The finger pointing over the fall of Afghanistan between President Biden and former President Trump is in full swing amid the chaotic scramble to get U.S. personnel and allies out of the country before a full Taliban takeover.
Biden, who rarely mentions his predecessor, made a point of doing so in a weekend statement digging in on the U.S. withdrawal. Biden reminded Americans that the U.S. pullout was originally negotiated by the Trump administration and highlighted the former president's plans to invite Taliban leaders to Camp David around the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Trump, who just months ago suggested Biden was not getting out of Afghanistan fast enough, has led the charge among Republicans to hammer the Biden administration for its handling of the withdrawal. Trump went as far as calling on the president to resign in a Sunday statement.
The back-and-forth overshadows what experts and former government officials say is a messy situation that both leaders had a hand in creating.
“President Trump did the Biden administration no favors by making it very clear that he was going to remove U.S. troops and beginning a negotiation process which was driven by that imperative. He really let the Taliban set the tone and the direction of the talks,” said a former State Department official who served in the Trump administration and previous administrations.
“In many ways, what Trump starts, Biden is prepared to fulfill,” the official said.
Biden has long been a skeptic of the continued U.S. presence in Afghanistan, and he advocated during his time as vice president for a smaller footprint there. While Biden spent his first weeks in office unraveling his predecessor’s agenda with ruthless efficiency, he announced in April that he would follow through with plans first announced by Trump to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan.
But as the withdrawal nears its conclusion, the situation has gone awry. The Taliban have swept through major cities and took control faster than Biden administration officials predicted, and the Afghan forces trained and equipped by American troops have failed to provide much resistance.
The U.S. has scrambled to get its own diplomatic personnel out of the capital city of Kabul, as well as briskly process and evacuate thousands of Afghan civilians who aided the Americans over the last 20 years. Many of those allies now fear for their safety under Taliban rule.
The Trump administration brokered a deal with the Taliban in 2020 that laid out a plan for the U.S. to fully withdraw from Afghanistan by May 2021 if the group upheld certain commitments, such as denying safe haven to al Qaeda.
Roughly 2,500 troops remained in Afghanistan when Biden took office. The president in April said he would follow through on the planned withdrawal, but he moved the end date back to Sept. 11, and later shifted it to Aug. 31, citing logistical considerations.
“I wish Joe Biden wouldn't use September 11 as the date to withdraw our troops from Afghanistan, for two reasons,” Trump said in a statement at the time. “First, we can and should get out earlier. Nineteen years is enough, in fact, far too much and way too long.”
But Trump, who spent years advocating for an end to “endless wars,” has used the burgeoning crisis under Biden’s watch to pummel his successor. Trump has released more than a dozen statements in recent days on the subject of Afghanistan and attempted to fundraise off the issue, insisting the U.S. withdrawal would have been more orderly if he were still in office.
“Afghanistan is the most embarrassing military outcome in the history of the United States. It didn’t have to be that way!” Trump said in a Monday statement.
“Can anyone even imagine taking out our Military before evacuating civilians and others who have been good to our Country and who should be allowed to seek refuge?” Trump added in a separate statement. “In addition, these people left topflight and highly sophisticated equipment. Who can believe such incompetence? Under my Administration, all civilians and equipment would have been removed.” SURE. BY MAY.
A trio of former Trump administration officials argued in a statement Monday that the former president would not have followed through on the withdrawal without successful final talks between the Taliban and Afghan government.
“The difference between then and now is leadership,” former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe , former Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and former national security adviser to the vice president Keith Kellogg said in a statement, declaring “the Biden Administration alone owns this failure.”
Biden officials have pointed to public polling showing support for the end of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan to justify the decision to pull out, and they have argued the rapid collapse of the Afghan government illustrates the futility of remaining there.
But as criticism ratchets up, the White House has harkened back to Trump-era decisions that they believe set the stage for this month’s breakdown. Setting a deadline of May 1 allowed the Taliban to wait out the U.S., they argued, and Trump’s Camp David invite to the Taliban granted the group legitimacy.
With Republicans and national security hawks second guessing the entire operation, Biden dug in on his decision on Saturday while pointing the finger in part at Trump.
“When I came to office, I inherited a deal cut by my predecessor—which he invited the Taliban to discuss at Camp David on the eve of 9/11 of 2019—that left the Taliban in the strongest position militarily since 2001 and imposed a May 1, 2021 deadline on US forces,” Biden said in a statement. “Shortly before he left office, he also drew US forces down to a bare minimum of 2,500. Therefore, when I became President, I faced a choice—follow through on the deal, with a brief extension to get our forces and our allies’ forces out safely, or ramp up our presence and send more American troops to fight once again in another country’s civil conflict.
“I was the fourth President to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan—two Republicans, two Democrats. I would not, and will not, pass this war onto a fifth,” Biden said in the statement.
But experts expressed skepticism over the idea that Biden was really boxed in by Trump. They argued he could have pushed the withdrawal date back to ensure the Taliban upheld its commitments or maintained a smaller force in the region to oversee the safe withdrawal of personnel.
As of Monday afternoon, the U.S. was sending 7,000 troops to Afghanistan to aid in the evacuation effort.
“He has undone plenty of Trump administration policies, and he definitely could’ve undone this one as well if he had chosen to,” said Emily Harding, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Biden signaled early on he wanted to get us out of Afghanistan.”
As each side seeks to stave off political backlash for its role in setting the U.S. withdrawal in motion, current and former government officials believe both Trump and Biden bear some responsibility for the mess unfolding in Kabul and elsewhere.
“Both presidents Biden and Trump had the right goal in mind — ending America’s longstanding presence in Afghanistan. But both also failed to pursue that goal in the right way,” tweeted Mark Esper, Trump’s former Defense secretary who was fired last year after advocating against drawing down forces in Afghanistan.
“The only way this conflict could have ended better was through a political agreement among Afghans that was conditions based, patient, and backed up by U.S. and allied militaries,” Esper added. “We had this, but both presidents abandoned the process and stuck to an arbitrary timeline.”
While most GOP lawmakers have rushed to criticize Biden for overseeing a disorderly evacuation process, some have been adamant the last week’s events were more than a year in the making.
“Here’s the ugly truth: Neither party is serious about foreign policy,” Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) said in a statement. “For a decade now, demagogues have lied to the American people about our mission in Afghanistan. President Trump pioneered the strategy of retreat President Biden is pursuing, to disastrous effect.”
Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), who served in the U.S. Air Force, called it a “dark day” that could foreshadow the emergence of terrorist groups as the Taliban strengthens its hold on Afghanistan.
“I’ve said countless times that withdrawing our troops emboldens our enemies and puts our allies in grave danger. And yet, both President Trump and President Biden made their announcements anyway — broadcasting to our enemies that we were leaving and telling our allies around the world that we had given up,” Kinzinger said in a statement. “The reality we face now is sad, and the aftermath will be dangerous and devastating.”
AND BOTH PRESIDENTS AND BOTH PARTIES MUST BEAR RESPONSIBILTY FOR THAT.
Biden’s Betrayal of Afghans Will Live In Infamy August 16, 2021 at 2:00 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard George Packer: “There’s plenty of blame to go around for the 20-year debacle in Afghanistan—enough to fill a library of books. Perhaps the effort to rebuild the country was doomed from the start.
"But our abandonment of the Afghans who helped us, counted on us, staked their lives on us, is a final, gratuitous shame that we could have avoided.
“The Biden administration failed to heed the warnings on Afghanistan, failed to act with urgency—and its failure has left tens of thousands of Afghans to a terrible fate. This betrayal will live in infamy. The burden of shame falls on President Joe Biden.”
Ex-Obama Aide Says Biden Should Fire Jake Sullivan August 16, 2021 at 2:23 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Former Obama adviser Brett Bruen writes in USA Today that President Biden should fire National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan in light of the Taliban unexpectedly quick takeover of Afghanistan.
Said Bruen: “The national security adviser has two jobs. "As the name suggests, they are the last and ideally closest counselor to the president in the Situation Room.
"Their second duty is to translate the commander in chief’s decisions and direction into practical policies.
"Sometimes that requires speaking truth to power.
"On all of these scores the current occupant of the office appears to have failed.”
Actually Trump just talked about this and stated clearly:
1) Troops would not have left before American personnel left. 2) Nothing would have been left behind for the Taliban. All military equipment would hve been taken or destroyed.
It's not a timing thing, Reverend.
It's a competency thing.
Biden ignored the advice of his top military and now all of these people are suffering. Not because of Bush, or Obama, or Trump. 100% because of Biden. Biden.
They suffer because we have an old codger making decisions for the country when he shouldn't probably be making decisions on what to eat for lunch.
Americans, or at least the commentating classes, are watching aghast as events unfold in Afghanistan. Some are second-guessing the wisdom of withdrawal – after all, how hard is it to maintain a few thousand soldiers there permanently? Others are taking the more comfortable position of saying yes, we had to leave but this just wasn’t the right way. I must be the only person in America who is having exactly the opposite reaction. The more I see the more I’m convinced this was the right decision – both what I see on the ground in Afghanistan and perhaps even more the reaction here in the United States.
It is crystal clear that the Afghan national army and really the Afghan state was an illusion. It could not survive first contact with a post-US military reality. As is so often the case in life – with bad investments, bad relationships – what we were doing there was staying to delay our reckoning with the consequences of the reality of the situation.
That’s a bad idea.
But as I’ve said in other posts over the last two days, we knew this part. What has been deeply revealing to me is the American response. And here I mean to say the most prominent media and political voices. It’s true this is quicker than I’d figured – not that I’d given the precise timing a lot of thought. And it seems to be quicker than the White House figured. But by a month? Three months? Does that matter? I don’t see why. If anything, given the outcome, quicker is better – since a protracted fall is necessarily a bloodier fall. But what the reaction has demonstrated to me is the sheer depth of denial. The inability to accept the reality of the situation. And thus the excuse making. Sen. Maggie Hassan’s press release below is a painfully good example of that. So is this article by in The Atlantic by George Packer. Virtually everything Richard Engel has been writing on Twitter for the last 24 hours. All so much the cant of empire. But more than this, far more important than this, simply unwise.
For better or worse I am bought into the post-World War II American project. This makes me much more conventional in my thinking about foreign policy and national security than a significant percentage of TPM Readers. I note this here because I don’t come to any of this with the assumption that it’s none of our business or that we’re a malign force in the world. I’m bought in. Indeed, my instinctive caution probably would have made me hesitate to make this unilateral move. You can always kick the can a bit further down the road.
The perpetual effort to stand up an Afghan government that could exist on its own did not work. That doesn’t mean the decision to topple the Taliban government in 2001 was a mistake. But that was twenty years ago. We are living in a dramatically different world today. We have been in a perpetual occupation in pursuit of no clear national security interest of the United States. At a certain point you have to realize that and act accordingly. I find convincing this suggestion that Biden refused a more phased or circumstances-based withdrawal precisely because he had seen up close how Barack Obama had been rolled by the Pentagon a decade ago.
WOMP-womp! 2014 tweet from Joe Biden debunks any and everyone trying to claim leaving Afghanistan was Trump’s idea (including Joe!)
Man oh man, some people on the Left are working overtime to pretend none of this Afghanistan mess is Biden’s fault. We realize they have spent many years blaming Trump for any and everything wrong in the WORLD, but pretending Biden was powerless or had to do this or was just following along is a stretch even for those stretchy mo-fos.
Planning to remove our troops from Afghanistan is one thing. Doing it in such a sloppy way that the Taliban has already taken over the country? That’s very different.
And even the Biden automatons have to know that.
We hate to break it to them (ok, not really), but Biden was talking about leaving Afghanistan when he was still our crappy Vice President.
In 122 AD the Emperor Hadrian built what history knows as “Hadrian’s Wall,” which bisects Britain. You can still see it today. It marked the northernmost boundary of the Roman Empire. On this side Rome; on that side the tribes of Caledonia. Some twenty years later in 142 AD the Emperor Antoninus Pius, frustrated with the marauding and managing the tribes north of wall, constructed a new wall roughly one hundred miles further north into what is now Scotland. This was the Antonine Wall. Rome would garrison and pacify the region between the two walls. Twenty years later in 162 AD, the year after Antonius Pius died, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius abandoned the new territory and withdrew back to Hadrian’s Wall. Not everything works.
The intensity of the current handwringing over the fall of Kabul is an almost perfect measure of the denial about the failure of the current mission. Indeed, they are two sides of the same coin. What was keeping us there this long? THIS! Look at it around you today. The collective unwillingness to endure this reality is what has kept the US in the country for at least a decade. Processing ten years of denial in ten hours is rough.
We’ve been in Afghanistan for either ten or twenty years because no one in authority was ready to endure this moment and not look back. I don’t know if Biden will pay a domestic political price for this denouement. But watching it all unfold I’m even more certain he made the right decision than I was a day ago. Does anyone think we’ll look back a year from now and think, wow, I wish we were still garrisoning Afghanistan? I doubt it.
Someone had to make the decision that Bush, Obama and Trump did not and apparently could not. Biden did.
He left in a rage because he was absolutely certain that Trump colluded with Putin and that it was just a matter of time before the evidence proved it. He was too humiliated by being so wrong that he just left.
He did come back to declare his happiness that Biden won the election. Apparently he thought that somehow made up for his being wrong about the Special Counsel. Then he disappeared.
WP was one of the original Soars posters. Was very conservative. Then apparently ended up in some sort of mental hospital for a while. Once he came back he was a full fledged over the top conspiracy theorist liberal.
I had foresworn creating or posting any more “Hitler Learns About. . .” parodies, despite the extreme temptation to do so, but here’s one (not of my doing, just to be clear) using a different Downfall scene splicing together some of Slow Joe’s not-so-fine moments.
“He keeps saying something about how Trump was Hitler. . .
Instead of discussing politics using rhetoric like Sleepy Joe Sleepy Joe Biden and Sleepy Joe Biden
We’ve been in Afghanistan for either ten or twenty years because no one in authority was ready to endure this moment and not look back. I don’t know if Biden will pay a domestic political price for this denouement. But watching it all unfold I’m even more certain he made the right decision than I was a day ago. Does anyone think we’ll look back a year from now and think, wow, I wish we were still garrisoning Afghanistan? I doubt it.
This is the most embarrassing piece of hackery Josh Marshall has ever wrote.
There is going to be wholesale massacre in Kabul of women who work for the embassy, interpreters and other Afghans who work for the US.
And Josh Marchall will callously stand by and watch them die.. I assume Roger will cheer him on.
Just because I post something like that doesn't mean that I agree with him or her.
I suspect that the racist rodent bastard will post links complaining about too many Mooslimb people will be brought to the United States of white people..as he sees it.
I suspect that the racist rodent bastard will post links complaining about too many Mooslimb people will be brought to the United States of white people..as he sees it.
Wrong again, oh racist beater of black women.
I'd take several hundred plane loads of Afghan innocents any day over tens of thousands of Covid-positive MS-13 scumbags.
Slow Joe is sending thousands of innocent Afghans to their DEATHS.
The finger pointing over the fall of Afghanistan between President Biden and former President Trump is in full swing amid the chaotic scramble to get U.S. personnel and allies out of the country before a full Taliban takeover.
Biden, who rarely mentions his predecessor, made a point of doing so in a weekend statement digging in on the U.S. withdrawal. Biden reminded Americans that the U.S. pullout was originally negotiated by the Trump administration and highlighted the former president's plans to invite Taliban leaders to Camp David around the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
ADVERTISING
Trump, who just months ago suggested Biden was not getting out of Afghanistan fast enough, has led the charge among Republicans to hammer the Biden administration for its handling of the withdrawal. Trump went as far as calling on the president to resign in a Sunday statement.
The back-and-forth overshadows what experts and former government officials say is a messy situation that both leaders had a hand in creating.
“President Trump did the Biden administration no favors by making it very clear that he was going to remove U.S. troops and beginning a negotiation process which was driven by that imperative. He really let the Taliban set the tone and the direction of the talks,” said a former State Department official who served in the Trump administration and previous
Biden has long been a skeptic of the continued U.S. presence in Afghanistan, and he advocated during his time as vice president for a smaller footprint there. While Biden spent his first weeks in office unraveling his predecessor’s agenda with ruthless efficiency, he announced in April that he would follow through with plans first announced by Trump to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan.
But as the withdrawal nears its conclusion, the situation has gone awry. The Taliban have swept through major cities and took control faster than Biden administration officials predicted, and the Afghan forces trained and equipped by American troops have failed to provide much resistance.
The U.S. has scrambled to get its own diplomatic personnel out of the capital city of Kabul, as well as briskly process and evacuate thousands of Afghan civilians who aided the Americans over the last 20 years. Many of those allies now fear for their safety under Taliban rule.
The Trump administration brokered a deal with the Taliban in 2020 that laid out a plan for the U.S. to fully withdraw from Afghanistan by May 2021 if the group upheld certain commitments, such as denying safe haven to al Qaeda.
“The difference between then and now is leadership,” former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, former Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and former national security adviser to the vice president Keith Kellogg said in a statement, declaring “the Biden Administration alone owns this failure.”
Biden officials have pointed to public polling showing support for the end of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan to justify the decision to pull out, and they have argued the rapid collapse of the Afghan government illustrates the futility of remaining there.
But as criticism ratchets up, the White House has harkened back to Trump-era decisions that they believe set the stage for this month’s breakdown. Setting a deadline of May 1 allowed the Taliban to wait out the U.S., they argued, and Trump’s Camp David invite to the Taliban granted the group legitimacy.
With Republicans and national security hawks second guessing the entire operation, Biden dug in on his decision on Saturday while pointing the finger in part at Trump.
“When I came to office, I inherited a deal cut by my predecessor—which he invited the Taliban to discuss at Camp David on the eve of 9/11 of 2019—that left the Taliban in the strongest position militarily since 2001 and imposed a May 1, 2021 deadline on US forces,” Biden said in a statement. “Shortly before he left office, he also drew US forces down to a bare minimum of 2,500. Therefore, when I became President, I faced a choice—follow through on the deal, with a brief extension to get our forces and our allies’ forces out safely, or ramp up our presence and send more American troops to fight once again in another country’s civil conflict.
“I was the fourth President to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan—two Republicans, two Democrats. I would not, and will not, pass this war onto a fifth,” Biden said in the statement.
But experts expressed skepticism over the idea that Biden was really boxed in by Trump. They argued he could have pushed the withdrawal date back to ensure the Taliban upheld its commitments or maintained a smaller force in the region to oversee the safe withdrawal of personnel.
Back in July, state department spokes "man" Ned Price tried to claim that the pull-out from Afghanistan was Trump's policy, not Biden's -- but that Biden couldn't overturn it.
So Biden was going ahead with it, but if it didn't work, well it was the Bad Orange Man's fault.
Matt Lee -- one of the few actual reporters in the business -- called bullshit and pointed out that Biden had reversed many of Trump's foreign policy decisions, from the Mexico City abortion ban to the ending of the policy that any illegal immigrant claiming asylum must do so at the first safe country they arrive at after leaving their homeland, rather than going all the way to the US.
If Biden can reverse all those policies, then, he could reverse Trump's decision to get out of Afghanistan.
But he didn't.
Making this Biden's choice. His decision, for which he is accountable.
Not something he can say "The other guy did it."
But, after vowing heroically to Restore Our Norms by having a president who takes responsibility for his actions, Biden cleared his head with a Medicinal Ice Cream Cone and decided, nah, it's Trump's fault after all:
President Biden today said he stands by his decision to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan, characterizing the decision as a choice between pulling out, or going back to fighting the Taliban in the middle of the fighting season.
"I stand squarely behind my decision," Biden said in remarks from the White House. "After 20 years, I've learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw US forces. That's why we're still there." Biden went on to say that he had weighed the risks carefully before making the decision, but acknowledged that the situation on the ground had devolved more quickly than he anticipated.
"We were clear-eyed about the risks," he said. "We planned for every contingency. But, I always promised the American people that I will be straight with you. The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated."
The President went on to outline what he believes were the events that led to the Taliban's swift takeover in the country.
"So what's happened? Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, some without trying to fight. If anything, the developments of the past week reinforced that ending US military involvement in Afghanistan, now, was the right decision," Biden said. "American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves."
President Biden said that his national security team is closely monitoring the unfolding situation in Afghanistan and that the Taliban takeover there had happened faster than expected.
Mr. Biden said in televised remarks Monday that the purpose for the war had been accomplished and it was time to leave.
"Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation-building," Mr. Biden said.
He also said: "The truth is this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated."
Mr. Biden returned to the White House earlier Monday from Camp David. He issued a statement Saturday as the situation in Afghanistan was rapidly unfolding. His administration, in defending his decision to withdraw troops, has pointed to a February 2020 agreement former President Donald Trump made with the Taliban to wind down the U.S. presence.
Since Saturday, the news has been filled with scenes of chaos in Kabul, where U.S. troops are working to evacuate Americans and some refugees. Critics have accused the Biden administration of not taking enough steps to protect the Afghan people, especially those who may now be targeted by the Taliban.
Afghan President Fled with Helicopter Full of Cash August 16, 2021 at 3:25 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard “Russia’s embassy in Kabul said on Monday that Afghan President Ashraf Ghani had fled the country with four cars and a helicopter full of cash and had to leave some money behind as it would not all fit in,” Reuters reports. ______
Reminds me of other dictators who fled with so much gold on board their plan could not take off.
China Ready for ‘Friendly Relations’ with Taliban August 16, 2021 at 3:29 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard China is ready to deepen “friendly and cooperative” relations with Afghanistan, a government spokeswoman said Monday, after the Taliban seized control of the country, AFP reports.
Merkel Says U.S. Not Alone In Misjudging Afghans August 16, 2021 at 3:38 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard German Chancellor Angela Merkel acknowledged that she and other global leaders had “misjudged” the Afghan government’s ability to withstand attacks from the Taliban, DW News reports.
Said Merkel: “This is an extremely bitter development. Bitter, dramatic and terrifying.”
She added: “It is a terrible development for the millions of Afghans who want a more liberal society.”
Biden Addresses the Nation on Afghanistan August 16, 2021 at 3:45 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard President Biden addressed the nation on the U.S. pullout of Afghanistan and said he “stands squarely” behind his decision to pull out U.S. troops.
Said Biden: “Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to be nation-building. Our mission was preventing a terrorist attack on the United States.”
He added: “The truth is that this did unfold more quickly than we anticipated. So what happened? Afghan political leaders gave up and fled the country.”
Biden also said that after 20 years of war, he learned there was never a good time to withdraw forces.
What truly is sad is how many lives and gold we spent for a group of rag heads who did not give a shit for their country.....only thing they wanted was power to dominate their people.....just like trump!!!! At least Joe manned up, something donnie never did, and FINALLY STOPPED THE BLEEDING and pulled our.....just like the goat fuckers father should have done years ago!!!!!!
The armed forces are now a vehicle for the advancement of an agenda of social justice.
We see that the military, which is subject to top-down imposition of new social norms, is now the proving grounds of cultural overhaul. Troops must comply with these advances as a matter of discipline. And once these norms are instituted, the argument is then made that the rest of society just needs to catch up to the example set forth by our most-respected organization, albeit involuntarily. Our ruling class has turned our military into a coercive gateway to enact broader cultural change as it attempts to force it into our lives; and now they’ve corrupted it with their racial agenda, as well.
