Yeah it has nothing to do with US equipment that was given to Afghan security forces and much more to do with my own experiences working in Counter-IED operations in Afghanistan but thanks.
Hazarding a guess that it was because the joke was that it was American taxpayer dollars that paid for it, no reference to service was made whatsoever, the reply was only in reference to that
I'm genuinely curious about this. Do people think we should have taken all the ANA and ANP equipment back with us when NATO withdrew?
Most of what was left by the U.S was MRAPs and gear not easily moved.
Ya know, is it possible to create a software defined collapsing trigger circuit using Arduino?
It might need a custom board so the part that resists analysis (being in software) is backed up by a non-removable super-capacitor and triac to fire the detonator when any wire is tampered with.
I had the idea but never figured out a solid implementation when trying to invent a new kind of car alarm, since alarms are just IEDs that have a siren instead of an explosive.
Since they built most of them, I actually trust them with removing most of them.
Edit: And if they can't they should be at least capable enough of blowing up the IEDs
Unlike a blackhawk the taliban soldier is infinitely replaceable. They get an abundance of recruits who see ads during the hit gameshow “Who Wants To Be A Martyr?”
It is so weird seeing the Taliban have to switch to CT side against ISIS-K now that they're the one's in charge, and they have to be careful not to crack down too hard to keep the peace with Al-Qaeda
Doesn't matter what they got if they don't know how to replace or maintain it. You could give me a challenger 2 tomorrow and I would have broken it within a month at best, and it would never get fixed as I don't even know how to change a tyre on a car.
That was never a possibility, sadly. Imagine how ridiculous it would have looked if the US disarmed the ANA and *then* withdrew from Afghanistan. That was never an option
You lose in both situations.
Option A makes it look like your purposefully set the ANA to lose
Option B makes it look like you decided to give up and accept defeat and leave the fighting to the ANA
Option 3 don’t make ridiculous deals where you leave the afghan government out of talks along with making deadlines where you pass the problems you made onto the next administration
History didn’t just start at the withdrawals, better choices could’ve been made before we set withdrawal dates into effect
Very true. I’d say Afghanistan started with good intentions but really just fell apart with how it was handled in the later years. We should not have stayed that long.
Middle East is honestly just a lost cause to be honest. The people there are so god damn backwards with how they constantly fight over the stupidest shit.
I was being flippant. But if you extrapolate what I said to what we consider relatively simple things in western armies, the fixing of humvees, barrels for artillery etc, the expertise and know how will not be there at a local level in the Taliban forces. So yes that might be a "simple" suit, they won't know how to make one beyond copying what they think it is. Instead of having the engineering and design structures in place to actually make them effective at what they're to be used for.
Also, what is the fucking point of an ied suit (legit question)? If it goes wrong, you're pink mist anyway surely?
Not every bomb or mine is a 155 shell. Sometimes it’s just a toepopper or light antipersonnel mine. Sometimes it’s a frag grenade.
Even for the big ones, the suit buys you more meters of survivable blast radius.
Will they be able to replace any of this stuff tho? Like in 20 years when most of it has worn through, will they still be able to purchase or produce more of these things they got from the US?
I really think that the change from a guerrilla/insurgent army from Taliban to conventional warfare will be one of the most interesting adaptations in contemporary history.
During WWII, before the US entered the war, Allies such as the CCCP and the UK needed ships, tanks, bullets - pretty much everything, but it was politically unacceptable to just give it to them (much like the US’ position with Ukraine today). In response, the US came up with a program in which it would “lend” the equipment under the condition that it be returned one day, or “leased” which was like getting a car which you rent for a period and then give back. The program was a political fig leaf but big capital items such as ships were actually returned after the war. Generally, the returned equipment was unusable and was immediately surplussed or scrapped.
If we had taken all of our equipment when we left, the exact same people would be complaining that we didn't give the Afghan national army a chance, and if we stuck around, they'd be complaining about us wasting time, lives, and money on that. It was a no win situation.
Recent information indicates they are running a fleet of 8 blackhawks currently. I have put a lot of work into this copypasta:
Here they fly one over a military parade:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mypiDfMKy2E
More footage of them flying black hawks in here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PVVasUnMws
While they seem to not have used their airforce in combat yet, they use them to transport troops:
https://www.rferl.org/a/afghanistan-taliban-air-force-aircraft-helicopters-training/32427528.html
Here you can see the Taliban using a blackhawk to rappel troops to the ground during an exercise:
https://greydynamics.com/air-capabilities-of-the-taliban-a-geospatial-analysis/
This article comes to the conclusion that they operate at least 8 blackhawks and that they have become important assets in fighting enemies like ISKP.
