11, he makes it very clear that he knew that they could not militarily defeat the US.  That wasn't even his goal.  His goal, and again this is very well documented and clear in his own writings was to drag the US into a long, sustained stalemate that caused the US to dump tons of money into "war" and his end game was for this long, drawn out conflict to destroy the US financially.  He absolutely accomplished the majority of what he wanted.  He just underestimated the resiliency of the US economy and the power of the FED, etc. to prop up the economy during financial hardship.  Other than that miscalculation, Bin Laden far exceeded even his own hopes and expectations of what 9/11 would lead to.   His plan all along was for the US to invade Afghanistan.  Yes, that is what he wanted.  Again, this is not my opinion, this is his own writings.  His hope was that we would invade and that his followers would for the most part wait us out while hiding in the mountains of Tora Bora and caves.  Only coming out long enough to skirmish a little bit or slaughter some Afghan innocents so that we stuck around longer and longer.  His plan was to wait us out and then blitzkrieg the Afghan Army  once we left.  As I said, other than underestimating our financial resiliency, his plan worked better than he ever even dreamed that it would. 

I think it's fair to criticize the Biden administration for getting caught off guard with how fast things went South.  It's not our FAULT, per se -- this isn't our country or our military, but perhaps it could've have been foreseen.  That's a fair knock.

And Trump -- I'm not going to put this on him either.  There's no right way to leave a country with an undefined war ending -- there was never a way to do it right.  Negotiating with the Taliban would've had the GOP killing Dems had they done it, but I get it -- it's not ideal, but it's the reality that we live in.  Like it or not, Trump made it happen.  It's like pulling off a band-aid.  Ultimately, I think like 70% of the country wanted out of Afghanistan, so at the very least, he started the process.

For now, I can't really see anything that Biden can do differently.  Other than leaving people there indefinitely, a shitty group is going to oppress a population.  What can you do, other than occupy it forever.  The big lesson here is about world building.  The real winners in this fight, politically, are the Libertarians and Isolationists.  It seems you can't grant democracy with military intervention, something that both major political parties have been trying to do for half a century.

And in the future, once we're out, this is done and over with.  You go home and lick your wounds and hope you learn from it.  But this isn't likely to be a lingering issue.

The one thing that gets me though is the loss of military technology. That should have been planned for better.

Pretty much every way we have handled this has been wrong. Just today we secretly met with he Taliban asking for more time. When they rejected we told our allies that we were not going to extend the deadline and that no Afgans would be allowed to leave. The Taliban is coming off as kicking us out of the country.

Yeah.

I agree with this.

But what bothers me most is that there's just a feeling of helplessness that there is a generation of people who are used to living one way (in a moderate lifestyle) and they are likely to be thrown back into the stone age.  I literally don't know what to do about that on any level, but it's just so incredibly shitty.

I hope that the Taliban surprises us and they are less shitty just for PR purposes.  They still want foreign aid and stuff, so maybe they won't be so barbaric when it comes down to it, but I'm not holding my breath.

We really didn't lose much.  We never gave the national government the super high tech stuff.  Any advance stuff China or Russia got to reverse engineer was previously captured from dead American soldiers.

It's was their strategy from the early stages. They made it clear many years ago that they would outlast us by drawing out a long, costly, and unpopular war. The old way of winning wars like WWII are gone. It's almost impossible to win a war against an enemy that doesn't wear uniforms and blends into the "innocent" civilian population.

Make no mistake, they won. We quit the fight and lost. No different than a UFC fighter tapping out after "technically" winning most of the fight. If we had won, we wouldn't have to ask them for more time. We wouldn't have to ask them for anything because the loser is the one who capitulates. That's us. Maybe Pudding Brain Biden will grow a pair and do the right thing.

For some reason it wasn't letting me type at the time. I should have used the word gear instead of technology maybe. We left a lot to be taken.

So, now that the pullout is done, I wonder what we learned from this or where America stands with things like this in the future.

I think there's an odd coalition of bedfellows about this issue.  It's not really a right/left thing.

There is a libertarian-leaning, Ron-Paul-style, isolationist thinking.  There is a Trumpy, America-First thing.  There is also an anti-war, anti-occupation Bernie-style movement.  They aren't exactly in line with the reasoning of the methods, but the result is the same.  Don't fight foreign wars unless you absolutely have to.