WASHINGTON (AP) - Striking a defiant tone, President Joe Biden said Monday that he stands "squarely behind" his decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan and that the Afghan government's collapse was quicker than anticipated.
Biden said he was faced with a choice between sticking to a previously negotiated agreement to withdraw U.S. troops this year or sending thousands more service members back into Afghanistan for a "third decade" of war.
Biden said he will not repeat mistakes of the past and did not regret his decision to proceed with the withdrawal.
"I stand squarely behind my decision," Biden said in a televised address to the nation from the White House East Room. "After 20 years, I've learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces."
Biden said he'd rather take the criticism over the fallout in Afghanistan than leave the decision to another president. He said the decision to leave Afghanistan is "the right one for America."
Louisiana Health Care System Near ‘Major Failure’ August 16, 2021 at 4:24 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard “Grappling with an unprecedented flood of COVID-19 patients, Louisiana’s hospitals are struggling to provide the public with the most basic levels of care — and are quickly approaching catastrophe,” the Baton Rouge Advocate reports.
Said Gov. John Bel Edwards (D): “We are rapidly getting to the point where we could have a major failure of our health care delivery system. There’s some people out there whose care is being delayed to the point where, for them, it’s already failed.”
Said Biden: “Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to be nation-building. Our mission was preventing a terrorist attack on the United States.”
Yes, captain Obvious that still doesn't explain his unceremonious bug out.
He added: “The truth is that this did unfold more quickly than we anticipated. So what happened? Afghan political leaders gave up and fled the country.”
Biden also said that after 20 years of war, he learned there was never a good time to withdraw forces.
Yes, and he blame Trump for "boxing him in". Biden is blaming everybody but himself.
“How many more generations of America's daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghanistan's civil war when Afghan troops will not? How many more lives, American lives, is it worth, how many endless rows of headstones at Arlington National Cemetery?
I'm clear in my answer. I will not repeat the mistakes we've made in the past. The mistake of staying and fighting indefinitely in a conflict that is not in the national interest of the United States.”
What does this have to with Biden's debacle in Afghanistan.
And what does your bitching about James post serve to fix either problem!!!! The debacle in that shit hole started with busches fuck up and finally Biden has brought it to a close!!!!!!!!!! Saving american lives and gold!!!!!!!!
#UPDATE China is ready to deepen "friendly and cooperative" relations with #Afghanistan, a government spokeswoman (pic, R) said Monday, after the Taliban seized control of the country
"I stand squarely behind my decision. After 20 years, I've learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw US forces. That's why we're still there, we were clear-eyed about the risks, we planned for every contingency. But I always promised the American people I would be straight with you," Biden said. "The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated."
The following is a transcript of President Biden’s comments
It is a very memorable moment in time.
Good afternoon.
I want to speak today to the unfolding situation in Afghanistan, the developments that have taken place in the last week and the steps we’re taking to address the rapidly evolving events.
My national security team and I have been closely monitoring the situation on the ground in Afghanistan and moving quickly to execute the plans we had put in place to respond to every contingency, including the rapid collapse we’re seeing now.
I’ll speak more in a moment about the specific steps we’re taking. But I want to remind everyone how we got here and what America’s interests are in Afghanistan.
We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago with clear goals: get those who attacked us on Sept. 11, 2001, and make sure Al Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again. We did that. We severely degraded Al Qaeda and Afghanistan. We never gave up the hunt for Osama bin Laden and we got him.
That was a decade ago. Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation-building. It was never supposed to be creating a unified, centralized democracy. Our only vital national interest in Afghanistan remains today what it has always been: preventing a terrorist attack on American homeland.
I’ve argued for many years that our mission should be narrowly focused on counterterrorism, not counterinsurgency or nation-building. That’s why I opposed the surge when it was proposed in 2009 when I was vice president. And that’s why as president I’m adamant we focus on the threats we face today, in 2021, not yesterday’s threats.
Today a terrorist threat has metastasized well beyond Afghanistan. Al Shabab in Somalia, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Al Nusra in Syria, ISIS attempting to create a caliphate in Syria and Iraq and establishing affiliates in multiple countries in Africa and Asia. These threats warrant our attention and our resources. We conduct effective counterterrorism missions against terrorist groups in multiple countries where we don’t have permanent military presence. If necessary, we’ll do the same in Afghanistan. We’ve developed counterterrorism over-the-horizon capability that will allow us to keep our eyes firmly fixed on the direct threats to the United States in the region, and act quickly and decisively if needed.
When I came into office, I inherited a deal that President Trump negotiated with the Taliban. Under his agreement, U.S. forces would be out of Afghanistan by May 1, 2021, just a little over three months after I took office. U.S. forces had already drawn down during the Trump administration from roughly 15,500 American forces to 2,500 troops in country. And the Taliban was at its strongest militarily since 2001.
The choice I had to make as your president was either to follow through on that agreement or be prepared to go back to fighting the Taliban in the middle of the spring fighting season. There would have been no cease-fire after May 1. There was no agreement protecting our forces after May 1. There was no status quo of stability without American casualties after May 1. There was only a cold reality of either following through on the agreement to withdraw our forces or escalating the conflict and sending thousands more American troops back into combat in Afghanistan, and lurching into the third decade of conflict.
I stand squarely behind my decision. After 20 years, I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces. That’s why we’re still there. We were cleareyed about the risks. We planned for every contingency. But I always promised the American people that I will be straight with you.
Taxpayers should be furious not just about the profligate waste and extravagance of such an establishment, but at the bottomless idiocy of a class of credentialled people who think that the answer to every foreign problem is to spend absurd amounts of money, hire endless case officers and private contractors/consultants, outreach coordinators to tweet out rainbow flag celebrations, issue endless white papers analyzing the situation that bear little or no relation to reality, and an apparatus that has proven unable to process visas for the Afghans who worked for us, let alone have a plan for evacuating Americans. Despite Biden’s pathetic defense of the outcome, he ought to be furious with the whole upper echelon of our military-diplomatic complex. There ought to be mass firings. Of course, we all know that no one will be fired, and no senior person in this apparatus of disaster will have the honor to resign.
Finally there is the incompetence of the withdrawal itself. It is one thing to decide to end our presence in Afghanistan, and take your chances that the Taliban can be deterred or contained some other way (does anyone think our military-diplomatic complex has a serious plan to do this?). It is another thing to make the announcement that set the Taliban’s timeline in motion. So vagueness and misdirection were called for, but no one seemed to have the guile for it.
When the British decided to end the Gallipoli misadventure in early 1916, it made no public announcement that it was planning to end the offensive and withdraw, because they knew doing so would encourage the Turks to attack the retreating British and ANZAC forces and turn the retreat into a slaughter. So the withdrawal was done in a stealthy way that effectively disguised that the Allied forces were leaving the scene. The ingenious British went as far as to improvise rifles that fired from the abandoned trenches automatically, with makeshift firing mechanisms that pulled rifle triggers when water ran out a hole in a bucket, for example. We should have been using that kind of legerdemain in Afghanistan. At the very least, we should be mined and booby-trapped equipment we were abandoning.
The only people more feckless than our military-diplomatic elite are the media, led, naturally, by CNN. One of CNN’s reporters actually said, “They’re chanting ‘Death to America’ but seem friendly at the same time. It’s just bizarre.” I suspect a university education is behind this level of cluelessness.
The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated. So what’s happened? Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight. If anything, the developments of the past week reinforced that ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision.
American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves. We spent over a trillion dollars. We trained and equipped an Afghan military force of some 300,000 strong. Incredibly well equipped. A force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies. We gave them every tool they could need. We paid their salaries, provided for the maintenance of their air force, something the Taliban doesn’t have. Taliban does not have an air force. We provided close air support. We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future.
There are some very brave and capable Afghan special forces units and soldiers. But if Afghanistan is unable to mount any real resistance to the Taliban now, there is no chance that one year — one more year, five more years or 20 more years — that U.S. military boots on the ground would have made any difference.
Here’s what I believe to my core: It is wrong to order American troops to step up when Afghanistan’s own armed forces would not. The political leaders of Afghanistan were unable to come together for the good of their people, unable to negotiate for the future of their country when the chips were down. They would never have done so while U.S. troops remained in Afghanistan bearing the brunt of the fighting for them. And our true strategic competitors, China and Russia, would love nothing more than the United States to continue to funnel billions of dollars in resources and attention into stabilizing Afghanistan indefinitely.
When I hosted President Ghani and Chairman Abdullah at the White House in June, and again when I spoke by phone to Ghani in July, we had very frank conversations.
So I’m left again to ask of those who argue that we should stay: How many more generations of America’s daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghanistan’s civil war when Afghan troops will not? How many more lives, American lives, is it worth, how many endless rows of headstones at Arlington National Cemetery? I’m clear on my answer: I will not repeat the mistakes we’ve made in the past. The mistake of staying and fighting indefinitely in a conflict that is not in the national interest of the United States, of doubling down on a civil war in a foreign country, of attempting to remake a country through the endless military deployments of U.S. forces. Those are the mistakes we cannot continue to repeat because we have significant vital interest in the world that we cannot afford to ignore.
I also want to acknowledge how painful this is to so many of us. The scenes that we’re seeing in Afghanistan, they’re gut-wrenching, particularly for our veterans, our diplomats, humanitarian workers — for anyone who has spent time on the ground working to support the Afghan people. For those who have lost loved ones
I’ve worked on these issues as long as anyone. I’ve been throughout Afghanistan during this war, while the war was going on, from Kabul to Kandahar, to the Kunar Valley. I’ve traveled there on four different occasions. I’ve met with the people. I’ve spoken with the leaders. I spent time with our troops, and I came to understand firsthand what was and was not possible in Afghanistan. So now we’re focused on what is possible.
We will continue to support the Afghan people. We will lead with our diplomacy, our international influence and our humanitarian aid. We’ll continue to push for regional diplomacy and engagement to prevent violence and instability. We’ll continue to speak out for the basic rights of the Afghan people, of women and girls, just as we speak out all over the world.
I’ve been clear, the human rights must be the center of our foreign policy, not the periphery. But the way to do it is not through endless military deployments. It’s with our diplomacy, our economic tools and rallying the world to join us.
Let me lay out the current mission in Afghanistan: I was asked to authorize, and I did, 6,000 U.S. troops to deploy to Afghanistan for the purpose of assisting in the departure of U.S. and allied civilian personnel from Afghanistan, and to evacuate our Afghan allies and vulnerable Afghans to safety outside of Afghanistan. Our troops are working to secure the airfield and ensure continued operation on both the civilian and military flights. We’re taking over air traffic control. We have safely shut down our embassy and transferred our diplomats. Our diplomatic presence is now consolidated at the airport as well.
Over the coming days we intend to transport out thousands of American citizens who have been living and working in Afghanistan. We’ll also continue to support the safe departure of civilian personnel — the civilian personnel of our allies who are still serving in Afghanistan. Operation Allies Refuge, which I announced back in July, has already moved 2,000 Afghans who are eligible for special immigration visas and their families to the United States. In the coming days, the U.S. military will provide assistance to move more S.I.V.-eligible Afghans and their families out of Afghanistan.
We’re also expanding refugee access to cover other vulnerable Afghans who work for our embassy. U.S. nongovernmental organizations and Afghans who otherwise are a great risk in U.S. news agencies — I know there are concerns about why we did not begin evacuating Afghan civilians sooner. Part of the answer is some of the Afghans did not want to leave earlier, still hopeful for their country. And part of it because the Afghan government and its supporters discouraged us from organizing a mass exodus to avoid triggering, as they said, a crisis of confidence.
American troops are performing this mission as professionally and as effectively as they always do. But it is not without risks. As we carry out this departure, we have made it clear to the Taliban: If they attack our personnel or disrupt our operation, the U.S. presence will be swift, and the response will be swift and forceful. We will defend our people with devastating force if necessary. Our current military mission is short on time, limited in scope and focused in its objectives: Get our people and our allies as safely and quickly as possible. And once we have completed this mission, we will conclude our military withdrawal. We will end America’s longest war after 20 long years of bloodshed.
The events we’re seeing now are sadly proof that no amount of military force would ever deliver a stable, united, secure Afghanistan, as known in history as the graveyard of empires. What’s happening now could just as easily happen five years ago or 15 years in the future. We have to be honest, our mission in Afghanistan made many missteps over the past two decades.
I’m now the fourth American president to preside over war in Afghanistan. Two Democrats and two Republicans. I will not pass this responsibility on to a fifth president. I will not mislead the American people by claiming that just a little more time in Afghanistan will make all the difference. Nor will I shrink from my share of responsibility for where we are today and how we must move forward from here. I am president of the United States of America, and the buck stops with me.
I’m deeply saddened by the facts we now face. But I do not regret my decision to end America’s war-fighting in Afghanistan and maintain a laser focus on our counterterrorism mission, there and other parts of the world. Our mission to degrade the terrorist threat of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and kill Osama bin Laden was a success. Our decades-long effort to overcome centuries of history and permanently change and remake Afghanistan was not, and I wrote and believed it never could be.
I cannot and will not ask our troops to fight on endlessly in another country’s civil war, taking casualties, suffering life-shattering injuries, leaving families broken by grief and loss. This is not in our national security interest. It is not what the American people want. It is not what our troops who have sacrificed so much over the past two decades deserve. I made a commitment to the American people when I ran for president that I would bring America’s military involvement in Afghanistan to an end. While it’s been hard and messy and, yes, far from perfect, I’ve honored that commitment.
More importantly, I made a commitment to the brave men and women who serve this nation that I wasn’t going to ask them to continue to risk their lives in a military action that should’ve ended long ago. Our leader did that in Vietnam when I got here as a young man. I will not do it in Afghanistan.
I know my decision will be criticized. But I would rather take all that criticism than pass this decision on to another president of the United States, yet another one, a fifth one. Because it’s the right one, it’s the right decision for our people. The right one for our brave service members who risked their lives serving our nation. And it’s the right one for America.
Thank you. May God protect our troops, our diplomats and all brave Americans serving in harm’s way.
"Pentagon press secretary John Kirby confirmed to Fox News on Sunday evening that the administration will not give priority evacuation to Americans in Afghanistan over Afghans applying for visas."
Honesty is rare in politics but he is the most honest President I have ever seen before.
The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated. So what’s happened? Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight. If anything, the developments of the past week reinforced that ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision.
The fact that they collapsed in in a few days is proof of his decision was correct!
Biden Refuses to Take Questions From Reporters After Blaming Trump For His Afghanistan Disaster – Will Return to Camp David This Afternoon! (VIDEO) By Cristina Laila Published August 16, 2021 at 3:47pm 693 Comments Share Gab
Joe Biden on Monday delivered a short speech on his Afghanistan disaster.
After mumbling through prepared remarks, blaming Trump and the Afghan security forces on his botched withdrawal, Biden fled the lectern without taking any questions from reporters.
But if he allows thousands of Muslims rrb will go crazy with hate crimes
Blogger rrb said...
I suspect that the racist rodent bastard will post links complaining about too many Mooslimb people will be brought to the United States of white people..as he sees it.
Wrong again, oh racist beater of black women.
I'd take several hundred plane loads of Afghan innocents any day over tens of thousands of Covid-positive MS-13 scumbags.
Slow Joe is sending thousands of innocent Afghans to their DEATHS.
Bonus Quote of the Day August 16, 2021 at 5:36 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard “The president said that the buck stopped with him, but in fact, this speech was full of finger-pointing and blame, especially for the Afghans… He did not really get into or accept any blame for the catastrophic exit that we have been watching on television in the last several days.” — CNN anchor Jake Tapper, commenting on President Biden’s speech to the nation on Afghanistan.
Well, if blame is not to be put on the Afghans, after SO much aid and support from us in terms of equipment and the many lives we lost, ON WHOM SHOULD IT BE PLACED?
It's hard to believe this has to be said, but unlike this president, I’ll do my job and take responsibility. I won’t blame others. And I’ll never forget that the job isn’t about me — it’s about you. 3:00 PM · Jun 4, 2020
thebradfordfile https://twitter.com/thebradfordfile/status/1427365378469072902 The President of the United States is afraid to take questions from the press during an international crisis he created.
Joe has yet to take questions from all the press until they ran out.
While I can reassure myself that in his racist demagoguery Trump is like George Wallace, and in his prevaricating he's like Joe McCarthy, and that the GOP's exploitation of race runs like a strong thread through the history of the past half century (since the passage of the Voting Rights Act), and that on numerous occasions Americans have demonized outsiders from the Irish in the 1840s to Chinese in the 1880s to Japanese-Americans in the 1940s, nothing prepared me for the embrace and continuing adoration of Donald Trump by a major political party.
That still stumps me. So, for that matter, does the ongoing resistance to the Covid-19 vaccines.
Some historians, such as Heather Cox Richardson in How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America, see strong parallels between the forces of oligarchy in the 19th century and those today in the 21st, noting the parallels between the ideology of southern slaveholders, western silver mine owners and Trumpie Republicans. These parallels are striking, no doubt. In the old South and the Wild West oligarchs celebrated rule by the rich. Who does that sound like? But it seems too simple to me to draw a straight line through American history from oligarchs in the past to those of the present. While I highly respect Richardson's work and am in awe of her research and broad knowledge I'm more impressed by the differences between then and now than the similarities. Something has changed.
Still, history is not irrelevant. It is helpful to know that our history is replete with instances of racism, xenophobia, and other signs of moral depravity. We'd really feel lost if we weren't aware of Jim Crow, Juan Crow, and McCarthyism. (Which is why it's vital that school children are exposed to the truth about American history, at least in the higher grades.) And while white people by and large haven't faced the assaults on democracy we are seeing now and can anticipate in the future, black Americans have, and familiarizing ourselves with their experience can teach us lessons about resistance and endurance. What history has taught white Americans is that the unfolding of history is the unfolding of human freedom, from the broadening of the suffrage to males without property to female suffrage and gay marriage. What black Americans have learned is that rights can be taken away. That is the lesson they learned when whites put an end to Reconstruction.
To those who think a coup couldn't happen here in America there's the unpleasant fact that we've already had one. In 1898 white Redeemers in Wilmington, North Carolina violently staged a coup against a coalition of blacks and white Populists who had managed to win an election to take control of city government. A knowledge of history is therefore not nothing.
But the present challenge requires us to look with fresh eyes on our country. As Lincoln said, writing in a different time but in one which resonates today, "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."
(CNN) -- "The debacle of the US defeat and chaotic retreat in Afghanistan is a political disaster for Joe Biden, whose failure to orchestrate an urgent and orderly exit will further rock a presidency plagued by crises and stain his legacy."
they sure went from no crises to one plagued by crises fast
But, I always promised the American people that I will be straight with you. The truth is..."
Then he lied through his teeth and ran off without taking a single question. At what point does the media take their job seriously and call this crap out.
This blog post was written by Rick Shenkman, the founder of George Washington University's History News Network, and the author of Political Animals: How Our Stone-Age Brain Gets in the Way of Smart Politics (Basic Books).
I spent the last 45 years studying the history of this country. But after the last 4 years I can truly say I didn't understand it, cynical though I often was about the ugly disfiguring patches that no Band-Aid could hide.
McCarthyism – sure. Racism – of course. Xenophobia – duh. Misogyny – hell yes. America had it all.
But a mass cult built around an old man known for lying and grifting who bronzes his face each day? Didn't see that happening. Nor did I anticipate that tens of millions would refuse a free vaccine that could save others' lives – and their own.
And cynical as I was I never thought that the politicians these millions elected would be so cowed by their chosen leader that almost every one of them would go along with his wild schemes and lies.
It's said that the past is a foreign country. But with each passing day I can't escape the feeling that it's the present I don't understand. Knowing our history hasn't made it easier to come to terms with the present. If anything, it's been a hindrance.
It's gotten in the way of me seeing what is in front of my own eyes. It's made me want to excuse what's happening or to downplay it.
Realizing that this country is not what I thought it was is disillusioning. Which is strange. I spent my whole career trying to see things clearly as they are and not as I'd wish them to be.
JAMES who is not a pederast, as rat well knows, SAID: ~~~How many times did Trump take no questions? QUITE many.
RAT (RRB) SAID: ~~~List them for us pederast. Give us the accurate count.
JAMES SAID: ~~~`Too many to list, rat bastard, Just google, as I did, "Trump refused to answer questions" and you will get Videos of Trump refused to answer questions and More videos of Trump refused to answer questions and Images of Trump refused to answer questions and More images of Trump refused to answer questions and numerous, numerous links to articles depicting Trump refusing to answer questions.
Then he lied through his teeth and ran off without taking a single question. At what point does the media take their job seriously and call this crap out.
Honesty is rare in politics but he is the most honest President I have ever seen before.
The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated. So what’s happened? Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight. If anything, the developments of the past week reinforced that ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision.
The fact that they collapsed in in a few days is proof of his decision was correct!
Catturd ™ https://twitter.com/catturd2/status/1427284525449633794 While the Biden regime was busy hanging rainbow flags at embassies, looking for pretend white rage, releasing embarrassing TikTok videos, and having laughable, fake crying commissions on 1/6 misdemeanor trespassing - the Taliban was planning the military takeover of Afghanistan.
1. afghanistan should've never have happened. you all fought for nothing. 2. the afghanis suck so hard 3. I stand by my decision 4. *ignores the disaster that's unfolding now* 5. no questions
Why didn't he just stay at Camp David and give it ?
Izengabe https://mobile.twitter.com/Izengabe_/status/1427368237885497352 Amazing how Joe Biden asked how many more Americans had to fight & die in Afghanistan when the US has not had a single causality in Afghanistan in over 1 1/2 years. Biden is the one who made Afghanistan more dangerous & put US lives at risk.
4:56 I did not run away. Just google and see. Not only did Trump FREQUENTLY refuse to answer questions, he often lambasted those who asked perfectly legitimate questions, especially if they were women, and he was notorious for going days and days and days without a press conference.
And his last press person was notorious for reading a provocative statement at the end of the session, slamming the book she read it from, and charging out of the room ignoring all the shouted questions.
Amazing how Joe Biden asked how many more Americans had to fight & die in Afghanistan when the US has not had a single causality in Afghanistan in over 1 1/2 years. _____
And if they had taken on the Taliban (which the Afghan forces were supposed to do), there would have been no American deaths?
Trump sat and answered Covid questions for as long as there was questions when they were doing the Task force briefings (when it was most important). Trump also gave press conferences where he had almost no written statement and everything was Q & A. I rarely recall Trump leaving a press conference without taking questions and he never did so when he was addressing something important (like the total collapse of a country because of his own stupidity).
Did you already forget about the press wars he had with the various reporters and how he would call out to them and have that old back and forth (some not too friendly).
Trump answered more questions at a single press conference than Biden has answered since he was President.
But nice to know, Reverend...
That instead of defending Biden.
You lie about Trump.
Is that what it has come to? That embarrassing to defend a President?
And yes, those briefings on Covid where Trump ran his ignorant mouth concerning things he knew so little about that Fauci and Birx were freqently kept squirming--
Well, ast least they offered us some comic relief!
Blogger JamesNewLeaf said... I don't even understand Cali's statement above beginning "Pedo yesterday..." (even with the were correction).
Let me be the first to remind you
Blogger Caliphate4vr said... Blogger JamesNewLeaf said... Trump had four years to improve on our policy in Afghanistan. He was for withdrwal of our troops.
What did he do in those four years to make withdrawal feasible?
I repeat: What?