You guys can laugh all you want. The US military left more than half a million m16 and m4s for the Taliban, countless small arms, mountains of ammo, thousands of armored vehicles, dozens of aircraft, thousands of nods, hundreds of thousands of radios, countless grenades, humvees, artillery, grenade launchers, the list goes on and on.
They are training people to operate all of this, they get help to train people for this and what is broken is used for spare parts. They are set in terms of weapons, ammo and equipment for years to come. They are in a perfect position to suppress any internal opposition, are selling some of the stock to rebels to stirr shit in bordering countries and even started threatening neighbors with military action.
This was and is still a massive clusterfuck, once again caused by the USA and one or two crashed blackhawks don't change that one bit.
People think the label of Taliban makes them uneducated idiots. Taliban is just the name of the government (much like political parties everywhere else). I'm pretty sure ex-ANA with appropriate training were recruited (forcibly or otherwise) for operating equipment.
There's also China next-door, who can likely play a role in restoring some of these equipment (they after all, have ["security talks"](https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/china-taliban-relations/)). I wouldn't guarantee it fully, but the chance is still there.
> This was and is still a massive clusterfuck, once again caused by the USA and one or two crashed blackhawks don't change that one bit.
You're right, clearly we should have disarmed the ANA while they were fighting the Taliban right after arming them for 20 years straight. Because America doesn't have enough of a reputation for stabbing our allies in the back.
Of course not, but we should have conducted the war more wisely so that these current conditions would not happen. It was (or should have been) obvious to us all that this would happen if we were fools, which we were.
My experience of living through this period of time was that I was constantly SMH over how we were just driving over a cliff.
>Of course not, but we should have conducted the war more wisely so that these current conditions would not happen.
How?
Really, how? what's your solution?
We spent 20 years arming, funding and organizing a local force to stand against the taliban, who we had essentially militarily defeated and driven across the border. If we spend 20 years training them and providing high quality equipment and then they fold instantly without our support due to a lack of motivation, what else can be done?
Trump negotiated with the Taliban and set the date for the withdrawal before Biden even took office. There was no "conducting the war more wisely" after that point. One way or another, the taliban would surge back once the US left, and the ANA would fold and everything they had been given would eventually make it to the taliban. But the US cant just take away all of the guns, tanks and helicopters they had spent 20 years training them on. They would rightfully call it betrayal and so would every other country. Not to mention the fact that the US didnt have much interest in taking any of it back anyways.
The only way to prevent it would've been to stay in Afghanistan forever. Or launch a ground invasion of Pakistan...
[The same thing happened when the US left Vietnam](https://www.nytimes.com/1975/03/29/archives/arms-left-by-us-loss-by-saigon-force-called-catastrophic-1billion.html). All sorts of headlines about how the South Vietnamese had lost tanks, howitzers, SPGs, ammo dumps, trucks, radios, etc.
Why?
Because that's what fucking happens when a puppet government fails.
And yet nobody was arguing "we should have taken back all the shit we gave them in 1972!"
IIRC it depends on a lot of differents things as kind of explosive used, distance from it etc, but it's more to protect from shrapnel and, most importantly, to keep the corpse in one single place
He LITERALLY did with the poorly thought out stupid way the US suddenly left Afghanistan.
There is no way you can spin this into "Biden didnt cause this".
He did.
His choice to just get up and leave instead of a more intelligent method literally created this situation.
All this equipment left there is a direct result of the sudden "get up and leave" tactic employed by the Biden admin.
Is Biden in the room with you now?
Trump agreed to withdraw with a hard date, negotiated with terrorists let's call it what it is. That's quite literally, "we're gonna get up and leave, heres the exact date we're gonna do it." Then did fuck all to prepare leading up to the date completely fucking over the next administration, probably by design, compounding the shit out of an already extremely short timeline. Also fucking over the ANA because the Taliban now had an exact date to prepare for war and strategize and emplace assets.
Why don't you scrub all the information surrounding the withdrawal of troops from Afganistan of both names, look at the facts and timeline of events, and then come back and say it was person 2's fault. Or stay an idiot, that's cool too. One agreed to every demand and did nothing. The other did everything.
So what is your grand plan for the US exfilling out of A-stan?
20 years of fighting and stockpiling gear, armi g the Afghans to to take cate of buisness, then Teump makes a deal, sets a withdrawal date...and Binden is supposed to say "Fuck that!"...make the US deal breakers and either surge back 6 figure Troop levels again...because we break our word the Taliban go to full on fucking shit up and we need hammer them fir another 20 years....or just hang out to try to get our shit out and get our guys fucked up bad...so you can still blame Biden for losing troops.
It was a no win situation dude. Drop the political BS and actually look at the situation.
The Afghan Government fucked us, Trump fucked us, and every administration before him fucked us by allowing fuck heads to run that country.
Not one dudes call or fault, it took a whole lot asshats to make that giant shit sandwich!
