First, Biden contended that he was bound by a 2020 Trump administration agreement with the Taliban to withdraw all US troops by May 2021. But that was an agreement conducted by a previous administration -- so it's not binding -- and it was predicated on [a number of conditions that haven't been met]....
[T]he Trump administration pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, while Biden is now honoring an agreement with an insurgent/terrorist group that is not abiding by the terms of the deal that was negotiated last year by the Trump team.
Second, Biden claimed in his speech that the US Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation, Zalmay Khalilzad, would "work vigorously" for a negotiated solution between the Taliban and the Afghan government.... The Khalilzad-led peace process hasn't worked for the past three years. Why would it suddenly work now?...
Third, Biden said that the US can't be in Afghanistan "indefinitely," yet there are some 28,000 US troops in South Korea three quarters of a century after the end of the Korean War....
Fourth, Biden speciously implied that if the US has troops in Afghanistan then somehow it won't be strong enough to "meet the strategic competition with China and other nations." The US military consists of 1.3 million active-duty personnel and yet it can't leave 2,500 troops in Afghanistan? To use a trademark Biden expression: C'mon man!
After his speech, Biden told reporters that it's "highly unlikely" that the Taliban will take over Afghanistan, which is not what his own intelligence community is warning....
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4 comments:
Bart writes: "There needs to be a conversation about the use of the word "peopled" in this article."
Ha ha. Can remarks be peopled?
But the "straw men" are in the remarks... The fake men are there.
Is "peopled" wrong in a way that "littered" is not? — "remarks peopled with straw men and littered with false assertions." The assertions were spoken, not written on paper and dropped on the ground.
Temujin writes, with the subject line "Afghanist-done":
"1) The Taliban are already taking the country over. As we leave a block to the Afghan army, the army runs away and the Taliban are walking in. They don't even have to fight for it. This is exactly what most people knew would happen. Whether we left in 2008, 2015, or today- the Taliban would take over again. So why did we sacrifice so many lives for this?
"2) We should never have been there for all these years. We cannot control that country unless we are prepared to actually CONTROL that country. By that I mean, with a strong hand and overwhelming force. We were never going to do that. Hell, we can't even manage Chicago.
"3) Joe Biden/Kamala Harris is a disaster for the United States. Domestically, we're falling apart. Globally, the race has begun to spin the world in ways that undo any alliances, or strengths we have. Globally, we are living on our reputation and the perceived strength of our military. But as our military is now more focused on Equity, Diversity, and making Trans people comfortable, I give us exactly 1 year before we are fully tested by China, Iran, N. Korea, Russia, Venezuela, Hizballah, or some other player. No one played with us while Trump was in office. The entire country is at play right now, as Joe figures out what flavor ice cream to have at his next stop, and Kamala works on facial expressions and cliches to insert into her next speech."
Alex writes:
"When I was there in 2011, we were still living in tents and crapping in porta-johns. I was told that this was because we were prevented by Congress from spending money on permanent structures. It told me all I needed to know. There's a paradox that we've spent the past fourteen years searching for a one to two year solution to Afghanistan. The Obama admin never wanted to be there, but had to at least appear somewhat supportive of the mission, so they desperately wanted things stabilized just enough to allow them to pull us out. And so we floundered.
"Perhaps I'm a cockeyed optimist because I do believe that there was a way forward in Afghanistan, but it involved a commitment to long-term actions in the region: building permanent bases in the southern portion of the country to staunch the flow of Taliban fighters, aggressively confronting the Pakistani government over their enabling of the Taliban safe zones in the Northwest Territories, aggressively undermining the Iranian regime and seeking their replacement, and pushing for long-term cultural changes among the Afghans. Instead we played whack-a-mole while allowing the Pakistani ISI to play both sides. The Obama admin refused to support the 2009 protests which could have toppled the Iranian mullahs and brought about a replacement government, and our civ-mil folks decided to simply carpet bomb Afghanistan with money, leading to widespread corruption and laziness.
"Biden claims that pulling out will allow us to shift focus to China, but any reasonable strategy towards containment of China should involve Afghanistan. Without US influence in Central Asia, the Chinese will likely expand and strengthen their supply lines in the region, reducing the ability of the US to influence events via blockades and embargoes. The Pakistanis will continue to view the Pashun tribes as a source of manpower in any conflict with India, while strengthening their military alliance with China so that the Indians are threatened along two fronts, and the Iranians will shift increased resources back towards Iraq and the Middle East, drawing away US focus from the Pacific region.
"All in all, an utter disaster."
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