Here ya go stupid
U.S.-Taliban sign landmark agreement in bid to end America's longest war The U.S. has agreed to withdraw all forces from Afghanistan within 14 months and pull out of five bases in 135 days.
DOHA, Qatar — The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan started nearly 7,000 miles away on a sunny September morning when hijacked planes slammed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, as well as the Pentagon and a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
On Saturday, more than 18 years after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. made a bid to end America's longest war.
Hundreds of miles from the battlefields of Afghanistan in a glitzy banquet hall in a five-star hotel in Qatar, the United States and the Taliban signed a landmark agreement that paves the way for U.S. troops to begin withdrawing from the poor and war-torn central Asian country.
"The Taliban will not allow any of its members, other individuals or groups, including Al Qaeda, to use the soil of Afghanistan to threaten the security of the United States and its allies,” the agreement states.
Under the pact, the U.S. would reduce its forces to 8,600 from 13,000 in the next three to four months. Remaining U.S. forces would withdraw in 14 months, although a complete pullout would depend on the Taliban meeting commitments to prevent terrorism.
U.S. special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad and the Taliban’s chief negotiator and one of its founders, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, signed the agreement in Doha after more than a year of on-off formal talks.
Some in the room broke out in whoops, cheers and shouts of "God is Great" at the signing. The several dozen members of the Taliban exited the room after the ceremony beaming.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also attended the ceremony, but did not sign the "Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan," under which the Taliban pledged to enter into peace talks with Afghan government officials, representatives of the opposition, and members of civil society on March 10.
The U.S. committed to work with both sides in upcoming talks to secure the release of up to 5,000 prisoners held by the Afghan government and 1,000 prisoners held by the Taliban by the start of intra-Afghan peace talks.
Washington also agreed to lift U.S. sanctions on the Taliban later this year and to work with other members of the U.N. Security Council to remove sanctions against members of the Taliban within three months.
Speaking to reporters, Pompeo said the United States was "realistic" about the deal it signed, but was "seizing the best opportunity for peace in a generation."
He said that while he was still angry about the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the U.S. will not "squander" what its soldiers "have won through blood, sweat and tears.
August 15, 2021 at 3:18 PM Delete
Then you ghosted until this morning. It’s what always happens after you’ve had stupid ignorant ass shoved down your throat. You’re gutless and incapable of an original thought
Towards the end of his chaotic election campaign events, he quit taking questions because he would say things, that made him look crazy. It's one of the reasons why he lost the election
Trump answered more questions at a single press conference than Biden has answered since he was President.
But nice to know, Reverend...
That instead of defending Biden.
You lie about Trump.
Is that what it has come to? That embarrassing to defend a President?
the POS "pastor" lies are growing more and more blatant
There is no comparison to Trumps openness to questions compared to Bidens.
and no honest person would suggest otherwise.
and Trump trusted Fauci and Birx, and that was a great mistake on his part.
You should trust science but not political scientists. And Fauci in particular has misled us from day 1 (Covid no big deal, don't stop flights from China, 15 days to stop the spread, masks/no masks, no chance this was man made, spreads by surface contact, impossible to develop a vaccine in timely manner, needed 100's of thousands of ventilators etc. etc.) Trump owns most of those mistakes but they were made following Fauci's counsel.
Fauci is a disaster and should have no input into our future and needs to explain his past.
Who's responsible for the chaos in Kabul? Joe Biden, of course. He's commander-in-chief and the buck stops with him.
Fine. But with that formality out of the way, who's really responsible? If we want to learn any lessons from this, we have to go beyond platitudes and dig a little deeper.
So then: to a first approximation, the answer is "nobody." Withdrawing from Afghanistan was always going to be a bloody, chaotic affair no matter what. That's why no one wanted to do it: It was pretty obvious how it would go down, and no one with any sense wants that as part of their presidential legacy. But the bloodshed was inevitable once the decision to leave was made.
Now dig a little deeper. Sure, withdrawal was always going to be messy, but why was it this messy? Recent reporting makes it clear that the answer is twofold. First, the military insisted on an inept training strategy that left the Afghans with a literally useless army the moment we withdrew support. Second, the Afghans themselves were far more corrupt and far more willing to accept Taliban rule than we thought.
How is it that we misunderstood these things after 20 years in country? That remains a bit of a mystery. We could use some more reporting on this.
But now dig even deeper. Even given all our mistakes, did the events of the past couple of days have to be so horrific? My answer might surprise you: they haven't been. I'm speaking relatively, of course, but the truth is that I expected worse. I wouldn't have been surprised to see something like Fallujah on steroids: bodies hanging from bridges, lines of "traitors" being shot, Taliban fighters surrounding American forces, and so forth. But so far, we haven't seen that. The Taliban takeover has been far smoother and less vicious than I expected.
I get that this is hard to accept after watching even a few minutes of CNN. And obviously things could change rapidly. But what we've seen in Kabul has been about the best outcome we could have reasonably expected. The chaos we're seeing is simply the nature of military withdrawals under pressure. For anyone who disagrees, I can only ask: What did you expect?
Jack Posobiec https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1427377546824458245
“Helping Afghanistan become self-sustaining is going to be a monumental task. It's going to take up to a decade, and more blood will be spilled and more treasure will be spent. But I think it's important”
Hey "pastor" we all know Trump stormed off a few times. The press was brutal with him. But trying to compare him to Biden's press questioning is ridiculous
There is no comparison.
Biden almost always either takes no questions or has a pre-selected list.
Trump answered questions for hours. The press complained it was taking too long.
No one has ever said that about Biden
So stop being so dishonest. You only fool yourself.
The presidency is about a lot more than tweeting from your golf cart. It requires taking on the ultimate responsibility for the biggest decisions in the world. Donald Trump simply wasn’t prepared for that. I promise you I will be. 4:55 PM · May 24, 2020
American Greatness thinks it's all George Bush's fault!
How Bush Ruined Everything
For all his faults, Al Gore couldn't have been worse.
By Adam Mill
August 15, 2021
It’s impossible to forget those anxious December days when cherry-picked Florida counties continued to find handfuls of new Gore votes as recount after recount marched the 2000 election result towards a reversal of the apparent Bush victory a month earlier. Eventually the Supreme Court put a stop to the selective process which counted hanging chads in Democratic counties differently than in Republican counties.
When Bush won, he brought with him a cabal of staffers broadly known as “neoconservatives” who distinguished themselves from traditional Republicans by ignoring deficit spending and strongly supporting interventionist foreign policy with a heavy emphasis on protecting and advancing America’s petro-allies in the Middle East. Months after September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration diverted America’s response to terrorism by seeking a revenge war in Iraq.
American taxpayers poured trillions of dollars into the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The wars represented a new golden age for the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon, as Americans developed a neo-colonial relationship with the client states in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bush and his allies easily brushed aside the few complaints and warnings from traditional liberals about abuses of civil liberties and the prospect of a never-ending Vietnam-like war. I can still hear the sound of Vice President Dick Cheney chuckling dismissively on the Sunday morning talk shows as he scoffed at these fears. Sure, the wars would be expensive. But “deficits don’t matter” according to the then-vice president.
Oh, what a bitter harvest we have reaped.
History acquitted those chicken-little voices that warned of never-ending wars, ballooning deficits, and the dangers of bloated and politicized intelligence agencies. I admit it. I was wrong about Bush. He was a disaster.
Rich Republicans across the country followed Bush into the arms of the Democrats as leftists and corporate America formed their unholy alliance that continues to oppress us today. Thanks to Bush, no party now advocates for fiscal restraint or true free-market principles. Yet another part of Bush’s awful legacy is a culture of debt tolerance that has led us to a catastrophic greater-than-GDP public debt one normally associates with a Third-World country.
What did nearly two decades in Afghanistan and Iraq buy us? Thousands of American dead and trillions more in debt, and Afghanistan is swiftly returning to its pre-invasion configuration. Lots of government contractors and retired generals grew very rich pouring American treasure into the land-locked and barren land. The Bushes themselves have become fabulously wealthy, worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Meanwhile it will take many more years for America to recover from their endless wars and crippling debt. That’s why I’m retroactively endorsing Al Gore for the 2000 presidential election. For all of his faults, he couldn’t have been worse.
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About Adam Mill
Adam Mill is a pen name. He is an adjunct fellow of the Center for American Greatness and works in Kansas City, Missouri as an attorney specializing in labor and employment and public administration law. He graduated from the University of Kansas and has been admitted to practice in Kansas and Missouri. Mill has contributed to The Federalist, American Greatness, and The Daily Caller.
Joe Biden: Good afternoon. I want to speak today to the unfolding situation in Afghanistan, the developments that have taken place in the last week and the steps we’re taking to address the rapidly evolving events. My National Security Team and I have been closely monitoring the situation on the ground in Afghanistan and moving quickly to execute the plans we had put in place to respond to every contingency, including the rapid collapse we’re seeing now. I’ll speak more in a moment about the specific steps we’re taking, but I want to remind everyone how we got here and what America’s interests are in Afghanistan. We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago with clear goals, get those who attacked us on September 11th, 2001, and make sure al-Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again. We did that. We severely degraded al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. We never gave up the hunt for Osama bin Laden and we got him. That was a decade ago. Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation building. It was never supposed to be creating a unified centralized democracy. Our only vital national interest in Afghanistan remains today what it has always been, preventing a terrorist attack on American homeland. I’ve argued for many years that our mission should be narrowly focused on counter terrorism, not counterinsurgency or nation building. That’s why I opposed The Surge when it was proposed in 2009 when I was Vice-President, and that’s why, as President I’m adamant we focus on the threats we face today in 2021, not yesterday’s threats. Today, the terrorist threat has metastasized well beyond Afghanistan. al-Shabab in Somalia, al-Qaeda in Arabian Peninsula, al Nusra in Syria, ISIS attempting to create a caliphate in Syria and Iraq and establishing affiliates in multiple countries in Africa and Asia. These threats warrant our attention and our resources. We conduct effective counter-terrorism missions against terrorist groups in multiple countries where we don’t have permanent military presence. If necessary, we’ll do the same in Afghanistan. We’ve developed counter-terrorism Over The Horizon capability that will allow us to keep our eyes firmly fixed on the direct threats to the United States in the region, and act quickly and decisively if needed. When I came into office, I inherited a deal that President Trump negotiated with the Taliban. Under his agreement, US forces would be out of Afghanistan by May 1, 2021, just a little over three months after I took office. US forces had already drawn down during the Trump administration from roughly 15,500 American forces to 2,500 troops in country. And the Taliban was at its strongest militarily since 2001. The choice I had to make, as your President, was either to follow through on that agreement or be prepared to go back to fighting the Taliban in the middle of the spring fighting season. There would have been no ceasefire after May 1. There was no agreement protecting our forces after May 1. There was no status quo of stability without American casualties after May 1. There was only a cold reality of either following through on the agreement to withdraw our forces or escalating the conflict and sending thousands more American troops back into combat in Afghanistan, lurching into the third decade of conflict. I stand squarely behind my decision. After 20 years, I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw US forces. That’s why we’re still there. We were clear-eyed about the risks, we planned for every contingency. But, I always promised the American people that I will be straight with you. The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated. So what’s happened? Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometime without trying to fight. If anything, the developments of the past week reinforced that ending US military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision.
American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war, and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves. We spent over a trillion dollars. We trained and equipped an Afghan military force with some 300,000 strong, incredibly well-equipped. A force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies. We gave them every tool they could need. We paid their salaries, provided for the maintenance of their air force -- something that Taliban doesn’t have, Taliban does not have an air force. We provided close air support. We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future. There’s some very brave and capable Afghan special forces units and soldiers. But if Afghanistan is unable to mount any real resistance of the Taliban now, there is no chance that one year, one more year, five more years or twenty more years of US military boots on the ground would have made any difference. Here’s what I believe to my core, it is wrong to order American troops to step up when Afghanistan’s own armed forces would not. The political leaders of Afghanistan were unable to come together for the good of their people, unable to negotiate for the future of their country when the chips were down. They would never have done so while US troops remained in Afghanistan, bearing the brunt of the fighting for them. And our true strategic competitors, China and Russia, would love nothing more than the United States to continue to funnel billions of dollars in resources and attention into stabilizing Afghanistan indefinitely. When I hosted President Ghani and Chairman Abdullah at the White House in June, and again when I spoke by phone to Ghani in July, we had very frank conversations. We talked about how Afghanistan should prepare to fight their civil wars after the US military departed. To clean up the corruption in government so the government could function for the Afghan people. We talked extensive about the need for Afghan leaders to unite politically. They failed to do any event. I also urge them to engage in diplomacy, to seek a political settlement with the Taliban. This advice was flatly refused. Mr. Ghani insisted that the Afghan forces would fight, but obviously he was wrong.
Mike Pompeo https://twitter.com/mikepompeo/status/1427417681368686599 Sending more than 5000 troops back in AFTER you withdrew a couple thousand of them is proof that you are disconnected from the reality on the ground and aren't serious about protecting Americans.
So I’m left again to ask of those who argue that we should stay, how many more generations of America’s daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghanistan’s civil war when Afghan troops will not? How many more lives, American lives, is it worth? How many endless rows of headstones in Arlington National Cemetery? I’m clear on my answer. I will not repeat the mistakes we’ve made in the past. The mistake of staying and fighting indefinitely in a conflict that is not in the national interest of the United States. Of doubling down on a civil war in a foreign country, of attempting to remake a country through the endless military deployments of US forces. Those are the mistakes we can not continue to repeat because we have significant vital interest in the world that we cannot afford to ignore. I also want to acknowledge how painful this is to so many of us. The scenes we’re seeing in Afghanistan, they’re gut-wrenching.Particularly for our veterans, our diplomats, humanitarian workers, for anyone who has spent time on the ground working to support the Afghan people. For those who have lost loved ones in Afghanistan, and for Americans have fought and served in the country, served our country, in Afghanistan. This is deeply, deeply personal. It is for me as well. I’ve worked in these issues as long as anyone, I’ve been throughout Afghanistan during this war, while the war was going on from Kabul to Kandahar to the Kunar Valley. I’ve traveled there on four different occasions. I met with the people, I’ve spoken to the leaders. I spent time with our troops and I came to understand firsthand what was and was not possible in Afghanistan. So now we’re focused on what is possible. We will continue to support the Afghan people. We will lead with our diplomacy, our international influence and our humanitarian aid. We’ll continue to work for regional diplomacy and engagement to prevent violence and instability. We’ll continue to speak out for the basic rights of the Afghan people, of women and girls, just as we speak out all over the world.
I’ve been clear that human rights must be the center of our foreign policy, not the periphery. But the way to do it is not through endless military deployments. It’s with our diplomacy, our economic tools and rallying the world to join us. Now let me lay out the current mission in Afghanistan. I was asked to authorize, and I did, 6,000 US troops to deploy to Afghanistan for the purpose of assisting in the departure of US and allied civilian personnel from Afghanistan, and to evacuate our Afghan allies and vulnerable Afghans to safety outside of Afghanistan. Our troops are working to secure the airfield and ensure continued operation of both the civilian and military flights. We’re taking over our traffic control. We have safely shut down our embassy and transferred our diplomats. Our diplomatic presence is now consolidated at the airport as well. Over the coming days, we intend to transport out thousands of American citizens who have been living and working in Afghanistan. We’ll also continue to support the safe departure of civilian personnel, the civilian personnel of our allies, who are still serving Afghanistan. Operation Allies Refuge, which I announced back in July, has already moved 2000 Afghans who are eligible for special immigration visas and their families to the United States. In the coming days, the US military will provide assistance to move more SIV eligible Afghans and their families out of Afghanistan. We’re also expanding refugee access to cover other vulnerable Afghans who worked for our embassy. US non-governmental agencies or US non-governmental organizations, and Afghans who otherwise are at great risk, and US news agencies. I know there are concerns about why we did not begin evacuating Afghan civilians sooner. Part of the answer is some of the Afghans did not want to leave earlier, still hopeful for their country. And part of it because the Afghan government and its supporters discouraged us from organizing a mass exodus to avoid “triggering,” as they said, “a crisis of confidence.” American troops are performing this mission as professionally and as effectively as they always do, but it is not without risks. As we carry out this departure, we have made it clear to the Taliban, if they attack our personnel or disrupt our operation, the US presence will be swift and the response will be swift and forceful. We will defend our people with devastating force if necessary. Our current military mission will be short in time, limited in scope, and focused in its objectives. Get our people and our allies as safely, as quickly as possible. And once we have completed this mission, we will conclude our military withdrawal. We will end America’s longest war, after 20 long years of bloodshed. The events we’re seeing now are sadly proof that no amount of military force would ever deliver a stable, united, secure Afghanistan as known in history as the graveyard of empires. What’s happening now could just as easily happened 5 years ago or 15 years in the future. We have to be honest, our mission in Afghanistan has taken many missteps, made many missteps over the past two decades. I’m now the fourth American President to preside over war in Afghanistan, two Democrats and two Republicans.
. I will not pass this responsibility on to a fifth president. I will not mislead the American people by claiming that just a little more time in Afghanistan will make all the difference. Nor will I shrink from my share of responsibility for where we are today and how we must move forward from here. I am President of the United States of America, and the buck stops with me. I’m deeply saddened by the facts we now face, but I do not regret my decision to end America’s war fighting in Afghanistan, and maintain a laser focus on our counter terrorism mission there and other parts of the world. Our mission to degrade the terrorist threat of al Qaeda in Afghanistan and kill Osama bin Laden was a success. Our decades-long effort to overcome centuries of history and permanently change and remake Afghanistan was not, and I wrote and believed it never could be. I cannot and will not ask our troops to fight on endlessly in another country’s civil war, taking casualties, suffering life shattering injuries, leaving families broken by grief and loss. This is not in our national security interest. It is not what the American people want. It is not what our troops, who have sacrificed so much over the past two decades, deserve. I made a commitment to the American people when I ran for President that I’d bring America’s military involvement in Afghanistan to an end. And while it’s been hard and messy, and yes, far from perfect, I’ve honored that commitment. More importantly, I made a commitment to the brave men and women who serve this nation that I wasn’t going to ask them to continue to risk their lives in a military action that should have ended long ago. Our leaders did that in Vietnam when I got here as a young man. I will not do it in Afghanistan. I know my decision will be criticized, but I would rather take all that criticism then pass this decision onto another President of the United States, yet another one, a fifth one. Because it’s the right one, it’s the right decision for our people. The right one for our brave service members who have risked their lives serving our nation. And it’s the right one for America. Thank you. May God protect our troops, our diplomats, and all brave Americans serving in harm’s way
Pedo no one cares what this demented fuck said, but since you cant’t back your shit, you’re as always spam the blog and hope the ass kicking you took gets buried.
The truth about the withdrawal from Afghanistan is hard for partisans to admit
John Stoehr, The Editorial Board
August 16, 2021
(Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)
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The situation in Afghanistan deteriorated quickly over the weekend. The Taliban took control of its capital city last night. That co-op of regional warlords now has effective control of the country. The swift developments provide partisans here in the states plenty of reasons for being partisan. The Republicans are acting like the fall of Kabul is the same — politically, strategically, morally — as the fall of Saigon at the end of another forever war that had no point but cost us blood and treasure. Naturally, this puts the Democrats on the defensive. I'm no expert on military history. I'm no expert on international affairs. I do know, however, that partisanship often makes people say silly things.
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I think it took a degree of courage for Joe Biden to end "the forever war." Decisions like this don't come without cost in every sense of the word. The president surely knew what was going to happen, though he probably could not have known how or how quickly it would. Given that uncertainty, it took courage. But contrary to what some liberals are saying in Biden's defense, I don't think it took that much courage.
I think instead it was a sound political calculation, like everything else. No matter how much money we pour into it, Afghanistan is just not in the mood, and may never be in the mood, to behave like a democratic nation-state. There is no such thing as "the national interest" in that country. (Even calling it a "country" is overstating things). There is no such thing as a moral belief in the fundamental equality between and among members of a political community dedicated to that very same national interest. Not even in theory. And that's not something you can buy. That "the president of Afghanistan" fled the country should be of no surprise after you understand that he was president on paper.
It's not possible for Joe Biden to have been the only president to have recognized that reality. He is the first to act on it, though. It's as if he said to himself one day: "Well, this isn't getting any better." Two decades is a long time. Memories of Sept. 11, 2001, have faded. Domestic politics, including the public-private interests of the military-industrial complex, is pretty much what kept past presidents from making the decision BIden made. It's said he's long been critical of "the forever war." He saw an opportunity. He took it.
Calling veterans suckers and losers It’s the MO of a gutless coward
Joe Concha https://twitter.com/JoeConchaTV/status/1427371533018746887 The Taliban spokesperson has taken more questions than the White House press secretary, POTUS and the VP on this to this point.
WASHINGTON, D.C.—In a forceful press conference today, Biden called for whoever the President is to "clean up this mess" in Afghanistan.
"Listen folks, this is ridiculous!" said President Biden. "Who's running this country anyway? I demand accountability! The President must be held responsible for this debacle!"
An aide attempted to whisper in his ear that he was the President, but Biden whirled around and punched the aide right in the nose in a flurry of righteous anger.
"How dare you sneak up on me while I'm holding the President to account!" said Biden.
The press conference was then abruptly interrupted by the evening call to prayer.
thebradfordfile https://twitter.com/thebradfordfile/status/1427404997197713412 I'm not an 'expert' but I'm pretty sure if this was properly planned, there wouldn't be people falling from the skies onto runways.
NEW: Joe Biden has arrived back at Camp David and the White House has called a lid, according to the pool. An unknown number of Americans remain trapped in Kabul.
James Woods https://twitter.com/RealJamesWoods/status/1427397537317589017 Joe Biden is a coward. He’s afraid to answer questions from a press corps who have his picture on their bedroom walls.
He actually followed up on an agreement between Trump and the Afghanistan government.
I’ve argued for many years that our mission should be narrowly focused on counterterrorism — not counterinsurgency or nation building. That’s why I opposed the surge when it was proposed in 2009 when I was Vice President.
And that’s why, as President, I am adamant that we focus on the threats we face today in 2021 — not yesterday’s threats.
Today, the terrorist threat has metastasized well beyond Afghanistan: al Shabaab in Somalia, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, al-Nusra in Syria, ISIS attempting to create a caliphate in Syria and Iraq and establishing affiliates in multiple countries in Africa and Asia. These threats warrant our attention and our resources.
We conduct effective counterterrorism missions against terrorist groups in multiple countries where we don’t have a permanent military presence.
If necessary, we will do the same in Afghanistan. We’ve developed counterterrorism over-the-horizon capability that will allow us to keep our eyes firmly fixed on any direct threats to the United States in the region and to act quickly and decisively if needed.
When I came into office, I inherited a deal that President Trump negotiated with the Taliban. Under his agreement, U.S. forces would be out of Afghanistan by May 1, 2021 — just a little over three months after I took office.
troops in country, and the Taliban was at its strongest militarily since 2001.
The choice I had to make, as your President, was either to follow through on that agreement or be prepared to go back to fighting the Taliban in the middle of the spring fighting season.
There would have been no ceasefire after May 1. There was no agreement protecting our forces after May 1. There was no status quo of stability without American casualties after May 1.
There was only the cold reality of either following through on the agreement to withdraw our forces or escalating the conflict and sending thousands more American troops back into combat in Afghanistan, lurching into the third decade of conflict.