And then there are the hawkish Republicans and military types, like David Patreaus, the old-school John McCain types.....and what were the interventionist Democrats, like the Clintons and Obama.  These Democrats don't really have much of a platform right now within the party, but they're still in the inner-workings, I'm sure.

I fall into the prior group.  I said a while ago to just get on planes and leave.  I was being a little hyperbolic, but the thought was there that this is just never-ending.  I think I personally learned from this conflict: You just can't solve human rights issues with occupation.  You may beat it back some, but I think the occupation actually causes more harm than you're fixing, and worse yet, it never ends.  ...short of just taking ownership of these lands and essentially making them US territories with our laws, there is no way to hand-off a government amidst a civil war.

I am just happy it's over.  Props to Trump, too, for making it happen.  For all the shit I've talked about him, and I think it's fair to criticize the method in some cases, at least he made the commitment to leave when nobody else would.  And props to Biden, too, for not extending it and dragging it out.  Sometimes you have to yank off the band-aid.

As far as I'm concerned, this is the best approach. We missed out on Ron Paul as president. Instead we got a feel good story because a black guy won POTUS with absolutely nothing to show for it when all was said and done.

If it was up to me I would pull the majority of our military back to the US and would cut off all foreign aid money to all countries. Instead, I would keep a handful of strategic military bases throughout the globe and reallocate some of that money to lease the land from those countries. No more free handouts to countries just so they say their our friend.

I disagree on Biden. He fucked up the pullout. You guys say, "what could he have done, he had no choice". Of course he had a choice. He made the choice to postpone the original pullout date. He made the choice to not evacuate all our personal before pulling the plug. He made the choice to leave billions upon billions of dollars worth of equipment. And worst of all, his choices led to the deaths of our people. To answer the question, he could have made the correct decisions and heeded the warnings that were presented to him before those decisions were made.

^ I don't agree with much of what you're saying.

But I also think it doesn't matter.  If we both don't want to be in that conflict anymore (or others like it), I'll take that compromise.  I probably disagree with you on the methods, what to do with refugees, foreign aid, etc.  -- But it's over and we're out of there, so I'll take the win.

I'm sure I'm in the minority but I had no problem with us being there. I think the world was safer while we were there and we have lost that advantage. Similar to the situation in Korea. South Korea needs us to keep North from eating them alive.

Obviously not a laughing matter, but I saw a headline on Afghanistan during lunch today that made me snort a good bit...

"Nation Stunned That 20-Year Catastrophe Could End So Catastrophically"

 ;)

I think a fact lots of people are ignoring is that very little of the gear the Taliban captured belonged to the USA at the time it was captured.  Almost all of it was owned by the Afgan government.

So what should we have done different?

1 Never provided any arms to allied Afghans?

2 Disarm the national government before the withdrawal?

3 Stayed indefinitely?

 

There's a split.  Part of your party feels that way -- the John McCain hawks.
Part of my party feels that way too.

It's really one of the truly non-partisan issues where neither of the two political parties has truly staked that claim as their own.

True.  And it sounds really weird to hear politicians  (whichever party was in charge during the pullout would have done the same thing) bragging about what a great surrender we had.  They of course don't use that word, but that is essentially what they are saying.  We consider our surrender to have been an outstanding success!   Because when all is said and done, we are leaving with the same people in charge who were in charge when we invaded, except now they are better armed with our weapons instead of 45 year old Soviet AK-47s.   Anyone who doesn't consider that a surrender is just too 'Merica Proud to admit it.  Kinda reminds me of the Iraqi Information Minister whom we lovingly called Baghdad Bob who was on tv talking about how the Americans would never survive to make it to Baghdad and that their blood was running in the streets in the rural areas of Iraq.  And in the background you can see shit burning in in Baghdad, hear American planes flying overhead and hear bombs hitting within a couple miles of him as he is reporting. LOL   

Left leaning snopes said "less than $10 Billion". So we can assume $9-10 billion. That's a lot of scratch to just leave behind.

1 Pulled all our people out first
2 Pulled all of our equipment out
3 Pulled our military out

So basically we wasted 20 years and $2 Trillion plus interest fighting people wearing flip flops, driving old toyota trucks, and using Soviet era small arms. Annnnnnnd, we lost.

