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Originally Posted by Frownland
The media is full of warhawks because war is an excellent content farm that they don't want to lose.
jwb's right that Biden's poll numbers are dropping in response to this, I just think that its relevancy is outweighed by the positive of ending what's universally recognized as a pointless war. The fact that the pull out went to **** so quickly is just an affirmation of how useless prolonging it was.
If you want to talk horse races, I feel like this was a pretty good move to court the progressives in his party that oppose him.
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actually i would say that's more of an indication of how rapidly and haphazardly the pull out was executed. Nobody was expecting the country to fall as quickly as it did or for the evacuation to be as chaotic as it was.
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Originally Posted by The Batlord
No you're just saying it could have been done better and using Biden's negative media portrayal as proof. How do you micromanage the sustainability of a country when it's own president abandons it the week of pulling out? What options were there to actually do anything short of sending a new invasion force?
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It's not even about micromanaging the long term stability... I would tend to agree that as long as you pull out the resurge of Taliban rule was likely if not inevitable but it wasn't necessarily as inevitable for it to go down quite as disasterous as it did.
Like sure it was probably inevitable that Katrina was going to be a disaster too but the way the govt handled it also exasperated that situation and as such was a stain on the administration responsible.
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Originally Posted by The Batlord
Thousands are already dying in Afghanistan every year. You just don't hear about it cause they're not American. So long as we're there the Taliban will continue to gain recruits and the war will never end. Leaving Afghanistan to the Taliban is repugnant but at least there's a chance they sort their own **** out. Will never happen so long as we stay and defense contractors continue to get trillions for the murder machine.
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do you honestly think Afghanistan has a chance in hell at being better off than it was during the occupation?
As unwinnable as that war was, its hard for me to think that the country isn't by and large going to be worse off in the long run under Taliban rule. It just won't be as much of our problem anymore but that country was a theocratic hell hole ruled by religious war lords pre 9/11 and that's exactly what's coming back. Make no doubt about it.
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Originally Posted by The Batlord
I can agree that wishful thinking led to insufficient people on the ground to manage the airport, which is why 3000 troops are apparently on their way to (hopefully temporarily) secure it, but greater security in the airport probably would not make a meaningful difference in the collapse of everywhere else.
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could've saved some soldiers and civilians lives. Could've had a better plan for evacuating refugees. We are basically abandoning a **** load of innocent people who were better off under the occupation than they will be under the Taliban. People aren't hanging off planes for no reason. They know damn well they will be executed.