The Biden administration is planning to announce that most Americans who have received the coronavirus vaccine will need booster shots to combat waning immunity and the highly transmissible delta variant that is sparking a surge in covid-19 cases, according to four people familiar with the decision.
The administration’s health and science experts are coalescing around the view that people will need the boosters eight months after being fully vaccinated, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a decision not yet public. The decision is likely to be announced as soon as this week.
The administration of the boosters would not occur until mid- or late September, after an application from Pfizer-BioNTech for the additional shots is cleared by the Food and Drug Administration, the individuals said.
The conclusion that boosters will be broadly needed was reached after intense discussions last weekend involving high-ranking officials who scrutinized the latest data from the United States and other countries on the effectiveness of the shots.
The statement is a striking change from public statements by senior officials in recent months who had said it was far too soon to conclude that Americans would need booster shots. In July, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FDA put out an unusual statement that said, “Americans who have been fully vaccinated do not need a booster shot at this time.” Officials have repeatedly said it wasn’t clear whether boosters would be needed.
But in recent days, the messaging has started to change. As data from other countries and in the United States showed waning immunity, health officials moderated their language, hinting booster shots would be likely. Last week, Anthony S. Fauci, the White House chief medical adviser, said it was “likely” everyone will need a coronavirus booster at some point.
The demonization of patriots reached its nadir in the Big Lie that the January 6th protests at the Capitol amounted to an “insurrection.” A legitimate protest against how the presidential elections were conducted was painted as seditious. Last week, the DHS issued a terror warning conflating Americans protesting COVID-19 restrictions to jihadists who might strike on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. A DHS bulletin warned, “anti-government, anti-authority violent extremists” may try to “exploit the emergence of COVID-19 variants by viewing the potential re-establishment of public health restrictions across the U.S. as a rationale to conduct attacks.”
The attacks on, and the maligning of, conservatives or those who advance narratives not favored by the Left have reached unimaginable proportions. They include constitutional violations such as wholesale censorship, vicious defamation, unjust imprisonment, unpunished assaults, and denial of rights to a fair and speedy trial. This perilous trajectory must be corrected. Otherwise, it will signal the end of our constitutional republic.
And yet, the Taliban wasn't running the country. Now Biden just sent 6000 troops back in while Taliban go door to door executing anyone who had worked with us.
Add this to the border disaster, high inflation, energy problems, and covid mismanagement. Biden already challenging carter for worst president ever.
And yet the ball less wonder has missed the last 35 years of history in that the afghan soldiers are about as brave as he is dropping their guns and running....just like trump did when he had his famous bone spurs fake letter bought by his old man....I'd imagine each of you slurpers would be as brave as those who ran when it counted!!!! Maybe ballz should go to the border and show those beaners where to go!!!!!! BWAAAAAAPAAAAAA!!!
In spite of our infectious disease expert Lil Schitty saying otherwise....it sure appears that the data says unvaxed americans not only jeopardize themselves.....but EVERYONE around them....The sad thing is none of them give a shit!!!!! Just like trump!!!
The COVID-19 situation in Iceland is proof that vaccines work, a leading US infectious-disease expert said.
Iceland reported 2,847 new infections over the past month, mostly from the highly infectious Delta variant and mostly in fully vaccinated people, official statistics indicated. This is the highest number of new infections in a month since the start of the pandemic, but vaccines appear to be doing their job. The vast majority of new infections are mild at worst.
Of the 1,239 Icelanders who were recorded as having COVID-19 on Sunday, 3% were in the hospital, data showed.
The COVID-19 situation in Iceland is proof that vaccines work, a leading US infectious-disease expert said.
Iceland reported 2,847 new infections over the past month, mostly from the highly infectious Delta variant and mostly in fully vaccinated people, official statistics indicated. This is the highest number of new infections in a month since the start of the pandemic, but vaccines appear to be doing their job. The vast majority of new infections are mild at worst.
Of the 1,239 Icelanders who were recorded as having COVID-19 on Sunday, 3% were in the hospital, data showed.
In spite of our infectious disease expert Lil Schitty Florida is number one
Five states broke records for the average number of daily new Covid cases over the weekend as the delta variant strains hospital systems across the U.S. and forces many states to reinstate public health restrictions. 1:Florida, Louisiana, Hawaii, Oregon and Mississippi all reached new peaks in their seven-day average of new cases per day as of Sunday, according to a CNBC analysis of data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. On a per capita basis, Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida are suffering from the three worst outbreaks in the country.
But remember our resident expert yesterday when confronted with the La disaster immediately blamed it on the democrats !!!!!! He really has turned into a sorry sack of shit with no moral compass except defend the white guy party of trump!!!!!
I swear, if I see the grim visage of one more Republican congressman lamenting the "chaos" caused by Joe Biden and the promises we broke with our "Afghan partners," I'm going to puke. We didn't have Afghan partners; we had people in a foreign country we showered with money and ordered around and told what to think and who to believe, which was us. Republicans have been waiting to hang "losing" the Afghanistan war around the neck of Joe Biden since he announced back in April that we would withdraw the troops remaining in that country by the end of this month. Unmentioned by all the Trump-puppets like Lil Scottie is the fact that Biden is doing nothing more or less than carrying out to the letter the deal Trump made with the Taliban last year: that we would pull all our troops out, that we wouldn't engage Taliban fighters in hostilities and they wouldn't engage us, and that the Taliban would pledge not to turn the country back into a stronghold for terrorist groups like al-Qaida and the Islamic State group.
The Doha agreement had markers for the taliban to reach for the withdrawal to proceed. It also had actual plans for a pull out that included thousands of people who would need to be part of it.
Like Obama said, never underestimate Joe's ability to fuck things up.
Unmentioned by all the Trump-puppets like Lil Scottie and you is the fact that Biden is doing nothing more or less than carrying out to the letter the deal Trump made with the Taliban last year.
You believe that he was a great deal maker. Well President Biden followed the same path
Honest people have read the Trump deal and all it's corresponding conditions, which included removing or destroying every single American military asset.
Biden fled Afghanistan UNCONDITIONALLY, arming the Taliban to the fucking teeth as we fled.
Welcome back Carter.
The Mujahedeen haven't gotten a deal this sweet since Charlie Wilson was pounding bourbon and banging hotties in DC.
I can see exactly why you're compelled to lie through your fucking teeth about this alky.
The truth makes you and your president look like absolute SHIT.
In other news, the publisher of the WaPo is pleading with the white house to evacuate all the journalists currently in Shithole-istan.
Leave them there. All of them.
The WaPo, the NYT, XiNN, et. al....
Let them scrawl their stories on stone tablets for their new masters as they're being raped a dozen times per day. They're presstitutes, so they should enjoy what's in store for them.
The scale of America’s global humiliation is so total that I see my friends at Fox News cannot even bear to cover it. As I write, every other world network – the BBC, Deutsche Welle, France 24, not to mention the Chinese – is broadcasting the collapse of the American regime in real time; on Fox, meanwhile, they’re talking about the spending bill and the third Covid shot and the dead Haitians …as if the totality of the defeat is such that for once it cannot be fixed into the American right’s usual consolations (“well, this positions us pretty nicely for 2022”).
On the leftie side, of course, the court eunuchs have risen as one to protect the Dementia Kid, and are working as hurriedly as the Kabul document-shredders in an effort to figure out a way to blame it all on Trump.
But don’t for a moment think this is just some rushed, bungled, memo-incinerating abandonment of the US embassy. State Department diplomats have been preparing this move all summer, under cover of a highly sophisticated deflection operation on their Kabul Twitter feed:
The month of June is recognized as (LGBTI) Pride Month. The United States respects the dignity & equality of LGBTI people & celebrates their contributions to the society. We remain committed to supporting civil rights of minorities, including LGBTI persons. #Pride2021 #PrideMonth
I do hope they’ve managed to evacuate the embassy’s LGBTQWERTY flag before the sacking commences.
One of the depressing aspects of the Swamp is that everything becomes a racket – including even your armed forces. Look at that buffoon at top right, the guy who heads the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Thoroughly Modern Milley: that’s an awful lot of chest ribbonry for a nation that hasn’t won a war in three-quarters of a century. During his recent wokier-than-thou Congressional testimony on “white rage”, I wish someone would have asked Thoroughly Modern what they were all for:
Well, this is for Korea… Vietnam… This small ribbon’s for the Jimmy Carter helicopters-in-the-desert fiasco, because that went tits up far quicker than it usually takes… Here’s the Pentagon Female Empowerment Award I got for introducing Take Your Child Bride To Work Day to Jalalabad… This one’s from the Association of Non-Binary Staff Colleges for Most Transitions in a Single Battalion… Oh, and this most recent one is for getting into a Twitter spat over Tucker Carlson…
If you don’t have total contempt for Milley and the rest of the brass right now, you’re part of the problem.
Well President Biden followed the same path FACT CHECK: FALSE. Honest people have read the Trump deal and all it's corresponding conditions, which included removing or destroying every single American military asset. Biden fled Afghanistan UNCONDITIONALLY, arming the Taliban to the fucking teeth as we fled.
It is pathetic the way the Democrats are trying to blame Trump for Biden's debacle in Afghanistan. No matter what Biden owns this failure.
BTW Biden's address to the nation was not that of a President but that of a weaselly bureaucrat. It was a total embarrassment.
Gee ballz,, never realized what a talent you are being able to watch all the major networks and than editorialize their reporting!!!!! Dayum, maybe you should parlay that talent into a money making blog!!!!!!! BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!
thebradfordfile https://twitter.com/thebradfordfile/status/1427456442035019780 Say want you want about Trump, he never would have left Americans behind. Ever.
thebradfordfile https://twitter.com/thebradfordfile/status/1427426220057276420 Any politician still using the word "insurrection" to describe January 6th should be laughed out of public life forever.
and the state media lost the last crumbs of their credibility to how they gave cover to that false narrative
Wow rat.....I bet you are surprised that China bad mouthed the US to Taiwan.....I guess you have missed the past 50 years of that relationship!!!!!!! bWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!! As to cramps prediction....about as good as he thinks trump won!!!!!
Panetta Compares Afghanistan Exit to Bay of Pigs August 16, 2021 at 11:12 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard 431 Comments “Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta compared the fall of the democratic government in Afghanistan over the weekend to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961,” The Hill reports.
Said Panetta: “I think of John Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs. It unfolded quickly and the president thought that everything would be fine and that was not the case.”
He added: “President Kennedy took responsibility for what took place. I strongly recommend to President Biden that he take responsibility … admit the mistakes that were made.”
U.S. to Advise Boosters for Most Americans August 16, 2021 at 10:38 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard 148 Comments “The Biden administration has decided that most Americans should get a coronavirus booster shot eight months after they completed their initial vaccination, and could begin offering the extra shots as early as mid-September,” the New York Times reports.
“Officials are planning to announce the administration’s decision as early as this week. Their goal is to let Americans know now that they will need additional protection against the Delta variant that is causing surging caseloads across the nation.”
Washington Post: “The question of boosters has become increasingly fraught as the pandemic continues to unfurl, with the ferocity of the delta variant surprising scientists. Data continues to accumulate suggesting that vaccines lose some anti-virus potency over time.”
“But officials have been reluctant to highlight that fact because they are still trying to persuade broad swaths of Americans to get vaccinated — considered the best way to exit from the pandemic. And they are not sure how much of the reduction in protection is from the passage of time and how much is due to the variant.”
If the economy continues to grow rapidly, once the images from Kabul this week fade from television screens, relief that the war is over will actually be an asset for the Democrats.
It’s Now the Taliban’s Military August 17, 2021 at 8:40 am EDT By Taegan Goddard 50 Comments Associated Press: “Built and trained at a two-decade cost of $83 billion, Afghan security forces collapsed so quickly and completely — in some cases without a shot fired — that the ultimate beneficiary of the American investment turned out to be the Taliban. They grabbed not only political power but also U.S.-supplied firepower — guns, ammunition, helicopters and more.”
Afghanistan May Not Matter for the Midterms August 17, 2021 at 8:06 am EDT By Taegan Goddard 55 Comments
New York Times: “The political impact of the chaos and possible bloodshed in Afghanistan is far from clear, either in the midterm congressional elections next year or the 2024 presidential election.”
“Once the images from Kabul this week fade from television screens, relief that the war is over — at least for U.S. troops — could be the dominant emotional outcome.”
There’s No Elegant Way to Lose a War August 17, 2021 at 8:04 am EDT By Taegan Goddard 25 Comments Fareed Zakaria: “The United States had been watching the Taliban gain ground in Afghanistan for years now. It is rich and powerful enough to have been able to mask that reality through a steady stream of counter-attacks and air, missile and drone strikes.”
“But none of that changed the fact that, despite all its efforts, it had not been able to achieve victory — it could not defeat the Taliban. Could it have withdrawn better, more slowly, in a different season, after more negotiations? Certainly. This withdrawal has been poorly planned and executed. But the naked truth is this: There is no elegant way to lose a war.”
A Test of Credibility for Biden August 17, 2021 at 8:02 am EDT By Taegan Goddard 34 Comments Walter Russell Mead: “Joe Biden believed three things about Afghanistan. First, that he could stage a dignified and orderly withdrawal from America’s longest war. Second, that a Taliban win in Afghanistan would not seriously affect U.S. power and prestige world-wide. Third, that Americans were eager enough to put the Afghan war behind them that voters wouldn’t punish him even if the withdrawal went pear-shaped.”
“He was utterly and unspinnably wrong about the first. One fears he was equally wrong about the second. We shall see about the third, and his Monday afternoon speech staunchly defending the pullout indicates that he believes he can carry the country with him.”
One Covid Case Sends New Zealand Into Lockdown August 17, 2021 at 7:59 am EDT By Taegan Goddard 17 Comments Washington Post: “New Zealand will go into a three-day, nationwide lockdown late Tuesday after the country reported its first local case of the coronavirus in nearly six months. Auckland, the largest city, where the case was detected, is likely to be shut down for seven days.”
China Stages Military Exercise Near Taiwan August 17, 2021 at 7:49 am EDT By Taegan Goddard 17 Comments “China is staging an extensive air and sea military exercise near Taiwan in response to ‘provocations’ by Taiwan independence forces, which it described as the biggest source of security risks across the Taiwan Strait,” the South China Morning Post reports.
Taliban Conquest Scrambles Diplomatic Map August 17, 2021 at 7:47 am EDT By Taegan Goddard 20 Comments Wall Street Journal: “The ascent of the Taliban has redrawn the diplomatic map for the U.S. and its rivals as they compete to shape the future of Afghanistan. China and Russia already are moving to build ties with the Taliban and have hosted Taliban officials even before the U.S. military completed its troop withdrawal.”
Bush Feels ‘Great Sadness’ Watching Afghanistan Exit August 17, 2021 at 6:57 am EDT By Taegan Goddard 65 Comments Former President George W. Bush said late Monday that he and former first lady Laura Bush had “been watching the tragic events unfolding in Afghanistan with deep sadness,” Axios reports.
211 comments:
1 – 200 of 211 Newer› Newest»Just remember,
Trump said this should have happened sooner.
Biden Building Back Berkas
It's ironic, Slow Joe has the same built-in protection against impeachment that 0linsky did -
An imbecile Vice President.
Trump shared a goal. Not a half asses execution. Trump built in markers i to a plan. Biden just shit the bed trying to shory cut it.
James you do know Biden is MY President.
In four years of Trump was Trump.Your President.
POSTED BY
THE HILL
1 HOUR AGO
The finger pointing over the fall of Afghanistan between President Biden and former President Trump is in full swing amid the chaotic scramble to get U.S. personnel and allies out of the country before a full Taliban takeover.
Biden, who rarely mentions his predecessor, made a point of doing so in a weekend statement digging in on the U.S. withdrawal. Biden reminded Americans that the U.S. pullout was originally negotiated by the Trump administration and highlighted the former president's plans to invite Taliban leaders to Camp David around the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Trump, who just months ago suggested Biden was not getting out of Afghanistan fast enough, has led the charge among Republicans to hammer the Biden administration for its handling of the withdrawal. Trump went as far as calling on the president to resign in a Sunday statement.
The back-and-forth overshadows what experts and former government officials say is a messy situation that both leaders had a hand in creating.
“President Trump did the Biden administration no favors by making it very clear that he was going to remove U.S. troops and beginning a negotiation process which was driven by that imperative. He really let the Taliban set the tone and the direction of the talks,” said a former State Department official who served in the Trump administration and previous administrations.
“In many ways, what Trump starts, Biden is prepared to fulfill,” the official said.
Biden has long been a skeptic of the continued U.S. presence in Afghanistan, and he advocated during his time as vice president for a smaller footprint there. While Biden spent his first weeks in office unraveling his predecessor’s agenda with ruthless efficiency, he announced in April that he would follow through with plans first announced by Trump to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan.
But as the withdrawal nears its conclusion, the situation has gone awry. The Taliban have swept through major cities and took control faster than Biden administration officials predicted, and the Afghan forces trained and equipped by American troops have failed to provide much resistance.
The U.S. has scrambled to get its own diplomatic personnel out of the capital city of Kabul, as well as briskly process and evacuate thousands of Afghan civilians who aided the Americans over the last 20 years. Many of those allies now fear for their safety under Taliban rule.
The Trump administration brokered a deal with the Taliban in 2020 that laid out a plan for the U.S. to fully withdraw from Afghanistan by May 2021 if the group upheld certain commitments, such as denying safe haven to al Qaeda.
Roughly 2,500 troops remained in Afghanistan when Biden took office. The president in April said he would follow through on the planned withdrawal, but he moved the end date back to Sept. 11, and later shifted it to Aug. 31, citing logistical considerations.
“I wish Joe Biden wouldn't use September 11 as the date to withdraw our troops from Afghanistan, for two reasons,” Trump said in a statement at the time. “First, we can and should get out earlier. Nineteen years is enough, in fact, far too much and way too long.”
But Trump, who spent years advocating for an end to “endless wars,” has used the burgeoning crisis under Biden’s watch to pummel his successor. Trump has released more than a dozen statements in recent days on the subject of Afghanistan and attempted to fundraise off the issue, insisting the U.S. withdrawal would have been more orderly if he were still in office.
“Afghanistan is the most embarrassing military outcome in the history of the United States. It didn’t have to be that way!” Trump said in a Monday statement.
“Can anyone even imagine taking out our Military before evacuating civilians and others who have been good to our Country and who should be allowed to seek refuge?” Trump added in a separate statement. “In addition, these people left topflight and highly sophisticated equipment. Who can believe such incompetence? Under my Administration, all civilians and equipment would have been removed.”
SURE. BY MAY.
A trio of former Trump administration officials argued in a statement Monday that the former president would not have followed through on the withdrawal without successful final talks between the Taliban and Afghan government.
“The difference between then and now is leadership,” former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe , former Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and former national security adviser to the vice president Keith Kellogg said in a statement, declaring “the Biden Administration alone owns this failure.”
Biden officials have pointed to public polling showing support for the end of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan to justify the decision to pull out, and they have argued the rapid collapse of the Afghan government illustrates the futility of remaining there.
But as criticism ratchets up, the White House has harkened back to Trump-era decisions that they believe set the stage for this month’s breakdown. Setting a deadline of May 1 allowed the Taliban to wait out the U.S., they argued, and Trump’s Camp David invite to the Taliban granted the group legitimacy.
With Republicans and national security hawks second guessing the entire operation, Biden dug in on his decision on Saturday while pointing the finger in part at Trump.
“When I came to office, I inherited a deal cut by my predecessor—which he invited the Taliban to discuss at Camp David on the eve of 9/11 of 2019—that left the Taliban in the strongest position militarily since 2001 and imposed a May 1, 2021 deadline on US forces,” Biden said in a statement. “Shortly before he left office, he also drew US forces down to a bare minimum of 2,500. Therefore, when I became President, I faced a choice—follow through on the deal, with a brief extension to get our forces and our allies’ forces out safely, or ramp up our presence and send more American troops to fight once again in another country’s civil conflict.
“I was the fourth President to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan—two Republicans, two Democrats. I would not, and will not, pass this war onto a fifth,” Biden said in the statement.
But experts expressed skepticism over the idea that Biden was really boxed in by Trump. They argued he could have pushed the withdrawal date back to ensure the Taliban upheld its commitments or maintained a smaller force in the region to oversee the safe withdrawal of personnel.
As of Monday afternoon, the U.S. was sending 7,000 troops to Afghanistan to aid in the evacuation effort.
“He has undone plenty of Trump administration policies, and he definitely could’ve undone this one as well if he had chosen to,” said Emily Harding, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Biden signaled early on he wanted to get us out of Afghanistan.”
As each side seeks to stave off political backlash for its role in setting the U.S. withdrawal in motion, current and former government officials believe both Trump and Biden bear some responsibility for the mess unfolding in Kabul and elsewhere.
“Both presidents Biden and Trump had the right goal in mind — ending America’s longstanding presence in Afghanistan. But both also failed to pursue that goal in the right way,” tweeted Mark Esper, Trump’s former Defense secretary who was fired last year after advocating against drawing down forces in Afghanistan.
“The only way this conflict could have ended better was through a political agreement among Afghans that was conditions based, patient, and backed up by U.S. and allied militaries,” Esper added. “We had this, but both presidents abandoned the process and stuck to an arbitrary timeline.”
While most GOP lawmakers have rushed to criticize Biden for overseeing a disorderly evacuation process, some have been adamant the last week’s events were more than a year in the making.
“Here’s the ugly truth: Neither party is serious about foreign policy,” Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) said in a statement. “For a decade now, demagogues have lied to the American people about our mission in Afghanistan. President Trump pioneered the strategy of retreat President Biden is pursuing, to disastrous effect.”
Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), who served in the U.S. Air Force, called it a “dark day” that could foreshadow the emergence of terrorist groups as the Taliban strengthens its hold on Afghanistan.
“I’ve said countless times that withdrawing our troops emboldens our enemies and puts our allies in grave danger. And yet, both President Trump and President Biden made their announcements anyway — broadcasting to our enemies that we were leaving and telling our allies around the world that we had given up,” Kinzinger said in a statement. “The reality we face now is sad, and the aftermath will be dangerous and devastating.”
AND BOTH PRESIDENTS AND BOTH PARTIES MUST BEAR RESPONSIBILTY FOR THAT.
Nope
Biden is not competent enough to even take food orders at a drive-thru
He wouldn't last a shift
Why is he running the country?
a complete failure
It is fun watching the POS "pastor" disintegrate into shouting like the corner homeless man
ROFLMFAO !!!
kind of reminds you of Biden
Biden’s Betrayal of Afghans Will Live In Infamy
August 16, 2021 at 2:00 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard
George Packer:
“There’s plenty of blame to go around for the 20-year debacle in Afghanistan—enough to fill a library of books. Perhaps the effort to rebuild the country was doomed from the start.
"But our abandonment of the Afghans who helped us, counted on us, staked their lives on us, is a final, gratuitous shame that we could have avoided.
“The Biden administration failed to heed the warnings on Afghanistan, failed to act with urgency—and its failure has left tens of thousands of Afghans to a terrible fate. This betrayal will live in infamy. The burden of shame falls on President Joe Biden.”
Ex-Obama Aide Says Biden Should Fire Jake Sullivan
August 16, 2021 at 2:23 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard
Former Obama adviser Brett Bruen
writes in USA Today that President Biden should fire National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan in light of the Taliban unexpectedly quick takeover of Afghanistan.
Said Bruen:
“The national security adviser has two jobs.