I'd say that pretty much sums it up, yeah. 

Don't let Spider know that a nuclear power lost to a non nuclear power. He'll throw a fit, LMAO

We didn't really "surrender".  I mean, we were the occupying force.  It's not like we gave up control -- it's not our country.  We just left.

As for won/lost -- what was the mission?  That's kinda the whole point; we lost simply by fighting.  There really wasn't a war to win.  I think we basically went in there to seek justice for 9/11, essentially did some version of that for a long, long time, and then couldn't find a way to get out of there smoothly.

And the real kicker is we were still bombing in retaliation on the way out.  Same shit.  More civilian death.

Surrender, give up, submit, quit? It's all the same, they WON using the strategy they said they would use a long time ago. A long, expensive, and unpopular war against an enemy that blended in with the civilian population. Aside from nuking the whole country into a sheet of glass, they were always going to win.

Dave, regarding your comment about "surrender", there has been a lot of what I call "antics with semantics" in both Afghanistan and Iraq.  To most vets like myself, we see it as surrender.  But you are right in that there could be an argument made about whether pulling out of there meets the dictionary definition of surrender.  Hell, it wasn't even a war for that matter.  Congress never actually declared war in Afghanistan.  It sure seemed like war to me, but war was technically never declared by Congress.  The US has a history of avoiding using the term "surrender" because our collective ego as a nation doesn't like the humiliating nature of the term.  I guess no matter what we call it, it sure as hell wasn't a victory.  We lost.  And anyone who isn't willing to say we lost is like when a team loses a game in sports and afterwards they keep talking about how much of a better team they were than the other team.  Yeah, it doesn't matter if you were "better" if you lost.  

You hit on the very key problem with the entire conflict/war/hissyfit/whatever when you said "what was the mission".    The mission was never clearly defined.  It is wildly wrong to send a military force into any kind of battle without a clear identification of what the end game (mission) is.  Was the mission to overthrow the Taliban in 2001?  If so, then that was accomplished in a matter of weeks and we should have left right then.  Was the mission to disrupt the terrorist training camps throughout Afghanistan?  If so, that mission was accomplished within a couple months (although a lot of them just moved into the mountains or across the border into Pakistan).  Was the mission to kill Bin Laden?  Considering he had been in Pakistan for YEARS when the SEALs took him out during the Obama administration then that mission didn't even have anything to do with Afghanistan.  

Your comment about "civilian death" was a big part of our problem in the war/conflict/whatever in Afghanistan just like it was in Iraq when I was there.  The fighting against any uniformed military units was over within weeks in both countries.  After that, the enemy were ALL civilians.  Al Qaeda, ISIS, etc etc etc are all civilians.  They aren't military.  The "enemy combatants" looked just like the average every day citizen.  In fact, they were EXACTLY like any other citizen in that for the most part they went about their business just like everyone else most of the time and fought against the U.S. as almost a part time hobby.  This made it damn near impossible to identify the "enemy" from "regular civilians".  

Afghanistan was a shitty, no-win situation with no clearly defined mission, idiotic Rules of Engagement that made it virtually impossible for soldiers to do their job effectively, and possibly worst of all, destined for failure because the politicians and the decision makers within the Pentagon tried to turn the U.S. military into police officers and also charged the military with the impossible task of trying to train Afghans not just military tactics, but to train them to care about something that none of them cared about.  Afghanistan has never been truly a centralized government.  It has always been a nation of hundreds of villages (for lack of a better term) run by war lords and they had no interaction with a centralized government and didn't want one.  Police work, nation building, creation of infrastructure etc. are not what the military does.  The military's job is to kill people and blow shit up.  Anything above and beyond that is the job of the State Dept.

Sorry this was so long.  Being a combat veteran and having lost good men under me in the crapholes of the middle east has left me pretty opinionated.  LOL

I don't always agree with you on a lot of things, but you are exactly correct.  Those of us old enough to remember the USSR invasion of Afghanistan can tell you all about how we (the U.S.) laughed our asses off at how the second most powerful nation in the world got their asses kicked by a bunch of goat herders who had never seen indoor plumbing in their lives.  And a lot of the world is now laughing at us for the exact same reason that we laughed at the USSR.   