"As the name suggests, they are the last and ideally closest counselor to the president in the Situation Room.
"Their second duty is to translate the commander in chief’s decisions and direction into practical policies.
"Sometimes that requires speaking truth to power.
"On all of these scores the current occupant of the office appears to have failed.”
My 'shouting' is more intelligent than your stupid incessant ROFLMFAO's.
HILARIOUS!
You know, it's really telling how no one new ever shows up here anymore.
Why? Because the level of discourse has deteriorated so badly.
Good comentators like WpHamilton and Pn and others just get tired and go away.
Trump said this should have happened sooner.
Actually Trump just talked about this and stated clearly:
1) Troops would not have left before American personnel left.
2) Nothing would have been left behind for the Taliban. All military equipment would hve been taken or destroyed.
It's not a timing thing, Reverend.
It's a competency thing.
Biden ignored the advice of his top military and now all of these people are suffering. Not because of Bush, or Obama, or Trump. 100% because of Biden. Biden.
They suffer because we have an old codger making decisions for the country when he shouldn't probably be making decisions on what to eat for lunch.
Josh Marshall
August 15, 2021 4:39 p.m.
Americans, or at least the commentating classes, are watching aghast as events unfold in Afghanistan. Some are second-guessing the wisdom of withdrawal – after all, how hard is it to maintain a few thousand soldiers there permanently? Others are taking the more comfortable position of saying yes, we had to leave but this just wasn’t the right way. I must be the only person in America who is having exactly the opposite reaction. The more I see the more I’m convinced this was the right decision – both what I see on the ground in Afghanistan and perhaps even more the reaction here in the United States.
It is crystal clear that the Afghan national army and really the Afghan state was an illusion. It could not survive first contact with a post-US military reality. As is so often the case in life – with bad investments, bad relationships – what we were doing there was staying to delay our reckoning with the consequences of the reality of the situation.
That’s a bad idea.
But as I’ve said in other posts over the last two days, we knew this part. What has been deeply revealing to me is the American response. And here I mean to say the most prominent media and political voices. It’s true this is quicker than I’d figured – not that I’d given the precise timing a lot of thought. And it seems to be quicker than the White House figured. But by a month? Three months? Does that matter? I don’t see why. If anything, given the outcome, quicker is better – since a protracted fall is necessarily a bloodier fall. But what the reaction has demonstrated to me is the sheer depth of denial. The inability to accept the reality of the situation. And thus the excuse making. Sen. Maggie Hassan’s press release below is a painfully good example of that. So is this article by in The Atlantic by George Packer. Virtually everything Richard Engel has been writing on Twitter for the last 24 hours. All so much the cant of empire. But more than this, far more important than this, simply unwise.
For better or worse I am bought into the post-World War II American project. This makes me much more conventional in my thinking about foreign policy and national security than a significant percentage of TPM Readers. I note this here because I don’t come to any of this with the assumption that it’s none of our business or that we’re a malign force in the world. I’m bought in. Indeed, my instinctive caution probably would have made me hesitate to make this unilateral move. You can always kick the can a bit further down the road.
The perpetual effort to stand up an Afghan government that could exist on its own did not work. That doesn’t mean the decision to topple the Taliban government in 2001 was a mistake. But that was twenty years ago. We are living in a dramatically different world today. We have been in a perpetual occupation in pursuit of no clear national security interest of the United States. At a certain point you have to realize that and act accordingly. I find convincing this suggestion that Biden refused a more phased or circumstances-based withdrawal precisely because he had seen up close how Barack Obama had been rolled by the Pentagon a decade ago.
WOMP-womp! 2014 tweet from Joe Biden debunks any and everyone trying to claim leaving Afghanistan was Trump’s idea (including Joe!)
Man oh man, some people on the Left are working overtime to pretend none of this Afghanistan mess is Biden’s fault. We realize they have spent many years blaming Trump for any and everything wrong in the WORLD, but pretending Biden was powerless or had to do this or was just following along is a stretch even for those stretchy mo-fos.
Planning to remove our troops from Afghanistan is one thing. Doing it in such a sloppy way that the Taliban has already taken over the country? That’s very different.
And even the Biden automatons have to know that.
We hate to break it to them (ok, not really), but Biden was talking about leaving Afghanistan when he was still our crappy Vice President.
Joe Biden - "We will leave in 2014" (tweet)
https://twitchy.com/samj-3930/2021/08/16/womp-womp-2014-tweet-from-joe-biden-debunks-any-and-everyone-trying-to-claim-leaving-afghanistan-was-trumps-idea-including-joe/
that's got to hurt
ROFLMFAO !!!
what happened Joe ???
maybe the "pastor" can help you
he's a regular liar
In 122 AD the Emperor Hadrian built what history knows as “Hadrian’s Wall,” which bisects Britain. You can still see it today. It marked the northernmost boundary of the Roman Empire. On this side Rome; on that side the tribes of Caledonia. Some twenty years later in 142 AD the Emperor Antoninus Pius, frustrated with the marauding and managing the tribes north of wall, constructed a new wall roughly one hundred miles further north into what is now Scotland. This was the Antonine Wall. Rome would garrison and pacify the region between the two walls. Twenty years later in 162 AD, the year after Antonius Pius died, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius abandoned the new territory and withdrew back to Hadrian’s Wall. Not everything works.
The intensity of the current handwringing over the fall of Kabul is an almost perfect measure of the denial about the failure of the current mission. Indeed, they are two sides of the same coin. What was keeping us there this long? THIS! Look at it around you today. The collective unwillingness to endure this reality is what has kept the US in the country for at least a decade. Processing ten years of denial in ten hours is rough.
We’ve been in Afghanistan for either ten or twenty years because no one in authority was ready to endure this moment and not look back. I don’t know if Biden will pay a domestic political price for this denouement. But watching it all unfold I’m even more certain he made the right decision than I was a day ago. Does anyone think we’ll look back a year from now and think, wow, I wish we were still garrisoning Afghanistan? I doubt it.
Someone had to make the decision that Bush, Obama and Trump did not and apparently could not. Biden did.
WpHamilton
He left in a rage because he was absolutely certain that Trump colluded with Putin and that it was just a matter of time before the evidence proved it. He was too humiliated by being so wrong that he just left.
He did come back to declare his happiness that Biden won the election. Apparently he thought that somehow made up for his being wrong about the Special Counsel. Then he disappeared.
WP was one of the original Soars posters. Was very conservative. Then apparently ended up in some sort of mental hospital for a while. Once he came back he was a full fledged over the top conspiracy theorist liberal.
Old codger rhetoric is the opposite of Russia Russia Russia.
Someone had to make the decision that Bush, Obama and Trump did not and apparently could not. Biden did.
Trump made the decision
Biden fucked it up
Period
Major Patriot
@MajorPatriot
52 seconds. Presidency in ruins.
This is award winning video:
https://gab.com/MajorPatriot/posts/106762037500601224
Resign
Powerline
SLOW JOE: LET THE PARODIES BEGIN
I had foresworn creating or posting any more “Hitler Learns About. . .” parodies, despite the extreme temptation to do so, but here’s one (not of my doing, just to be clear) using a different Downfall scene splicing together some of Slow Joe’s not-so-fine moments.
“He keeps saying something about how Trump was Hitler. . .
Instead of discussing politics using rhetoric like Sleepy Joe Sleepy Joe Biden and Sleepy Joe Biden
We’ve been in Afghanistan for either ten or twenty years because no one in authority was ready to endure this moment and not look back. I don’t know if Biden will pay a domestic political price for this denouement. But watching it all unfold I’m even more certain he made the right decision than I was a day ago. Does anyone think we’ll look back a year from now and think, wow, I wish we were still garrisoning Afghanistan? I doubt it.
This is the most embarrassing piece of hackery Josh Marshall has ever wrote.
There is going to be wholesale massacre in Kabul of women who work for the embassy, interpreters and other Afghans who work for the US.
And Josh Marchall will callously stand by and watch them die.. I assume Roger will cheer him on.
Just because I post something like that doesn't mean that I agree with him or her.
I suspect that the racist rodent bastard will post links complaining about too many Mooslimb people will be brought to the United States of white people..as he sees it.
I suspect that the racist rodent bastard will post links complaining about too many Mooslimb people will be brought to the United States of white people..as he sees it.
Wrong again, oh racist beater of black women.
I'd take several hundred plane loads of Afghan innocents any day over tens of thousands of Covid-positive MS-13 scumbags.
Slow Joe is sending thousands of innocent Afghans to their DEATHS.
Piece of shit.
Where is Joe?
Late
He will speak in a few minutes...
BY BRETT SAMUELS131TWEET SHARE MORE
The finger pointing over the fall of Afghanistan between President Biden and former President Trump is in full swing amid the chaotic scramble to get U.S. personnel and allies out of the country before a full Taliban takeover.
Biden, who rarely mentions his predecessor, made a point of doing so in a weekend statement digging in on the U.S. withdrawal. Biden reminded Americans that the U.S. pullout was originally negotiated by the Trump administration and highlighted the former president's plans to invite Taliban leaders to Camp David around the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
ADVERTISING
Trump, who just months ago suggested Biden was not getting out of Afghanistan fast enough, has led the charge among Republicans to hammer the Biden administration for its handling of the withdrawal. Trump went as far as calling on the president to resign in a Sunday statement.
The back-and-forth overshadows what experts and former government officials say is a messy situation that both leaders had a hand in creating.
“President Trump did the Biden administration no favors by making it very clear that he was going to remove U.S. troops and beginning a negotiation process which was driven by that imperative. He really let the Taliban set the tone and the direction of the talks,” said a former State Department official who served in the Trump administration and previous
Biden has long been a skeptic of the continued U.S. presence in Afghanistan, and he advocated during his time as vice president for a smaller footprint there. While Biden spent his first weeks in office unraveling his predecessor’s agenda with ruthless efficiency, he announced in April that he would follow through with plans first announced by Trump to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan.
But as the withdrawal nears its conclusion, the situation has gone awry. The Taliban have swept through major cities and took control faster than Biden administration officials predicted, and the Afghan forces trained and equipped by American troops have failed to provide much resistance.
The U.S. has scrambled to get its own diplomatic personnel out of the capital city of Kabul, as well as briskly process and evacuate thousands of Afghan civilians who aided the Americans over the last 20 years. Many of those allies now fear for their safety under Taliban rule.
The Trump administration brokered a deal with the Taliban in 2020 that laid out a plan for the U.S. to fully withdraw from Afghanistan by May 2021 if the group upheld certain commitments, such as denying safe haven to al Qaeda.
Blogger KansasDemocrat said...
Where is Joe?
Late
Of course. He had to wait for Cum-Allah. She was probably servicing a staffer.
Lol, yep
“The difference between then and now is leadership,” former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, former Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and former national security adviser to the vice president Keith Kellogg said in a statement, declaring “the Biden Administration alone owns this failure.”
Biden officials have pointed to public polling showing support for the end of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan to justify the decision to pull out, and they have argued the rapid collapse of the Afghan government illustrates the futility of remaining there.
But as criticism ratchets up, the White House has harkened back to Trump-era decisions that they believe set the stage for this month’s breakdown. Setting a deadline of May 1 allowed the Taliban to wait out the U.S., they argued, and Trump’s Camp David invite to the Taliban granted the group legitimacy.
With Republicans and national security hawks second guessing the entire operation, Biden dug in on his decision on Saturday while pointing the finger in part at Trump.
“When I came to office, I inherited a deal cut by my predecessor—which he invited the Taliban to discuss at Camp David on the eve of 9/11 of 2019—that left the Taliban in the strongest position militarily since 2001 and imposed a May 1, 2021 deadline on US forces,” Biden said in a statement. “Shortly before he left office, he also drew US forces down to a bare minimum of 2,500. Therefore, when I became President, I faced a choice—follow through on the deal, with a brief extension to get our forces and our allies’ forces out safely, or ramp up our presence and send more American troops to fight once again in another country’s civil conflict.
“I was the fourth President to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan—two Republicans, two Democrats. I would not, and will not, pass this war onto a fifth,” Biden said in the statement.
But experts expressed skepticism over the idea that Biden was really boxed in by Trump. They argued he could have pushed the withdrawal date back to ensure the Taliban upheld its commitments or maintained a smaller force in the region to oversee the safe withdrawal of personnel.
Live Feed Alky?
Biden is lying through his fucking teeth about the deal Trump had struck with the Taliban.
What a despicable piece of shit.
Back in July, state department spokes "man" Ned Price tried to claim that the pull-out from Afghanistan was Trump's policy, not Biden's -- but that Biden couldn't overturn it.
So Biden was going ahead with it, but if it didn't work, well it was the Bad Orange Man's fault.
Matt Lee -- one of the few actual reporters in the business -- called bullshit and pointed out that Biden had reversed many of Trump's foreign policy decisions, from the Mexico City abortion ban to the ending of the policy that any illegal immigrant claiming asylum must do so at the first safe country they arrive at after leaving their homeland, rather than going all the way to the US.
If Biden can reverse all those policies, then, he could reverse Trump's decision to get out of Afghanistan.
But he didn't.
Making this Biden's choice. His decision, for which he is accountable.
Not something he can say "The other guy did it."
But, after vowing heroically to Restore Our Norms by having a president who takes responsibility for his actions, Biden cleared his head with a Medicinal Ice Cream Cone and decided, nah, it's Trump's fault after all:
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/395206.php
And the cowardly piece of shit flees without taking a single question.
The Buck Stops With Me
LOL. Yeah alky. That's why he FLED.
I hope the Taliban makes a public display of capturing all of the LGBTQWERTYXYZ flags and burning the fucking things.
LOL.
rrbAugust 16, 2021 at 3:22 PM
And the cowardly piece of shit flees without taking a single question"
How weak
President Biden today said he stands by his decision to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan, characterizing the decision as a choice between pulling out, or going back to fighting the Taliban in the middle of the fighting season.
"I stand squarely behind my decision," Biden said in remarks from the White House. "After 20 years, I've learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw US forces. That's why we're still there."
Biden went on to say that he had weighed the risks carefully before making the decision, but acknowledged that the situation on the ground had devolved more quickly than he anticipated.
"We were clear-eyed about the risks," he said. "We planned for every contingency. But, I always promised the American people that I will be straight with you. The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated."
The President went on to outline what he believes were the events that led to the Taliban's swift takeover in the country.
"So what's happened? Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, some without trying to fight. If anything, the developments of the past week reinforced that ending US military involvement in Afghanistan, now, was the right decision," Biden said. "American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves."
President Biden said that his national security team is closely monitoring the unfolding situation in Afghanistan and that the Taliban takeover there had happened faster than expected.
Mr. Biden said in televised remarks Monday that the purpose for the war had been accomplished and it was time to leave.
"Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation-building," Mr. Biden said.
He also said: "The truth is this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated."
Mr. Biden returned to the White House earlier Monday from Camp David. He issued a statement Saturday as the situation in Afghanistan was rapidly unfolding. His administration, in defending his decision to withdraw troops, has pointed to a February 2020 agreement former President Donald Trump made with the Taliban to wind down the U.S. presence.
Since Saturday, the news has been filled with scenes of chaos in Kabul, where U.S. troops are working to evacuate Americans and some refugees. Critics have accused the Biden administration of not taking enough steps to protect the Afghan people, especially those who may now be targeted by the Taliban.
Afghan President Fled with Helicopter Full of Cash
August 16, 2021 at 3:25 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard
“Russia’s embassy in Kabul
said on Monday that Afghan President Ashraf Ghani had fled the country with four cars and a helicopter full of cash and had to leave some money behind as it would not all fit in,” Reuters reports.
______
Reminds me of other dictators who fled with so much gold on board their plan could not take off.
China Ready for ‘Friendly Relations’ with Taliban
August 16, 2021 at 3:29 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard
China is ready
to deepen “friendly and cooperative” relations with Afghanistan, a government spokeswoman said Monday, after the Taliban seized control of the country, AFP reports.
Merkel Says U.S. Not Alone In Misjudging Afghans
August 16, 2021 at 3:38 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard
German Chancellor Angela Merkel
acknowledged that she and other global leaders had “misjudged” the Afghan government’s ability to withstand attacks from the Taliban, DW News reports.
Said Merkel:
“This is an extremely bitter development. Bitter, dramatic and terrifying.”
She added: “It is a terrible development for the millions of Afghans who want a more liberal society.”
Biden Addresses the Nation on Afghanistan
August 16, 2021 at 3:45 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard
President Biden
addressed the nation on the U.S. pullout of Afghanistan and said he “stands squarely” behind his decision to pull out U.S. troops.
Said Biden:
“Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to be nation-building. Our mission was preventing a terrorist attack on the United States.”
He added:
“The truth is that this did unfold more quickly than we anticipated. So what happened? Afghan political leaders gave up and fled the country.”
Biden also said that after 20 years of war, he learned there was never a good time to withdraw forces.
What truly is sad is how many lives and gold we spent for a group of rag heads who did not give a shit for their country.....only thing they wanted was power to dominate their people.....just like trump!!!! At least Joe manned up, something donnie never did, and FINALLY STOPPED THE BLEEDING and pulled our.....just like the goat fuckers father should have done years ago!!!!!!
The armed forces are now a vehicle for the advancement of an agenda of social justice.
We see that the military, which is subject to top-down imposition of new social norms, is now the proving grounds of cultural overhaul. Troops must comply with these advances as a matter of discipline. And once these norms are instituted, the argument is then made that the rest of society just needs to catch up to the example set forth by our most-respected organization, albeit involuntarily. Our ruling class has turned our military into a coercive gateway to enact broader cultural change as it attempts to force it into our lives; and now they’ve corrupted it with their racial agenda, as well.
https://americanmind.org/salvo/hollowed-out/
WASHINGTON (AP) - Striking a defiant tone, President Joe Biden said Monday that he stands "squarely behind" his decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan and that the Afghan government's collapse was quicker than anticipated.
Biden said he was faced with a choice between sticking to a previously negotiated agreement to withdraw U.S. troops this year or sending thousands more service members back into Afghanistan for a "third decade" of war.
Biden said he will not repeat mistakes of the past and did not regret his decision to proceed with the withdrawal.
"I stand squarely behind my decision," Biden said in a televised address to the nation from the White House East Room. "After 20 years, I've learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces."
Biden said he'd rather take the criticism over the fallout in Afghanistan than leave the decision to another president. He said the decision to leave Afghanistan is "the right one for America."
Louisiana Health Care System Near ‘Major Failure’
August 16, 2021 at 4:24 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard
“Grappling with
an unprecedented flood of COVID-19 patients, Louisiana’s hospitals are struggling to provide the public with the most basic levels of care — and are quickly approaching catastrophe,” the Baton Rouge Advocate reports.
Said Gov. John Bel Edwards (D): “We are rapidly getting to the point where we could have a major failure of our health care delivery system. There’s some people out there whose care is being delayed to the point where, for them, it’s already failed.”
Striking a cowardly, pathetic tone, President Joe Biden fled without taking a single question.
And if we go the way of the 25th amendment, we get an incompetent $5 whore.
Whee!
Said Biden:
“Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to be nation-building. Our mission was preventing a terrorist attack on the United States.”
Yes, captain Obvious that still doesn't explain his unceremonious bug out.
He added:
“The truth is that this did unfold more quickly than we anticipated. So what happened? Afghan political leaders gave up and fled the country.”
Biden also said that after 20 years of war, he learned there was never a good time to withdraw forces.
Yes, and he blame Trump for "boxing him in". Biden is blaming everybody but himself.
Blogger JamesNewLeaf said...
Louisiana Health Care System Near ‘Major Failure’
August 16, 2021 at 4:24 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard
“Grappling with
What does this have to with Biden's debacle in Afghanistan.
His most memorable statement.
“How many more generations of America's daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghanistan's civil war when Afghan troops will not? How many more lives, American lives, is it worth, how many endless rows of headstones at Arlington National Cemetery?
I'm clear in my answer. I will not repeat the mistakes we've made in the past. The mistake of staying and fighting indefinitely in a conflict that is not in the national interest of the United States.”
— President Biden
It was a very memorable moment in history.
He accepts blame for not knowing how quickly this happened
What does this have to with Biden's debacle in Afghanistan.
And what does your bitching about James post serve to fix either problem!!!! The debacle in that shit hole started with busches fuck up and finally Biden has brought it to a close!!!!!!!!!! Saving american lives and gold!!!!!!!!
Blogger Roger Amick said...
He accepts blame for not knowing how quickly this happened
And that's a blatant LIE. He had the intel on July 8th when he lied to us then.
He chose to lie again today.
While our food costs are on the rise...
USDA to permanently boost food stamp benefits by 25 percent
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/usda-permanently-boost-food-stamp-benefits-25-percent-79472687
Fucking parasites.
AFP News Agency
@AFP
·
10h
#UPDATE China is ready to deepen "friendly and cooperative" relations with #Afghanistan, a government spokeswoman (pic, R) said Monday, after the Taliban seized control of the country
http://u.afp.com/UKg7
https://twitter.com/AFP/status/1427209328105250817
Well good for China.....maybe they can get something good out of that shit hole country!!!!!!
Fucking parasites.
But they are our parasites rat...not like the rag heads of asia the R's are now wanting to support!!!!!
"I stand squarely behind my decision. After 20 years, I've learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw US forces. That's why we're still there, we were clear-eyed about the risks, we planned for every contingency. But I always promised the American people I would be straight with you," Biden said. "The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated."
The following is a transcript of President Biden’s comments
It is a very memorable moment in time.
Good afternoon.
I want to speak today to the unfolding situation in Afghanistan, the developments that have taken place in the last week and the steps we’re taking to address the rapidly evolving events.
My national security team and I have been closely monitoring the situation on the ground in Afghanistan and moving quickly to execute the plans we had put in place to respond to every contingency, including the rapid collapse we’re seeing now.
I’ll speak more in a moment about the specific steps we’re taking. But I want to remind everyone how we got here and what America’s interests are in Afghanistan.
We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago with clear goals: get those who attacked us on Sept. 11, 2001, and make sure Al Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again. We did that. We severely degraded Al Qaeda and Afghanistan. We never gave up the hunt for Osama bin Laden and we got him.
That was a decade ago. Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation-building. It was never supposed to be creating a unified, centralized democracy. Our only vital national interest in Afghanistan remains today what it has always been: preventing a terrorist attack on American homeland.
I’ve argued for many years that our mission should be narrowly focused on counterterrorism, not counterinsurgency or nation-building. That’s why I opposed the surge when it was proposed in 2009 when I was vice president. And that’s why as president I’m adamant we focus on the threats we face today, in 2021, not yesterday’s threats.
Today a terrorist threat has metastasized well beyond Afghanistan. Al Shabab in Somalia, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Al Nusra in Syria, ISIS attempting to create a caliphate in Syria and Iraq and establishing affiliates in multiple countries in Africa and Asia. These threats warrant our attention and our resources. We conduct effective counterterrorism missions against terrorist groups in multiple countries where we don’t have permanent military presence. If necessary, we’ll do the same in Afghanistan. We’ve developed counterterrorism over-the-horizon capability that will allow us to keep our eyes firmly fixed on the direct threats to the United States in the region, and act quickly and decisively if needed.
When I came into office, I inherited a deal that President Trump negotiated with the Taliban. Under his agreement, U.S. forces would be out of Afghanistan by May 1, 2021, just a little over three months after I took office. U.S. forces had already drawn down during the Trump administration from roughly 15,500 American forces to 2,500 troops in country. And the Taliban was at its strongest militarily since 2001.
The choice I had to make as your president was either to follow through on that agreement or be prepared to go back to fighting the Taliban in the middle of the spring fighting season. There would have been no cease-fire after May 1. There was no agreement protecting our forces after May 1. There was no status quo of stability without American casualties after May 1. There was only a cold reality of either following through on the agreement to withdraw our forces or escalating the conflict and sending thousands more American troops back into combat in Afghanistan, and lurching into the third decade of conflict.
I stand squarely behind my decision. After 20 years, I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces. That’s why we’re still there. We were cleareyed about the risks. We planned for every contingency. But I always promised the American people that I will be straight with you.
AMERICA’S SUICIDE ATTEMPT—THE SEQUEL
Taxpayers should be furious not just about the profligate waste and extravagance of such an establishment, but at the bottomless idiocy of a class of credentialled people who think that the answer to every foreign problem is to spend absurd amounts of money, hire endless case officers and private contractors/consultants, outreach coordinators to tweet out rainbow flag celebrations, issue endless white papers analyzing the situation that bear little or no relation to reality, and an apparatus that has proven unable to process visas for the Afghans who worked for us, let alone have a plan for evacuating Americans. Despite Biden’s pathetic defense of the outcome, he ought to be furious with the whole upper echelon of our military-diplomatic complex. There ought to be mass firings. Of course, we all know that no one will be fired, and no senior person in this apparatus of disaster will have the honor to resign.
Finally there is the incompetence of the withdrawal itself. It is one thing to decide to end our presence in Afghanistan, and take your chances that the Taliban can be deterred or contained some other way (does anyone think our military-diplomatic complex has a serious plan to do this?). It is another thing to make the announcement that set the Taliban’s timeline in motion. So vagueness and misdirection were called for, but no one seemed to have the guile for it.
When the British decided to end the Gallipoli misadventure in early 1916, it made no public announcement that it was planning to end the offensive and withdraw, because they knew doing so would encourage the Turks to attack the retreating British and ANZAC forces and turn the retreat into a slaughter. So the withdrawal was done in a stealthy way that effectively disguised that the Allied forces were leaving the scene. The ingenious British went as far as to improvise rifles that fired from the abandoned trenches automatically, with makeshift firing mechanisms that pulled rifle triggers when water ran out a hole in a bucket, for example. We should have been using that kind of legerdemain in Afghanistan. At the very least, we should be mined and booby-trapped equipment we were abandoning.
The only people more feckless than our military-diplomatic elite are the media, led, naturally, by CNN. One of CNN’s reporters actually said, “They’re chanting ‘Death to America’ but seem friendly at the same time. It’s just bizarre.” I suspect a university education is behind this level of cluelessness.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/08/americas-suicide-attempt-the-sequel.php
Biden LIED directly to all of us, and the alcoholic racist wife beater of black women sits there gobbling down huge bowls of Biden's SHIT.
The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated. So what’s happened? Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight. If anything, the developments of the past week reinforced that ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision.
American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves. We spent over a trillion dollars. We trained and equipped an Afghan military force of some 300,000 strong. Incredibly well equipped. A force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies. We gave them every tool they could need. We paid their salaries, provided for the maintenance of their air force, something the Taliban doesn’t have. Taliban does not have an air force. We provided close air support. We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future.
There are some very brave and capable Afghan special forces units and soldiers. But if Afghanistan is unable to mount any real resistance to the Taliban now, there is no chance that one year — one more year, five more years or 20 more years — that U.S. military boots on the ground would have made any difference.
Here’s what I believe to my core: It is wrong to order American troops to step up when Afghanistan’s own armed forces would not. The political leaders of Afghanistan were unable to come together for the good of their people, unable to negotiate for the future of their country when the chips were down. They would never have done so while U.S. troops remained in Afghanistan bearing the brunt of the fighting for them. And our true strategic competitors, China and Russia, would love nothing more than the United States to continue to funnel billions of dollars in resources and attention into stabilizing Afghanistan indefinitely.
When I hosted President Ghani and Chairman Abdullah at the White House in June, and again when I spoke by phone to Ghani in July, we had very frank conversations.
So I’m left again to ask of those who argue that we should stay: How many more generations of America’s daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghanistan’s civil war when Afghan troops will not? How many more lives, American lives, is it worth, how many endless rows of headstones at Arlington National Cemetery? I’m clear on my answer: I will not repeat the mistakes we’ve made in the past. The mistake of staying and fighting indefinitely in a conflict that is not in the national interest of the United States, of doubling down on a civil war in a foreign country, of attempting to remake a country through the endless military deployments of U.S. forces. Those are the mistakes we cannot continue to repeat because we have significant vital interest in the world that we cannot afford to ignore.
I also want to acknowledge how painful this is to so many of us. The scenes that we’re seeing in Afghanistan, they’re gut-wrenching, particularly for our veterans, our diplomats, humanitarian workers — for anyone who has spent time on the ground working to support the Afghan people. For those who have lost loved ones
I’ve worked on these issues as long as anyone. I’ve been throughout Afghanistan during this war, while the war was going on, from Kabul to Kandahar, to the Kunar Valley. I’ve traveled there on four different occasions. I’ve met with the people. I’ve spoken with the leaders. I spent time with our troops, and I came to understand firsthand what was and was not possible in Afghanistan. So now we’re focused on what is possible.
We will continue to support the Afghan people. We will lead with our diplomacy, our international influence and our humanitarian aid. We’ll continue to push for regional diplomacy and engagement to prevent violence and instability. We’ll continue to speak out for the basic rights of the Afghan people, of women and girls, just as we speak out all over the world.
I’ve been clear, the human rights must be the center of our foreign policy, not the periphery. But the way to do it is not through endless military deployments. It’s with our diplomacy, our economic tools and rallying the world to join us.
Let me lay out the current mission in Afghanistan: I was asked to authorize, and I did, 6,000 U.S. troops to deploy to Afghanistan for the purpose of assisting in the departure of U.S. and allied civilian personnel from Afghanistan, and to evacuate our Afghan allies and vulnerable Afghans to safety outside of Afghanistan. Our troops are working to secure the airfield and ensure continued operation on both the civilian and military flights. We’re taking over air traffic control. We have safely shut down our embassy and transferred our diplomats. Our diplomatic presence is now consolidated at the airport as well.
Over the coming days we intend to transport out thousands of American citizens who have been living and working in Afghanistan. We’ll also continue to support the safe departure of civilian personnel — the civilian personnel of our allies who are still serving in Afghanistan. Operation Allies Refuge, which I announced back in July, has already moved 2,000 Afghans who are eligible for special immigration visas and their families to the United States. In the coming days, the U.S. military will provide assistance to move more S.I.V.-eligible Afghans and their families out of Afghanistan.
We’re also expanding refugee access to cover other vulnerable Afghans who work for our embassy. U.S. nongovernmental organizations and Afghans who otherwise are a great risk in U.S. news agencies — I know there are concerns about why we did not begin evacuating Afghan civilians sooner. Part of the answer is some of the Afghans did not want to leave earlier, still hopeful for their country. And part of it because the Afghan government and its supporters discouraged us from organizing a mass exodus to avoid triggering, as they said, a crisis of confidence.
American troops are performing this mission as professionally and as effectively as they always do. But it is not without risks. As we carry out this departure, we have made it clear to the Taliban: If they attack our personnel or disrupt our operation, the U.S. presence will be swift, and the response will be swift and forceful. We will defend our people with devastating force if necessary. Our current military mission is short on time, limited in scope and focused in its objectives: Get our people and our allies as safely and quickly as possible. And once we have completed this mission, we will conclude our military withdrawal. We will end America’s longest war after 20 long years of bloodshed.
The buck stops with me. But let me list everyone else whose fault it is.
The events we’re seeing now are sadly proof that no amount of military force would ever deliver a stable, united, secure Afghanistan, as known in history as the graveyard of empires. What’s happening now could just as easily happen five years ago or 15 years in the future. We have to be honest, our mission in Afghanistan made many missteps over the past two decades.
I’m now the fourth American president to preside over war in Afghanistan. Two Democrats and two Republicans. I will not pass this responsibility on to a fifth president. I will not mislead the American people by claiming that just a little more time in Afghanistan will make all the difference. Nor will I shrink from my share of responsibility for where we are today and how we must move forward from here. I am president of the United States of America, and the buck stops with me.
I’m deeply saddened by the facts we now face. But I do not regret my decision to end America’s war-fighting in Afghanistan and maintain a laser focus on our counterterrorism mission, there and other parts of the world. Our mission to degrade the terrorist threat of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and kill Osama bin Laden was a success. Our decades-long effort to overcome centuries of history and permanently change and remake Afghanistan was not, and I wrote and believed it never could be.
I cannot and will not ask our troops to fight on endlessly in another country’s civil war, taking casualties, suffering life-shattering injuries, leaving families broken by grief and loss. This is not in our national security interest. It is not what the American people want. It is not what our troops who have sacrificed so much over the past two decades deserve. I made a commitment to the American people when I ran for president that I would bring America’s military involvement in Afghanistan to an end. While it’s been hard and messy and, yes, far from perfect, I’ve honored that commitment.
More importantly, I made a commitment to the brave men and women who serve this nation that I wasn’t going to ask them to continue to risk their lives in a military action that should’ve ended long ago. Our leader did that in Vietnam when I got here as a young man. I will not do it in Afghanistan.
I know my decision will be criticized. But I would rather take all that criticism than pass this decision on to another president of the United States, yet another one, a fifth one. Because it’s the right one, it’s the right decision for our people. The right one for our brave service members who risked their lives serving our nation. And it’s the right one for America.
Thank you. May God protect our troops, our diplomats and all brave Americans serving in harm’s way.
OPEC to Biden:
"Yeah... go fuck yourself."
OPEC+ sees no need to meet U.S. call for more supply, sources say
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/opec-sees-no-need-speed-up-oil-cuts-easing-despite-us-calls-sources-2021-08-16/?taid=611a960feb3353000173751a&utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+Trending+Content&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter
Ooh, the alky's getting serious now.
He's posting Biden's Lies in BOLD
LOL.
Go alky, go alky...
LOL.
"Pentagon press secretary John Kirby confirmed to Fox News on Sunday evening that the administration will not give priority evacuation to Americans in Afghanistan over Afghans applying for visas."
Really, that is odd.
Honesty is rare in politics but he is the most honest President I have ever seen before.
The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated. So what’s happened? Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight. If anything, the developments of the past week reinforced that ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision.
The fact that they collapsed in in a few days is proof of his decision was correct!
Blogger rrb said...
Ooh, the alky's getting serious now.
He's posting Biden's Lies in BOLD
LOL.
Go alky, go alky...
LOL.
As furiously copies and paste shit if anyone was interested in could look up
Pitiful
Divert
Dodge
Lie
That's the only one I agree with.
But if he allows thousands of Muslims rrb will go crazy with hate crimes
Gateway Pundit rrb talking points
Biden Refuses to Take Questions From Reporters After Blaming Trump For His Afghanistan Disaster – Will Return to Camp David This Afternoon! (VIDEO)
By Cristina Laila
Published August 16, 2021 at 3:47pm
693 Comments
Share
Gab
Joe Biden on Monday delivered a short speech on his Afghanistan disaster.
After mumbling through prepared remarks, blaming Trump and the Afghan security forces on his botched withdrawal, Biden fled the lectern without taking any questions from reporters.
But if he allows thousands of Muslims rrb will go crazy with hate crimes
Blogger rrb said...
I suspect that the racist rodent bastard will post links complaining about too many Mooslimb people will be brought to the United States of white people..as he sees it.
Wrong again, oh racist beater of black women.
I'd take several hundred plane loads of Afghan innocents any day over tens of thousands of Covid-positive MS-13 scumbags.
Slow Joe is sending thousands of innocent Afghans to their DEATHS.
Piece of shit.
August 16, 2021 at 2:56 PM Delete
How many times did Trump take no questions?
QUITE many.
List them for us pederast. Give us the accurate count.
Bonus Quote of the Day
August 16, 2021 at 5:36 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard
“The president
said that the buck stopped with him, but in fact, this speech was full of finger-pointing and blame, especially for the Afghans…
He did not really get into or accept any blame for the catastrophic exit that we have been watching on television in the last several days.”
— CNN anchor Jake Tapper, commenting on President Biden’s speech to the nation on Afghanistan.
Well, if blame is not to be put on the Afghans, after SO much aid and support from us in terms of equipment and the many lives we lost,
ON WHOM SHOULD IT BE PLACED?
Joe Biden
@JoeBiden
United States government official
It's hard to believe this has to be said, but unlike this president, I’ll do my job and take responsibility. I won’t blame others. And I’ll never forget that the job isn’t about me — it’s about you.
3:00 PM · Jun 4, 2020
https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1268663821998206978
Any questions ?
He got out of there a lot faster and with better planning than Afghanistan.
but he was protecting himself
back to Mario Kart
I didn't need Jim Hoft to tell me Biden fled alky. I watched it with my own eyes.
My president is a liar and a coward.
And another US embassy gets surrendered on the eve of 9/11.
This is becoming a thing.
thebradfordfile
https://twitter.com/thebradfordfile/status/1427365378469072902
The President of the United States is afraid to take questions from the press during an international crisis he created.
Joe has yet to take questions from all the press until they ran out.
Trump did this regularly
While I can reassure myself that in his racist demagoguery Trump is like George Wallace, and in his prevaricating he's like Joe McCarthy, and that the GOP's exploitation of race runs like a strong thread through the history of the past half century (since the passage of the Voting Rights Act), and that on numerous occasions Americans have demonized outsiders from the Irish in the 1840s to Chinese in the 1880s to Japanese-Americans in the 1940s, nothing prepared me for the embrace and continuing adoration of Donald Trump by a major political party.
That still stumps me. So, for that matter, does the ongoing resistance to the Covid-19 vaccines.
Some historians, such as Heather Cox Richardson in How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America, see strong parallels between the forces of oligarchy in the 19th century and those today in the 21st, noting the parallels between the ideology of southern slaveholders, western silver mine owners and Trumpie Republicans. These parallels are striking, no doubt. In the old South and the Wild West oligarchs celebrated rule by the rich. Who does that sound like? But it seems too simple to me to draw a straight line through American history from oligarchs in the past to those of the present. While I highly respect Richardson's work and am in awe of her research and broad knowledge I'm more impressed by the differences between then and now than the similarities. Something has changed.
Still, history is not irrelevant. It is helpful to know that our history is replete with instances of racism, xenophobia, and other signs of moral depravity. We'd really feel lost if we weren't aware of Jim Crow, Juan Crow, and McCarthyism. (Which is why it's vital that school children are exposed to the truth about American history, at least in the higher grades.) And while white people by and large haven't faced the assaults on democracy we are seeing now and can anticipate in the future, black Americans have, and familiarizing ourselves with their experience can teach us lessons about resistance and endurance. What history has taught white Americans is that the unfolding of history is the unfolding of human freedom, from the broadening of the suffrage to males without property to female suffrage and gay marriage. What black Americans have learned is that rights can be taken away. That is the lesson they learned when whites put an end to Reconstruction.
To those who think a coup couldn't happen here in America there's the unpleasant fact that we've already had one. In 1898 white Redeemers in Wilmington, North Carolina violently staged a coup against a coalition of blacks and white Populists who had managed to win an election to take control of city government. A knowledge of history is therefore not nothing.
But the present challenge requires us to look with fresh eyes on our country. As Lincoln said, writing in a different time but in one which resonates today, "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."
CNN is going easy on him
Election Wizard
https://twitter.com/ElectionWiz/status/1427335355787878407
(CNN) -- "The debacle of the US defeat and chaotic retreat in Afghanistan is a political disaster for Joe Biden, whose failure to orchestrate an urgent and orderly exit will further rock a presidency plagued by crises and stain his legacy."
they sure went from no crises to one plagued by crises fast
https://www.rawstory.com/nothing-i-learned-as-a-historian-over-45-years-prepared-me-for-this-moment/
Show your plagiarism alky
But, I always promised the American people that I will be straight with you. The truth is..."
Then he lied through his teeth and ran off without taking a single question. At what point does the media take their job seriously and call this crap out.
This was not Presidential in the least.
Not one fucking question?
Why? Because they know he cannot answer them?
This blog post was written by Rick Shenkman, the founder of George Washington University's History News Network, and the author of Political Animals: How Our Stone-Age Brain Gets in the Way of Smart Politics (Basic Books).
I spent the last 45 years studying the history of this country. But after the last 4 years I can truly say I didn't understand it, cynical though I often was about the ugly disfiguring patches that no Band-Aid could hide.
McCarthyism – sure. Racism – of course. Xenophobia – duh. Misogyny – hell yes. America had it all.
But a mass cult built around an old man known for lying and grifting who bronzes his face each day? Didn't see that happening. Nor did I anticipate that tens of millions would refuse a free vaccine that could save others' lives – and their own.
And cynical as I was I never thought that the politicians these millions elected would be so cowed by their chosen leader that almost every one of them would go along with his wild schemes and lies.
It's said that the past is a foreign country. But with each passing day I can't escape the feeling that it's the present I don't understand. Knowing our history hasn't made it easier to come to terms with the present. If anything, it's been a hindrance.
It's gotten in the way of me seeing what is in front of my own eyes. It's made me want to excuse what's happening or to downplay it.
Realizing that this country is not what I thought it was is disillusioning. Which is strange. I spent my whole career trying to see things clearly as they are and not as I'd wish them to be.
Hey alky, why are you still so hung up on Trump ?
Oh never mind, you "don't" have TDS
ROFLMFAO !!!
...and stain his legacy."
Impossible. His legacy as a shitstain on the fabric of America was secured when he was still in the Senate.
https://www.rawstory.com/nothing-i-learned-as-a-historian-over-45-years-prepared-me-for-this-moment/
JAMES who is not a pederast, as rat well knows, SAID:
~~~How many times did Trump take no questions?
QUITE many.
RAT (RRB) SAID:
~~~List them for us pederast. Give us the accurate count.
JAMES SAID:
~~~`Too many to list, rat bastard,
Just google, as I did, "Trump refused to answer questions"
and you will get
Videos of Trump refused to answer questions
and
More videos of Trump refused to answer questions
and
Images of Trump refused to answer questions
and
More images of Trump refused to answer questions
and numerous, numerous links to articles depicting Trump refusing to answer questions.
~~~You are WELcome!
Blogger JamesNewLeaf said...
How many times did Trump take no questions?
QUITE many.
August 16, 2021 at 4:40 PM
Blogger rrb said...
List them for us pederast. Give us the accurate count.
Oh look, when pedo is cornered he runs away, just like yesterday
Huh.
All the claims that Trump is/was a racist.
Yet an actual example is NEVER offered.
Further cementing my claim that every narrative promoted by the left is a FALSE narrative.
I expected from both sides Scott said
Then he lied through his teeth and ran off without taking a single question. At what point does the media take their job seriously and call this crap out.
This was not Presidential in the least.
Not one fucking question?
Why? Because they know he cannot answer them?
Oh look, when pedo is cornered he runs away, just like yesterday
Yep.
Off to rape another male child I presume.
My response
Honesty is rare in politics but he is the most honest President I have ever seen before.
The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated. So what’s happened? Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight. If anything, the developments of the past week reinforced that ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision.
The fact that they collapsed in in a few days is proof of his decision was correct!
Louisiana Health Care System Near ‘Major Failure’
Well considering Louisiana is run by a Democrat within a country run by a Democrat.
Can the reverend explain why this is Donald Trump's fault?
Catturd ™
https://twitter.com/catturd2/status/1427284525449633794
While the Biden regime was busy hanging rainbow flags at embassies, looking for pretend white rage, releasing embarrassing TikTok videos, and having laughable, fake crying commissions on 1/6 misdemeanor trespassing - the Taliban was planning the military takeover of Afghanistan.
don't forget the cookies and ice cream
and spying on Tucker
we are fucked
Off to rape another male child I presume.
He has his priorities
LOL
Roger didn't agree with Biden earlier today...
But I am sure now that he accepted Biden's lies hook, line, and sinker. He is a full supporter of the Biden withdrawal.
It takes so little for Roger to stop thinking on his own.
tsar becket adams
https://mobile.twitter.com/BecketAdams/status/1427365994817892356
so, to recap biden'saddress:
1. afghanistan should've never have happened. you all fought for nothing.
2. the afghanis suck so hard
3. I stand by my decision
4. *ignores the disaster that's unfolding now*
5. no questions
Why didn't he just stay at Camp David and give it ?
no teleprompters ?
Izengabe
https://mobile.twitter.com/Izengabe_/status/1427368237885497352
Amazing how Joe Biden asked how many more Americans had to fight & die in Afghanistan when the US has not had a single causality in Afghanistan in over 1 1/2 years. Biden is the one who made Afghanistan more dangerous & put US lives at risk.
Biden has no clue what is going on
That's why he didn't take question
and gaslighted
a complete disaster and fraud "president"
Carter 2.0 embrace the suck
4:56 I did not run away. Just google and see. Not only did Trump FREQUENTLY refuse to answer questions, he often lambasted those who asked perfectly legitimate questions, especially if they were women, and he was notorious for going days and days and days without a press conference.
And his last press person was notorious for reading a provocative statement at the end of the session, slamming the book she read it from, and charging out of the room ignoring all the shouted questions.
Amazing how Joe Biden asked how many more Americans had to fight & die in Afghanistan when the US has not had a single causality in Afghanistan in over 1 1/2 years.
_____
And if they had taken on the Taliban (which the Afghan forces were supposed to do), there would have been no American deaths?
Get real.
Pedo yesterday you claimed Trump didn’t do anything in the ‘Stan yet once you ere shown he had a plan.
You ghosted
So fuck you, you gutless worm
*were
The pedantic pederast will probably claim that as a victory
Reverend...
Trump sat and answered Covid questions for as long as there was questions when they were doing the Task force briefings (when it was most important). Trump also gave press conferences where he had almost no written statement and everything was Q & A. I rarely recall Trump leaving a press conference without taking questions and he never did so when he was addressing something important (like the total collapse of a country because of his own stupidity).
Did you already forget about the press wars he had with the various reporters and how he would call out to them and have that old back and forth (some not too friendly).
Trump answered more questions at a single press conference than Biden has answered since he was President.
But nice to know, Reverend...
That instead of defending Biden.
You lie about Trump.
Is that what it has come to? That embarrassing to defend a President?
I don't even understand Cali's statement above beginning "Pedo yesterday..." (even with the were correction).
Maybe English would help?
Wonder why when you google "Trump refused to answer questions," you get SO many links.
And yes, those briefings on Covid where Trump ran his ignorant mouth concerning things he knew so little about that Fauci and Birx were freqently kept squirming--
Well, ast least they offered us some comic relief!
frequently
Blogger JamesNewLeaf said...
I don't even understand Cali's statement above beginning "Pedo yesterday..." (even with the were correction).
Let me be the first to remind you
Blogger Caliphate4vr said...
Blogger JamesNewLeaf said...
Trump had four years to improve on our policy in Afghanistan. He was for withdrwal of our troops.
What did he do in those four years to make withdrawal feasible?
I repeat: What?
Here ya go stupid
U.S.-Taliban sign landmark agreement in bid to end America's longest war
The U.S. has agreed to withdraw all forces from Afghanistan within 14 months and pull out of five bases in 135 days.