And I think you and I are the only ones here who have mentioned the fact that by Bin Laden's documented, detailed, and written plan for the "war", his mission was a resounding success.  His writings detail that victory meant tying up the US in a long, drawn out, expensive stalemate.  He didn't accomplish his end game of crippling the US economy only because he underestimated the resiliency of the American economic system (hooray Capitalism!) and our love of borrowing craptons of money from our own future and from the Chinese in order to stay financially vibrant.  Ya know how some individuals can continue to lead their very nice lifestyle with no money by essentially living off credit cards?  Yeah, that is what we've done as a nation. 

The problem with this analysis is that it is not solved by staying in Afghanistan for another 20 years.
If you believe Bin Laden and the Taliban have "won" today, then if we pulled out in 2040, they would have "won" even more (by forcing us to spend more in blood and treasure).

This entire concept of "winning" is really strange.  So if we had turned around and pulled out of Afghanistan in December 2001 (right after toppling the Taliban), would we have "won" the war?  What about in May of 2011, right after killing Bin Laden... would we have "won" the war then?  What does "winning" the war entail exactly, outside of literally occupying Afghanistan forever?

Again, this isn't like Vietnam, where there was a region (South Vietnam) that was previously NOT controlled by the enemy at the start of the war, but was conquered as a result of the war.  At the beginning of the Afghanistan War, the Taliban controlled the entire country; 20 years later, they control it again, after the person they were fighting to protect was killed by us.  The idea that it's as simple as "We lost and they won" is pretty silly.

At gun point?  By kidnapping them?  The state department issued a statement telling people to leave, they choose not to. 

Anybody watch the Netflix documentary Turning Point? The saddest part to me was listening to the Afghan soldiers saying they were going to be fine after the US withdrawal that they were ready to fight. Not so much it seems.

It's entirely that simple. Regardless of anything you say, most rational people damn sure know we didn't win. There's only one other option. When you don't have a goal or plan. And there's no end in sight and you concede, quit, submit, surrender, or give up. You effectively lose.

Your hypocrisy has you bragging about our superior military industrial complex bombing brown people for profit in a losing effort. Can't make this shit up, LMFAO

We achieved the goal on May 21, 2011.  Shouldn't have taken a decade to leave.

Call Obama on the "radical" left wing hypocrisy hotline and let him know your displeasure with his presidency. Good luck

So you believe Trump surrendered to the Taliban, then.
After all, he's the one who signed the deal to hand Afghanistan to the Taliban, just as Neville Chamberlain handed Czechoslovakia to the Nazis.

Weird how you had nothing to say about this surrender for the last year of Trump's presidency! But suddenly, once Biden executes the deal Trump signed, NOW you're outraged at the humiliation of America.

I stated that the United States lost in Afghanistan. All presidents since Bush are responsible, including Trump. However, the way the final pullout was handled is solely on Biden. You can support leaving Afghanistan while not supporting the botched exit strategy.

As pointed out earlier, we were always going to lose. If you want to blame Trump. Fine, our whole 20 year Afghanistan defeat to the Taliban is Trump's fault, I don't give a shit. My whole point is we lost. A nuclear power lost to a rag tag group of flip flop wearing, Toyota truck driving, Soviet era small arms fighting "radicals".

Your fixation and fetish for Trump at every turn severely impacts your credibility. Shit man, he ain't president. Stop the fake news, get off the dope, and let it go man...

You're over here claiming that we're "obsessed with Trump", but you didn't have a single word to say for months after Trump negotiated a "surrender" to the Taliban.  Yet suddenly, the moment Biden follows through with that "surrender," NOW you grow a tongue?  NOW you're up on your soapbox saying that anyone who doesn't acknowledge the total humiliation of our nation by a bunch of hill tribes driving rusted-out Toyota pickups is... delusional?

How very convenient that you had none of this bold commentary when your lord and savior put pen to paper declaring our "surrender" in Afghanistan.

No simply pointing out the stupid shit you say.

So ineffective that it took us 20 years, Trillions of Dollars, and thousands of dead Americans to accomplish nothing and lose. Being wrong seems to be a hobby of yours. 

Put the bong down and relax. As I've told you many times, I didn't vote for Trump. I'm pretty sure that I've mentioned the US losing in many wars after WWII before Biden fucked up the pullout and got our people killed. It's not like this is the 1st time it's come up.