DOHA, Qatar — The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan started nearly 7,000 miles away on a sunny September morning when hijacked planes slammed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, as well as the Pentagon and a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
On Saturday, more than 18 years after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. made a bid to end America's longest war.
Hundreds of miles from the battlefields of Afghanistan in a glitzy banquet hall in a five-star hotel in Qatar, the United States and the Taliban signed a landmark agreement that paves the way for U.S. troops to begin withdrawing from the poor and war-torn central Asian country.
"The Taliban will not allow any of its members, other individuals or groups, including Al Qaeda, to use the soil of Afghanistan to threaten the security of the United States and its allies,” the agreement states.
Under the pact, the U.S. would reduce its forces to 8,600 from 13,000 in the next three to four months. Remaining U.S. forces would withdraw in 14 months, although a complete pullout would depend on the Taliban meeting commitments to prevent terrorism.
U.S. special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad and the Taliban’s chief negotiator and one of its founders, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, signed the agreement in Doha after more than a year of on-off formal talks.
Some in the room broke out in whoops, cheers and shouts of "God is Great" at the signing. The several dozen members of the Taliban exited the room after the ceremony beaming.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also attended the ceremony, but did not sign the "Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan," under which the Taliban pledged to enter into peace talks with Afghan government officials, representatives of the opposition, and members of civil society on March 10.
The U.S. committed to work with both sides in upcoming talks to secure the release of up to 5,000 prisoners held by the Afghan government and 1,000 prisoners held by the Taliban by the start of intra-Afghan peace talks.
Washington also agreed to lift U.S. sanctions on the Taliban later this year and to work with other members of the U.N. Security Council to remove sanctions against members of the Taliban within three months.
Speaking to reporters, Pompeo said the United States was "realistic" about the deal it signed, but was "seizing the best opportunity for peace in a generation."
He said that while he was still angry about the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the U.S. will not "squander" what its soldiers "have won through blood, sweat and tears.
August 15, 2021 at 3:18 PM Delete
Then you ghosted until this morning. It’s what always happens after you’ve had stupid ignorant ass shoved down your throat. You’re gutless and incapable of an original thought
Hey Reverend...
Here is a great search
https://www.bing.com/search?q=biden+answers+questions+from+press&PC=U316&FORM=CHROMN
“The president said that the buck stopped with him,
Just like I suggested yesterday.
Towards the end of his chaotic election campaign events, he quit taking questions because he would say things, that made him look crazy. It's one of the reasons why he lost the election
Remember when Reagan withdrew from Lebanon after several huge soldiers had been killed by Mooslimb terrorists.???
Blogger Roger Amick said...
Remember when Reagan withdrew from Lebanon after several huge soldiers had been killed by Mooslimb terrorists.???
Huge soldiers, huh
Just damn
Hundreds
OPEC and Russia just told President Joe Biden to fuck off on upping Oil Production.
No one respects Biden.
Trump answered more questions at a single press conference than Biden has answered since he was President.
But nice to know, Reverend...
That instead of defending Biden.
You lie about Trump.
Is that what it has come to? That embarrassing to defend a President?
the POS "pastor" lies are growing more and more blatant
There is no comparison to Trumps openness to questions compared to Bidens.
and no honest person would suggest otherwise.
and Trump trusted Fauci and Birx, and that was a great mistake on his part.
You should trust science but not political scientists. And Fauci in particular has misled us from day 1 (Covid no big deal, don't stop flights from China, 15 days to stop the spread, masks/no masks, no chance this was man made, spreads by surface contact, impossible to develop a vaccine in timely manner, needed 100's of thousands of ventilators etc. etc.) Trump owns most of those mistakes but they were made following Fauci's counsel.
Fauci is a disaster and should have no input into our future and needs to explain his past.
And China just Taiwan, America will abandon you.
Wheeeee!
It didn't take long for Chinese state media to find grist for propaganda in America's chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.
State-controlled media said the rapid U.S. pullout should serve as a warning to the people of Taiwan: They shouldn't rely on U.S. protection in their long-running dispute with China.
"After the fall of the Kabul regime, the Taiwan authorities must be trembling," Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of the state-controlled Global Times, said on Twitter.
Another state-owned newspaper compared the U.S. retreat to a 2019 movie called "A Dog's Way Home," which, perhaps not coincidentally, was airing Monday on Chinese state television.
And China's official news agency, Xinhua, called the U.S. "the world's largest exporter of unrest," adding that "its hegemonic policy of 'only me, rather than the world' has caused too many human tragedies
But you’re safe from bad Orange Man
Who's responsible for the chaos in Kabul? Joe Biden, of course. He's commander-in-chief and the buck stops with him.
Fine. But with that formality out of the way, who's really responsible? If we want to learn any lessons from this, we have to go beyond platitudes and dig a little deeper.
So then: to a first approximation, the answer is "nobody." Withdrawing from Afghanistan was always going to be a bloody, chaotic affair no matter what. That's why no one wanted to do it: It was pretty obvious how it would go down, and no one with any sense wants that as part of their presidential legacy. But the bloodshed was inevitable once the decision to leave was made.
Now dig a little deeper. Sure, withdrawal was always going to be messy, but why was it this messy? Recent reporting makes it clear that the answer is twofold. First, the military insisted on an inept training strategy that left the Afghans with a literally useless army the moment we withdrew support. Second, the Afghans themselves were far more corrupt and far more willing to accept Taliban rule than we thought.
How is it that we misunderstood these things after 20 years in country? That remains a bit of a mystery. We could use some more reporting on this.
But now dig even deeper. Even given all our mistakes, did the events of the past couple of days have to be so horrific? My answer might surprise you: they haven't been. I'm speaking relatively, of course, but the truth is that I expected worse. I wouldn't have been surprised to see something like Fallujah on steroids: bodies hanging from bridges, lines of "traitors" being shot, Taliban fighters surrounding American forces, and so forth. But so far, we haven't seen that. The Taliban takeover has been far smoother and less vicious than I expected.
I get that this is hard to accept after watching even a few minutes of CNN. And obviously things could change rapidly. But what we've seen in Kabul has been about the best outcome we could have reasonably expected. The chaos we're seeing is simply the nature of military withdrawals under pressure. For anyone who disagrees, I can only ask: What did you expect?
https://jabberwocking.com/our-withdrawal-from-afghanistan-is-not-the-disaster-the-media-is-making-it/
here's a good video, Scot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I34X2PQKAA8
https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2020/05/dont-ask-me-ask-china-trump-gets-angry-and-storms-off-after-reporter-asks-why-he-sees-testing-as-a-global-competition/
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=trump+refuses+to+answer&&view=detail&mid=0D8678D43791F5BE264F0D8678D43791F5BE264F&rvsmid=6BE6C6F001C37FF046D26BE6C6F001C37FF046D2&FORM=VDQVAP
Compared to Biden, Trump looks like an untrained monkey in these and many more videos.
Jack Posobiec
https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1427377546824458245
“Helping Afghanistan become self-sustaining is going to be a monumental task. It's going to take up to a decade, and more blood will be spilled and more treasure will be spent. But I think it's important”
- Joe Biden, 2008
Biden before he said we would be out by 2014
What did he say today ?
Hey "pastor" we all know Trump stormed off a few times. The press was brutal with him. But trying to compare him to Biden's press questioning is ridiculous
There is no comparison.
Biden almost always either takes no questions or has a pre-selected list.
Trump answered questions for hours. The press complained it was taking too long.
No one has ever said that about Biden
So stop being so dishonest. You only fool yourself.
Michael New
https://twitter.com/Michael_J_New/status/1427369084761657344
After the fall of Saigon, President Ford hosted a press conference.
To his credit, it took over 35 minutes and he took over 20 questions from the press.
Biden runs and hides
Joe Biden
@JoeBiden
United States government official
The presidency is about a lot more than tweeting from your golf cart. It requires taking on the ultimate responsibility for the biggest decisions in the world. Donald Trump simply wasn’t prepared for that. I promise you I will be.
4:55 PM · May 24, 2020
https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1264706495096262662
A huge lie
Stormed off QUITE a few times, answered far too belligerently SO many times, misread his teleprompter often, and out and out lied MULTITUDINOUS times.
And oh yes, his freqent rants went on FAR too long and were far more heat than light, far more obfuscatory than revelatory.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
American Greatness thinks it's all George Bush's fault!
How Bush Ruined Everything
For all his faults, Al Gore couldn't have been worse.
By Adam Mill
August 15, 2021
It’s impossible to forget those anxious December days when cherry-picked Florida counties continued to find handfuls of new Gore votes as recount after recount marched the 2000 election result towards a reversal of the apparent Bush victory a month earlier. Eventually the Supreme Court put a stop to the selective process which counted hanging chads in Democratic counties differently than in Republican counties.
When Bush won, he brought with him a cabal of staffers broadly known as “neoconservatives” who distinguished themselves from traditional Republicans by ignoring deficit spending and strongly supporting interventionist foreign policy with a heavy emphasis on protecting and advancing America’s petro-allies in the Middle East. Months after September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration diverted America’s response to terrorism by seeking a revenge war in Iraq.
American taxpayers poured trillions of dollars into the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The wars represented a new golden age for the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon, as Americans developed a neo-colonial relationship with the client states in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bush and his allies easily brushed aside the few complaints and warnings from traditional liberals about abuses of civil liberties and the prospect of a never-ending Vietnam-like war. I can still hear the sound of Vice President Dick Cheney chuckling dismissively on the Sunday morning talk shows as he scoffed at these fears. Sure, the wars would be expensive. But “deficits don’t matter” according to the then-vice president.
Oh, what a bitter harvest we have reaped.
History acquitted those chicken-little voices that warned of never-ending wars, ballooning deficits, and the dangers of bloated and politicized intelligence agencies. I admit it. I was wrong about Bush. He was a disaster.
LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO
Back when I hated the neocons and I was called a fucking joke.
Rich Republicans across the country followed Bush into the arms of the Democrats as leftists and corporate America formed their unholy alliance that continues to oppress us today. Thanks to Bush, no party now advocates for fiscal restraint or true free-market principles. Yet another part of Bush’s awful legacy is a culture of debt tolerance that has led us to a catastrophic greater-than-GDP public debt one normally associates with a Third-World country.
What did nearly two decades in Afghanistan and Iraq buy us? Thousands of American dead and trillions more in debt, and Afghanistan is swiftly returning to its pre-invasion configuration. Lots of government contractors and retired generals grew very rich pouring American treasure into the land-locked and barren land. The Bushes themselves have become fabulously wealthy, worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Meanwhile it will take many more years for America to recover from their endless wars and crippling debt. That’s why I’m retroactively endorsing Al Gore for the 2000 presidential election. For all of his faults, he couldn’t have been worse.
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About Adam Mill
Adam Mill is a pen name. He is an adjunct fellow of the Center for American Greatness and works in Kansas City, Missouri as an attorney specializing in labor and employment and public administration law. He graduated from the University of Kansas and has been admitted to practice in Kansas and Missouri. Mill has contributed to The Federalist, American Greatness, and The Daily Caller.
Joe Biden:
Good afternoon. I want to speak today to the unfolding situation in Afghanistan, the developments that have taken place in the last week and the steps we’re taking to address the rapidly evolving events. My National Security Team and I have been closely monitoring the situation on the ground in Afghanistan and moving quickly to execute the plans we had put in place to respond to every contingency, including the rapid collapse we’re seeing now.
I’ll speak more in a moment about the specific steps we’re taking, but I want to remind everyone how we got here and what America’s interests are in Afghanistan. We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago with clear goals, get those who attacked us on September 11th, 2001, and make sure al-Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again.
We did that. We severely degraded al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. We never gave up the hunt for Osama bin Laden and we got him. That was a decade ago. Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation building. It was never supposed to be creating a unified centralized democracy. Our only vital national interest in Afghanistan remains today what it has always been, preventing a terrorist attack on American homeland.
I’ve argued for many years that our mission should be narrowly focused on counter terrorism, not counterinsurgency or nation building. That’s why I opposed The Surge when it was proposed in 2009 when I was Vice-President, and that’s why, as President I’m adamant we focus on the threats we face today in 2021, not yesterday’s threats.
Today, the terrorist threat has metastasized well beyond Afghanistan. al-Shabab in Somalia, al-Qaeda in Arabian Peninsula, al Nusra in Syria, ISIS attempting to create a caliphate in Syria and Iraq and establishing affiliates in multiple countries in Africa and Asia. These threats warrant our attention and our resources.
We conduct effective counter-terrorism missions against terrorist groups in multiple countries where we don’t have permanent military presence. If necessary, we’ll do the same in Afghanistan. We’ve developed counter-terrorism Over The Horizon capability that will allow us to keep our eyes firmly fixed on the direct threats to the United States in the region, and act quickly and decisively if needed.
When I came into office, I inherited a deal that President Trump negotiated with the Taliban. Under his agreement, US forces would be out of Afghanistan by May 1, 2021, just a little over three months after I took office. US forces had already drawn down during the Trump administration from roughly 15,500 American forces to 2,500 troops in country. And the Taliban was at its strongest militarily since 2001. The choice I had to make, as your President, was either to follow through on that agreement or be prepared to go back to fighting the Taliban in the middle of the spring fighting season.
There would have been no ceasefire after May 1. There was no agreement protecting our forces after May 1. There was no status quo of stability without American casualties after May 1. There was only a cold reality of either following through on the agreement to withdraw our forces or escalating the conflict and sending thousands more American troops back into combat in Afghanistan, lurching into the third decade of conflict.
I stand squarely behind my decision. After 20 years, I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw US forces. That’s why we’re still there. We were clear-eyed about the risks, we planned for every contingency. But, I always promised the American people that I will be straight with you. The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated.
So what’s happened? Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometime without trying to fight. If anything, the developments of the past week reinforced that ending US military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision.
American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war, and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves. We spent over a trillion dollars. We trained and equipped an Afghan military force with some 300,000 strong, incredibly well-equipped. A force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies. We gave them every tool they could need. We paid their salaries, provided for the maintenance of their air force -- something that Taliban doesn’t have, Taliban does not have an air force. We provided close air support.
We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future. There’s some very brave and capable Afghan special forces units and soldiers. But if Afghanistan is unable to mount any real resistance of the Taliban now, there is no chance that one year, one more year, five more years or twenty more years of US military boots on the ground would have made any difference.
Here’s what I believe to my core, it is wrong to order American troops to step up when Afghanistan’s own armed forces would not. The political leaders of Afghanistan were unable to come together for the good of their people, unable to negotiate for the future of their country when the chips were down. They would never have done so while US troops remained in Afghanistan, bearing the brunt of the fighting for them.
And our true strategic competitors, China and Russia, would love nothing more than the United States to continue to funnel billions of dollars in resources and attention into stabilizing Afghanistan indefinitely.
When I hosted President Ghani and Chairman Abdullah at the White House in June, and again when I spoke by phone to Ghani in July, we had very frank conversations. We talked about how Afghanistan should prepare to fight their civil wars after the US military departed. To clean up the corruption in government so the government could function for the Afghan people. We talked extensive about the need for Afghan leaders to unite politically. They failed to do any event. I also urge them to engage in diplomacy, to seek a political settlement with the Taliban. This advice was flatly refused. Mr. Ghani insisted that the Afghan forces would fight, but obviously he was wrong.
Mike Pompeo
https://twitter.com/mikepompeo/status/1427417681368686599
Sending more than 5000 troops back in AFTER you withdrew a couple thousand of them is proof that you are disconnected from the reality on the ground and aren't serious about protecting Americans.
Biden and his "team" are clueless
So I’m left again to ask of those who argue that we should stay, how many more generations of America’s daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghanistan’s civil war when Afghan troops will not? How many more lives, American lives, is it worth? How many endless rows of headstones in Arlington National Cemetery?
I’m clear on my answer. I will not repeat the mistakes we’ve made in the past. The mistake of staying and fighting indefinitely in a conflict that is not in the national interest of the United States. Of doubling down on a civil war in a foreign country, of attempting to remake a country through the endless military deployments of US forces. Those are the mistakes we can not continue to repeat because we have significant vital interest in the world that we cannot afford to ignore.
I also want to acknowledge how painful this is to so many of us. The scenes we’re seeing in Afghanistan, they’re gut-wrenching.Particularly for our veterans, our diplomats, humanitarian workers, for anyone who has spent time on the ground working to support the Afghan people. For those who have lost loved ones in Afghanistan, and for Americans have fought and served in the country, served our country, in Afghanistan. This is deeply, deeply personal.
It is for me as well. I’ve worked in these issues as long as anyone, I’ve been throughout Afghanistan during this war, while the war was going on from Kabul to Kandahar to the Kunar Valley. I’ve traveled there on four different occasions. I met with the people, I’ve spoken to the leaders. I spent time with our troops and I came to understand firsthand what was and was not possible in Afghanistan.
So now we’re focused on what is possible. We will continue to support the Afghan people. We will lead with our diplomacy, our international influence and our humanitarian aid. We’ll continue to work for regional diplomacy and engagement to prevent violence and instability. We’ll continue to speak out for the basic rights of the Afghan people, of women and girls, just as we speak out all over the world.
I’ve been clear that human rights must be the center of our foreign policy, not the periphery. But the way to do it is not through endless military deployments. It’s with our diplomacy, our economic tools and rallying the world to join us.
Now let me lay out the current mission in Afghanistan. I was asked to authorize, and I did, 6,000 US troops to deploy to Afghanistan for the purpose of assisting in the departure of US and allied civilian personnel from Afghanistan, and to evacuate our Afghan allies and vulnerable Afghans to safety outside of Afghanistan.
Our troops are working to secure the airfield and ensure continued operation of both the civilian and military flights. We’re taking over our traffic control. We have safely shut down our embassy and transferred our diplomats. Our diplomatic presence is now consolidated at the airport as well. Over the coming days, we intend to transport out thousands of American citizens who have been living and working in Afghanistan. We’ll also continue to support the safe departure of civilian personnel, the civilian personnel of our allies, who are still serving Afghanistan.
Operation Allies Refuge, which I announced back in July, has already moved 2000 Afghans who are eligible for special immigration visas and their families to the United States. In the coming days, the US military will provide assistance to move more SIV eligible Afghans and their families out of Afghanistan.
We’re also expanding refugee access to cover other vulnerable Afghans who worked for our embassy. US non-governmental agencies or US non-governmental organizations, and Afghans who otherwise are at great risk, and US news agencies. I know there are concerns about why we did not begin evacuating Afghan civilians sooner. Part of the answer is some of the Afghans did not want to leave earlier, still hopeful for their country. And part of it because the Afghan government and its supporters discouraged us from organizing a mass exodus to avoid “triggering,” as they said, “a crisis of confidence.”
American troops are performing this mission as professionally and as effectively as they always do, but it is not without risks. As we carry out this departure, we have made it clear to the Taliban, if they attack our personnel or disrupt our operation, the US presence will be swift and the response will be swift and forceful. We will defend our people with devastating force if necessary.
Our current military mission will be short in time, limited in scope, and focused in its objectives. Get our people and our allies as safely, as quickly as possible. And once we have completed this mission, we will conclude our military withdrawal. We will end America’s longest war, after 20 long years of bloodshed.
The events we’re seeing now are sadly proof that no amount of military force would ever deliver a stable, united, secure Afghanistan as known in history as the graveyard of empires. What’s happening now could just as easily happened 5 years ago or 15 years in the future. We have to be honest, our mission in Afghanistan has taken many missteps, made many missteps over the past two decades. I’m now the fourth American President to preside over war in Afghanistan, two Democrats and two Republicans.
. I will not pass this responsibility on to a fifth president. I will not mislead the American people by claiming that just a little more time in Afghanistan will make all the difference. Nor will I shrink from my share of responsibility for where we are today and how we must move forward from here. I am President of the United States of America, and the buck stops with me.
I’m deeply saddened by the facts we now face, but I do not regret my decision to end America’s war fighting in Afghanistan, and maintain a laser focus on our counter terrorism mission there and other parts of the world. Our mission to degrade the terrorist threat of al Qaeda in Afghanistan and kill Osama bin Laden was a success. Our decades-long effort to overcome centuries of history and permanently change and remake Afghanistan was not, and I wrote and believed it never could be.
I cannot and will not ask our troops to fight on endlessly in another country’s civil war, taking casualties, suffering life shattering injuries, leaving families broken by grief and loss. This is not in our national security interest. It is not what the American people want. It is not what our troops, who have sacrificed so much over the past two decades, deserve.
I made a commitment to the American people when I ran for President that I’d bring America’s military involvement in Afghanistan to an end. And while it’s been hard and messy, and yes, far from perfect, I’ve honored that commitment. More importantly, I made a commitment to the brave men and women who serve this nation that I wasn’t going to ask them to continue to risk their lives in a military action that should have ended long ago.
Our leaders did that in Vietnam when I got here as a young man. I will not do it in Afghanistan. I know my decision will be criticized, but I would rather take all that criticism then pass this decision onto another President of the United States, yet another one, a fifth one. Because it’s the right one, it’s the right decision for our people. The right one for our brave service members who have risked their lives serving our nation. And it’s the right one for America. Thank you. May God protect our troops, our diplomats, and all brave Americans serving in harm’s way
That is how a statesman President addresses the nation in a difficult time.
Hey POS "pastor"
You forgot to post the transcript of Biden's questions and answers
but I guess your lying about Trump made up for that
ROFLMFAO at the lying POS of a "pastor" !!!
Pedo no one cares what this demented fuck said, but since you cant’t back your shit, you’re as always spam the blog and hope the ass kicking you took gets buried.
It’s the MO of a gutless coward
Dementia Joe owns this
LOL
The Recount
VIDEO of a COWARD:
https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1427366518342529029
Biden takes no questions after his press briefing on Afghanistan.
@PeterAlexander yells: “What do you think of the Afghans clinging to aircrafts?”
embarrassing
and you can still see his teleprompter in the background
He can still barely read though
The truth about the withdrawal from Afghanistan is hard for partisans to admit
John Stoehr, The Editorial Board
August 16, 2021
(Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)
This article was paid for by Raw Story subscribers. Not a subscriber? Try us and go ad-free for $1. Prefer to give a one-time tip? Click here.
The situation in Afghanistan deteriorated quickly over the weekend. The Taliban took control of its capital city last night. That co-op of regional warlords now has effective control of the country. The swift developments provide partisans here in the states plenty of reasons for being partisan. The Republicans are acting like the fall of Kabul is the same — politically, strategically, morally — as the fall of Saigon at the end of another forever war that had no point but cost us blood and treasure. Naturally, this puts the Democrats on the defensive. I'm no expert on military history. I'm no expert on international affairs. I do know, however, that partisanship often makes people say silly things.
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I think it took a degree of courage for Joe Biden to end "the forever war." Decisions like this don't come without cost in every sense of the word. The president surely knew what was going to happen, though he probably could not have known how or how quickly it would. Given that uncertainty, it took courage. But contrary to what some liberals are saying in Biden's defense, I don't think it took that much courage.
I think instead it was a sound political calculation, like everything else. No matter how much money we pour into it, Afghanistan is just not in the mood, and may never be in the mood, to behave like a democratic nation-state. There is no such thing as "the national interest" in that country. (Even calling it a "country" is overstating things). There is no such thing as a moral belief in the fundamental equality between and among members of a political community dedicated to that very same national interest. Not even in theory. And that's not something you can buy. That "the president of Afghanistan" fled the country should be of no surprise after you understand that he was president on paper.
It's not possible for Joe Biden to have been the only president to have recognized that reality. He is the first to act on it, though. It's as if he said to himself one day: "Well, this isn't getting any better." Two decades is a long time. Memories of Sept. 11, 2001, have faded. Domestic politics, including the public-private interests of the military-industrial complex, is pretty much what kept past presidents from making the decision BIden made. It's said he's long been critical of "the forever war." He saw an opportunity. He took it.
Calling veterans suckers and losers
It’s the MO of a gutless coward
Joe Concha
https://twitter.com/JoeConchaTV/status/1427371533018746887
The Taliban spokesperson has taken more questions than the White House press secretary, POTUS and the VP on this to this point.
transparency Biden style
Hey alky,
you posted:
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who are we supposed to report this to?
Is this a precursor to turning our neighbors in for your fuhrer and his state police ?
Oh, and why are you trying to defend a president who is lying and gaslighting ?
Videos of Trump are like a carnival and will be far on into the future.
Biden Demands Whoever The President Is Take Full Responsibility For This Mess
WASHINGTON, D.C.—In a forceful press conference today, Biden called for whoever the President is to "clean up this mess" in Afghanistan.
"Listen folks, this is ridiculous!" said President Biden. "Who's running this country anyway? I demand accountability! The President must be held responsible for this debacle!"
An aide attempted to whisper in his ear that he was the President, but Biden whirled around and punched the aide right in the nose in a flurry of righteous anger.
"How dare you sneak up on me while I'm holding the President to account!" said Biden.
The press conference was then abruptly interrupted by the evening call to prayer.
Whitney Robertson
VETERAN TEARS BIDEN A NEW ASSHOLE: VIDEO:
https://twitter.com/whitneyleerob/status/1427386966685913092
U.S. Army veteran Matt Zeller goes off on MSNBC about Biden’s remarks on Afghanistan:
Zeller: “I feel like I watched a different speech than the rest of you guys. I was appalled.”
A video EVERYONE should listen to
Puts Biden and his speech to shame
with facts
thebradfordfile
https://twitter.com/thebradfordfile/status/1427404997197713412
I'm not an 'expert' but I'm pretty sure if this was properly planned, there wouldn't be people falling from the skies onto runways.
part of Biden's "prepared for every contingency"
Election Wizard
https://twitter.com/ElectionWiz/status/1427415744770449411
NEW: Joe Biden has arrived back at Camp David and the White House has called a lid, according to the pool. An unknown number of Americans remain trapped in Kabul.
He doesn't care
probably pissed he had to go give his "speech"
James Woods
https://twitter.com/RealJamesWoods/status/1427397537317589017
Joe Biden is a coward. He’s afraid to answer questions from a press corps who have his picture on their bedroom walls.
probably pissed he had to go give his "speech"
More likely the demented, Incontinent old fuck pissed himself and didn’t know.
But he’s not bad Orange man
He actually followed up on an agreement between Trump and the Afghanistan government.
I’ve argued for many years that our mission should be narrowly focused on counterterrorism — not counterinsurgency or nation building. That’s why I opposed the surge when it was proposed in 2009 when I was Vice President.
And that’s why, as President, I am adamant that we focus on the threats we face today in 2021 — not yesterday’s threats.
Today, the terrorist threat has metastasized well beyond Afghanistan: al Shabaab in Somalia, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, al-Nusra in Syria, ISIS attempting to create a caliphate in Syria and Iraq and establishing affiliates in multiple countries in Africa and Asia. These threats warrant our attention and our resources.
We conduct effective counterterrorism missions against terrorist groups in multiple countries where we don’t have a permanent military presence.
If necessary, we will do the same in Afghanistan. We’ve developed counterterrorism over-the-horizon capability that will allow us to keep our eyes firmly fixed on any direct threats to the United States in the region and to act quickly and decisively if needed.
When I came into office, I inherited a deal that President Trump negotiated with the Taliban. Under his agreement, U.S. forces would be out of Afghanistan by May 1, 2021 — just a little over three months after I took office.
troops in country, and the Taliban was at its strongest militarily since 2001.
The choice I had to make, as your President, was either to follow through on that agreement or be prepared to go back to fighting the Taliban in the middle of the spring fighting season.
There would have been no ceasefire after May 1. There was no agreement protecting our forces after May 1. There was no status quo of stability without American casualties after May 1.
There was only the cold reality of either following through on the agreement to withdraw our forces or escalating the conflict and sending thousands more American troops back into combat in Afghanistan, lurching into the third decade of conflict.
Trump had already reduced troops dramatically
U.S. forces had already drawn down during the Trump administration from roughly 15,500 American forces to 2,500 troops in country.
The Biden administration is planning to announce that most Americans who have received the coronavirus vaccine will need booster shots to combat waning immunity and the highly transmissible delta variant that is sparking a surge in covid-19 cases, according to four people familiar with the decision.
The administration’s health and science experts are coalescing around the view that people will need the boosters eight months after being fully vaccinated, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a decision not yet public. The decision is likely to be announced as soon as this week.
The administration of the boosters would not occur until mid- or late September, after an application from Pfizer-BioNTech for the additional shots is cleared by the Food and Drug Administration, the individuals said.
The conclusion that boosters will be broadly needed was reached after intense discussions last weekend involving high-ranking officials who scrutinized the latest data from the United States and other countries on the effectiveness of the shots.
The statement is a striking change from public statements by senior officials in recent months who had said it was far too soon to conclude that Americans would need booster shots. In July, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FDA put out an unusual statement that said, “Americans who have been fully vaccinated do not need a booster shot at this time.” Officials have repeatedly said it wasn’t clear whether boosters would be needed.
But in recent days, the messaging has started to change. As data from other countries and in the United States showed waning immunity, health officials moderated their language, hinting booster shots would be likely. Last week, Anthony S. Fauci, the White House chief medical adviser, said it was “likely” everyone will need a coronavirus booster at some point.
The demonization of patriots reached its nadir in the Big Lie that the January 6th protests at the Capitol amounted to an “insurrection.” A legitimate protest against how the presidential elections were conducted was painted as seditious. Last week, the DHS issued a terror warning conflating Americans protesting COVID-19 restrictions to jihadists who might strike on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. A DHS bulletin warned, “anti-government, anti-authority violent extremists” may try to “exploit the emergence of COVID-19 variants by viewing the potential re-establishment of public health restrictions across the U.S. as a rationale to conduct attacks.”
The attacks on, and the maligning of, conservatives or those who advance narratives not favored by the Left have reached unimaginable proportions. They include constitutional violations such as wholesale censorship, vicious defamation, unjust imprisonment, unpunished assaults, and denial of rights to a fair and speedy trial. This perilous trajectory must be corrected. Otherwise, it will signal the end of our constitutional republic.
And yet, the Taliban wasn't running the country. Now Biden just sent 6000 troops back in while Taliban go door to door executing anyone who had worked with us.
Add this to the border disaster, high inflation, energy problems, and covid mismanagement. Biden already challenging carter for worst president ever.
And yet the ball less wonder has missed the last 35 years of history in that the afghan soldiers are about as brave as he is dropping their guns and running....just like trump did when he had his famous bone spurs fake letter bought by his old man....I'd imagine each of you slurpers would be as brave as those who ran when it counted!!!! Maybe ballz should go to the border and show those beaners where to go!!!!!! BWAAAAAAPAAAAAA!!!
In spite of our infectious disease expert Lil Schitty saying otherwise....it sure appears that the data says unvaxed americans not only jeopardize themselves.....but EVERYONE around them....The sad thing is none of them give a shit!!!!! Just like trump!!!
The COVID-19 situation in Iceland is proof that vaccines work, a leading US infectious-disease expert said.
Iceland reported 2,847 new infections over the past month, mostly from the highly infectious Delta variant and mostly in fully vaccinated people, official statistics indicated. This is the highest number of new infections in a month since the start of the pandemic, but vaccines appear to be doing their job. The vast majority of new infections are mild at worst.
Of the 1,239 Icelanders who were recorded as having COVID-19 on Sunday, 3% were in the hospital, data showed.
The COVID-19 situation in Iceland is proof that vaccines work, a leading US infectious-disease expert said.
Iceland reported 2,847 new infections over the past month, mostly from the highly infectious Delta variant and mostly in fully vaccinated people, official statistics indicated. This is the highest number of new infections in a month since the start of the pandemic, but vaccines appear to be doing their job. The vast majority of new infections are mild at worst.
Of the 1,239 Icelanders who were recorded as having COVID-19 on Sunday, 3% were in the hospital, data showed.
In spite of our infectious disease expert Lil Schitty Florida is number one
Five states broke records for the average number of daily new Covid cases over the weekend as the delta variant strains hospital systems across the U.S. and forces many states to reinstate public health restrictions.
1:Florida, Louisiana, Hawaii, Oregon and Mississippi all reached new peaks in their seven-day average of new cases per day as of Sunday, according to a CNBC analysis of data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. On a per capita basis, Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida are suffering from the three worst outbreaks in the country.
The infection rate map shows the old Confederate States with the highest infections and death rates .
American Hospitals Buckle Under Delta, With I.C.U.s Filling Up https://nyti.ms/37RtMAy
If immunized people who get reinfected, have very mild symptoms and almost zero deaths.
But remember our resident expert yesterday when confronted with the La disaster immediately blamed it on the democrats !!!!!! He really has turned into a sorry sack of shit with no moral compass except defend the white guy party of trump!!!!!
I swear, if I see the grim visage of one more Republican congressman lamenting the "chaos" caused by Joe Biden and the promises we broke with our "Afghan partners," I'm going to puke. We didn't have Afghan partners; we had people in a foreign country we showered with money and ordered around and told what to think and who to believe, which was us. Republicans have been waiting to hang "losing" the Afghanistan war around the neck of Joe Biden since he announced back in April that we would withdraw the troops remaining in that country by the end of this month. Unmentioned by all the Trump-puppets like Lil Scottie is the fact that Biden is doing nothing more or less than carrying out to the letter the deal Trump made with the Taliban last year: that we would pull all our troops out, that we wouldn't engage Taliban fighters in hostilities and they wouldn't engage us, and that the Taliban would pledge not to turn the country back into a stronghold for terrorist groups like al-Qaida and the Islamic State group.
Texas has requested five mortuary trucks to handle the increase of deaths from the covid-19 virus and the Delta variance.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/texas-requests-five-mortuary-trailers-anticipation-covid-deaths-n1276924
That's a picture that will never be seen here.
The Doha agreement had markers for the taliban to reach for the withdrawal to proceed. It also had actual plans for a pull out that included thousands of people who would need to be part of it.
Like Obama said, never underestimate Joe's ability to fuck things up.
Funny how back in April, kamala was bragging that she actively advised Biden on the pull out. Now she's got a different story.
We did what we set out to do - decimate Al Queda. We did not go to Afghanistan to nation build. It’s not our country and it’s not our business.
We did what we set out to do - decimate Al Queda. We did not go to Afghanistan to nation build. It’s not our country and it’s not our business.
Trump certainly didn't advise bisen to find the most inept way to do this.
And strange that Biden can reverse everything else Trump did or tried to do. Even when he had no authority to do so.
I agree
Vice President Harris is keeping a very low profile, just like Sleepy Joe Biden, who won while being in the basement of his home.
If Biden's popularity drops she is not being associated with the President.
@PeterAlexander yells: “What do you think of the Afghans clinging to aircrafts?”
Heh.
It's ironic to be asking that of a clown clinging to his last shreds of cognition.
Ballsless.
Unmentioned by all the Trump-puppets like Lil Scottie and you is the fact that Biden is doing nothing more or less than carrying out to the letter the deal Trump made with the Taliban last year.
You believe that he was a great deal maker. Well President Biden followed the same path
Blogger Roger Amick said...
Vice President Harris is keeping a very low profile, just like Sleepy Joe Biden, who won while being in the basement of his home.
If Biden's popularity drops she is not being associated with the President.
So... Cum-Allah's finest work in her finest hour is distancing herself from the president she was charged with serving.
If there's a more appropriate metaphor to describe this disaster of a presidency I'd like to hear it.
All she is at this point is impeachment insurance. Just like Slow Joe was for 0linsky.
Florida funny
https://twitter.com/rlamick/status/1427592228000591873?s=19
Well President Biden followed the same path
FACT CHECK: FALSE.
Honest people have read the Trump deal and all it's corresponding conditions, which included removing or destroying every single American military asset.
Biden fled Afghanistan UNCONDITIONALLY, arming the Taliban to the fucking teeth as we fled.
Welcome back Carter.
The Mujahedeen haven't gotten a deal this sweet since Charlie Wilson was pounding bourbon and banging hotties in DC.
I can see exactly why you're compelled to lie through your fucking teeth about this alky.
The truth makes you and your president look like absolute SHIT.
In other news, the publisher of the WaPo is pleading with the white house to evacuate all the journalists currently in Shithole-istan.
Leave them there. All of them.
The WaPo, the NYT, XiNN, et. al....
Let them scrawl their stories on stone tablets for their new masters as they're being raped a dozen times per day. They're presstitutes, so they should enjoy what's in store for them.
The scale of America’s global humiliation is so total that I see my friends at Fox News cannot even bear to cover it. As I write, every other world network – the BBC, Deutsche Welle, France 24, not to mention the Chinese – is broadcasting the collapse of the American regime in real time; on Fox, meanwhile, they’re talking about the spending bill and the third Covid shot and the dead Haitians …as if the totality of the defeat is such that for once it cannot be fixed into the American right’s usual consolations (“well, this positions us pretty nicely for 2022”).
On the leftie side, of course, the court eunuchs have risen as one to protect the Dementia Kid, and are working as hurriedly as the Kabul document-shredders in an effort to figure out a way to blame it all on Trump.
But don’t for a moment think this is just some rushed, bungled, memo-incinerating abandonment of the US embassy. State Department diplomats have been preparing this move all summer, under cover of a highly sophisticated deflection operation on their Kabul Twitter feed:
The month of June is recognized as (LGBTI) Pride Month. The United States respects the dignity & equality of LGBTI people & celebrates their contributions to the society. We remain committed to supporting civil rights of minorities, including LGBTI persons. #Pride2021 #PrideMonth
I do hope they’ve managed to evacuate the embassy’s LGBTQWERTY flag before the sacking commences.
One of the depressing aspects of the Swamp is that everything becomes a racket – including even your armed forces. Look at that buffoon at top right, the guy who heads the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Thoroughly Modern Milley: that’s an awful lot of chest ribbonry for a nation that hasn’t won a war in three-quarters of a century. During his recent wokier-than-thou Congressional testimony on “white rage”, I wish someone would have asked Thoroughly Modern what they were all for:
Well, this is for Korea… Vietnam… This small ribbon’s for the Jimmy Carter helicopters-in-the-desert fiasco, because that went tits up far quicker than it usually takes… Here’s the Pentagon Female Empowerment Award I got for introducing Take Your Child Bride To Work Day to Jalalabad… This one’s from the Association of Non-Binary Staff Colleges for Most Transitions in a Single Battalion… Oh, and this most recent one is for getting into a Twitter spat over Tucker Carlson…
If you don’t have total contempt for Milley and the rest of the brass right now, you’re part of the problem.
https://americandigest.org/afghanistan-bananistan-mark-steyn-explains-it-all-to-you-because-im-busy-cleaning-my-gun/#more-25904
No that is false. And everyone knows it. No one made Biden do this in 5he most inept way possible.
Well President Biden followed the same path
FACT CHECK: FALSE.
Honest people have read the Trump deal and all it's corresponding conditions, which included removing or destroying every single American military asset.
Biden fled Afghanistan UNCONDITIONALLY, arming the Taliban to the fucking teeth as we fled.
It is pathetic the way the Democrats are trying to blame Trump for Biden's debacle in Afghanistan. No matter what Biden owns this failure.
BTW Biden's address to the nation was not that of a President but that of a weaselly bureaucrat. It was a total embarrassment.
Even ABC, CBS, NBC are calling bullshit on Biden's speech
Gee ballz,, never realized what a talent you are being able to watch all the major networks and than editorialize their reporting!!!!! Dayum, maybe you should parlay that talent into a money making blog!!!!!!! BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!
I understand when tv networks speak english. Only you would think that s special talent.
We don't call you dopey for nothing.
Biden fled Afghanistan UNCONDITIONALLY, arming the Taliban to the fucking teeth as we fled.
Welcome back Carter.
The Mujahedeen haven't gotten a deal this sweet since Charlie Wilson was pounding bourbon and banging hotties in DC.
I can see exactly why you're compelled to lie through your fucking teeth about this alky.
The truth makes you and your president look like absolute SHIT.
The stupidest and most incompetent thing is getting the military out before the civilians.
Some bases left in the middle of the night with no warning
Who the fuck does that and still has a job ?
And what commander in chief does that and goes to bed early
comes back reads a brief speech and goes back to vacation
Defenseless except by ultra-partisan idiots
or mental patients
Jewish Deplorable
VIDEO:
https://mobile.twitter.com/TrumpJew2/status/1426861250215088128
“There's going to be no circumstance where you see people lifted off the roof of an Embassy of the United States of America from Afghanistan”
- Joe Biden, July 8, 2021
roger is praising this
"brilliant"
roger is praising this
"brilliant"
The dumb fuck stops HERE.
thebradfordfile
https://twitter.com/thebradfordfile/status/1427456442035019780
Say want you want about Trump, he never would have left Americans behind. Ever.
indefensible what Biden did
thebradfordfile
https://twitter.com/thebradfordfile/status/1427426220057276420
Any politician still using the word "insurrection" to describe January 6th should be laughed out of public life forever.
and the state media lost the last crumbs of their credibility to how they gave cover to that false narrative
China To Taiwan: America Will Abandon You…
https://www.weaselzippers.us/473191-china-to-taiwan-america-will-abandon-you/
That is predictable. It only emboldens China to invade Taiwan, occupy Hong Kong, and North Korea to invade South Korea.
Biden just blunder us into a war in Southeast Asia.
Iran may beat them to it
and Russia may want to start expanding again...
Biden sure reversed the peace president fast
and it shows
Wow rat.....I bet you are surprised that China bad mouthed the US to Taiwan.....I guess you have missed the past 50 years of that relationship!!!!!!! bWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!! As to cramps prediction....about as good as he thinks trump won!!!!!
Panetta Compares Afghanistan Exit to Bay of Pigs
August 16, 2021 at 11:12 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard 431 Comments
“Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta compared the fall of the democratic government in Afghanistan over the weekend to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961,” The Hill reports.
Said Panetta: “I think of John Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs. It unfolded quickly and the president thought that everything would be fine and that was not the case.”
He added: “President Kennedy took responsibility for what took place. I strongly recommend to President Biden that he take responsibility … admit the mistakes that were made.”
U.S. to Advise Boosters for Most Americans
August 16, 2021 at 10:38 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard 148 Comments
“The Biden administration has decided that most Americans should get a coronavirus booster shot eight months after they completed their initial vaccination, and could begin offering the extra shots as early as mid-September,” the New York Times reports.
“Officials are planning to announce the administration’s decision as early as this week. Their goal is to let Americans know now that they will need additional protection against the Delta variant that is causing surging caseloads across the nation.”
Washington Post: “The question of boosters has become increasingly fraught as the pandemic continues to unfurl, with the ferocity of the delta variant surprising scientists. Data continues to accumulate suggesting that vaccines lose some anti-virus potency over time.”
“But officials have been reluctant to highlight that fact because they are still trying to persuade broad swaths of Americans to get vaccinated — considered the best way to exit from the pandemic. And they are not sure how much of the reduction in protection is from the passage of time and how much is due to the variant.”
Will this matter in the next election season??
If the economy continues to grow rapidly, once the images from Kabul this week fade from television screens, relief that the war is over will actually be an asset for the Democrats.
The war was not very popular in the first place..
It’s Now the Taliban’s Military
August 17, 2021 at 8:40 am EDT By Taegan Goddard 50 Comments
Associated Press:
“Built and trained at a two-decade cost of $83 billion, Afghan security forces collapsed so quickly and completely — in some cases without a shot fired — that the ultimate beneficiary of the American investment turned out to be the Taliban. They grabbed not only political power but also U.S.-supplied firepower — guns, ammunition, helicopters and more.”
Afghanistan May Not Matter for the Midterms
August 17, 2021 at 8:06 am EDT By Taegan Goddard 55 Comments
New York Times: “The political impact of the chaos and possible bloodshed in Afghanistan is far from clear, either in the midterm congressional elections next year or the 2024 presidential election.”
“Once the images from Kabul this week fade from television screens, relief that the war is over — at least for U.S. troops — could be the dominant emotional outcome.”
There’s No Elegant Way to Lose a War
August 17, 2021 at 8:04 am EDT By Taegan Goddard 25 Comments
Fareed Zakaria:
“The United States had been watching the Taliban gain ground in Afghanistan for years now. It is rich and powerful enough to have been able to mask that reality through a steady stream of counter-attacks and air, missile and drone strikes.”
“But none of that changed the fact that, despite all its efforts, it had not been able to achieve victory — it could not defeat the Taliban. Could it have withdrawn better, more slowly, in a different season, after more negotiations? Certainly. This withdrawal has been poorly planned and executed. But the naked truth is this: There is no elegant way to lose a war.”
A Test of Credibility for Biden
August 17, 2021 at 8:02 am EDT By Taegan Goddard 34 Comments
Walter Russell Mead:
“Joe Biden believed three things about Afghanistan. First, that he could stage a dignified and orderly withdrawal from America’s longest war. Second, that a Taliban win in Afghanistan would not seriously affect U.S. power and prestige world-wide. Third, that Americans were eager enough to put the Afghan war behind them that voters wouldn’t punish him even if the withdrawal went pear-shaped.”
“He was utterly and unspinnably wrong about the first. One fears he was equally wrong about the second. We shall see about the third, and his Monday afternoon speech staunchly defending the pullout indicates that he believes he can carry the country with him.”
One Covid Case Sends New Zealand Into Lockdown
August 17, 2021 at 7:59 am EDT By Taegan Goddard 17 Comments
Washington Post:
“New Zealand will go into a three-day, nationwide lockdown late Tuesday after the country reported its first local case of the coronavirus in nearly six months. Auckland, the largest city, where the case was detected, is likely to be shut down for seven days.”
China Stages Military Exercise Near Taiwan
August 17, 2021 at 7:49 am EDT By Taegan Goddard 17 Comments
“China is staging
an extensive air and sea military exercise near Taiwan in response to ‘provocations’ by Taiwan independence forces, which it described as the biggest source of security risks across the Taiwan Strait,” the South China Morning Post reports.
Taliban Conquest Scrambles Diplomatic Map
August 17, 2021 at 7:47 am EDT By Taegan Goddard 20 Comments
Wall Street Journal:
“The ascent of the Taliban has redrawn the diplomatic map for the U.S. and its rivals as they compete to shape the future of Afghanistan. China and Russia already are moving to build ties with the Taliban and have hosted Taliban officials even before the U.S. military completed its troop withdrawal.”
Bush Feels ‘Great Sadness’ Watching Afghanistan Exit
August 17, 2021 at 6:57 am EDT By Taegan Goddard 65 Comments
Former President George W. Bush said late Monday that he and former first lady Laura Bush had “been watching the tragic events unfolding in Afghanistan with deep sadness,” Axios reports.
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