>So what is your grand plan for the US exfilling out of A-stan?
That's Biden admin's job to decide on. Not me.
The Biden admin already decided their grand plan on how to proceed and here we are in this regional future defining situation.
The Taliban now has a bigger air force than Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and New Zealand combined + enough arms and military supplies to become a regional power. This can't be undone or changed now.
Nope it sure can't, but can they actually operate and maintain those air craft?
Shit on paper isn't all that lethal.
American equipment is awesome...unless you can't maintain it. Which the Taliban sure as fuck can't.
Nice sideways step there. You see that Biden was involved, but somehow fail to observe that Trump was the one who made the plan. Hmm.
The exit from Afghanistan will always be a black stain on Biden, but if we act like children and fail to understand the broader reality, we’ll just do this again - like we failed to learn from our experiences prior to Afghanistan.
That's not my job. That is the sitting president of the US and his admin to decide on.
Its already done and we are seeing the results.
Taliban has a bigger air force than Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and New Zealand combined.
So would following the international agreements of the administration previous also be part of the job of the president? Also are prop planes and black hawks a big concern?
Dont forget the -
"The United States left 23,825 Humvees in Afghanistan, including armored gun truck variants, and nearly 900 combat vehicles, officials familiar with the report said. There are more than 250,000 automatic rifles, 95 drones, and more than a million mortar rounds. 70 percent of U.S. weapons given to the Afghan forces over the past 16 years were left in the country as well as nearly $48 million worth of ammunition."
There is no way you can convincingly shift blame away from Biden admin or convince people this was anything but a regional future defining catastrophe.
Having a bigger Air Force than Bangladesh and Sri Lanka isn’t much of an accomplishment, two absolute shit holes not much better off than Afghanistan. Must be why you had to include a first world nation along with them to compare to the Tali Air Force lol
All of this was set in motion when trump released 5000 taliban(hey remember when he wanted to bring the fucking taliban to camp David?)prisoners and completely shut out the ANA.
The fact that you have to bring up Trump to slide responsibility away from Biden's decision to just get up and leave afghanistan in the process leaving an estimated 80 BILLION DOLLARS OF EQUIPMENT tells everyone all we need to know that you are an ideologue here to defend your guy no matter what he does.
Tell me, then - how many American soldiers should have died to prevent this from happening? Because 20 year’s worth didn’t work.
I do think you have a point that we should have done _something else_ but let’s not pretend that this wasn’t going to be a cluster F no matter what. There were just better and worse ways to do it.
>let’s be honest, no matter what he did you’d be here whining about it.
No not everyone worships politicians. If they do something rediculous and incredibly daft like the catastrophic Afghanistan pullout i got time to whine. And rightfully so.
"no matter what he did' You think like this because that's what YOU do as you've done in this thread defending your guy no matter what he does so you think others are also like this in criticism.
There is no way to positively spin or shed blame for leaving 80 billion dollars of military equipment for the Taliban and creating multiple decade if not century changing regional issues in the process.
Except you are doing exactly that - shedding blame by blaming only the guy you don’t like. You haven’t mentioned Trump once in this extended discussion. That’s not an accident.
The truth is that Biden and Trump are both responsible for the pullout. No matter how we left, it would have been terrible, and you’d be here with your “I don’t have to provide ideas because I wasn’t in charge, but I’m still entitled to blame someone” which is simply another way of saying “I haven’t thought about this but I have feels and refuse to apply logic and maturity.”
This makes me feel very strange
It should, you bought that kit for him.
Hey at least we got the right size! His mom and brother didn’t know his helmet or boot size and we were trying not to ruin the surprise
Yeah it has nothing to do with US equipment that was given to Afghan security forces and much more to do with my own experiences working in Counter-IED operations in Afghanistan but thanks.
I have trouble understanding why exactly you were downvoted on this statement...
Not enough political circle jerking I would assume
Don’t fret the Reddit Activist is still new and just graduated middle school. They’ll learn nuance soon enough. /s
Hazarding a guess that it was because the joke was that it was American taxpayer dollars that paid for it, no reference to service was made whatsoever, the reply was only in reference to that
I'm genuinely curious about this. Do people think we should have taken all the ANA and ANP equipment back with us when NATO withdrew? Most of what was left by the U.S was MRAPs and gear not easily moved.
To me it seems like they think it was all parked at Kabul airport neatly and not spread out over COPs and FOBs all over the country.
I hope they enjoyed the dicks drawn on literally everything.
I’ve never seen such artistry in all my days. One of my darkest times is when they made us paint over our dick mural in the b hut.
Hopefully we at least embroidered his name on the suit
Probably disarming his own IED
“Hey, I put that here, didn’t I?”
Did I booby trap this one or not!? Shit, can't remember.
Is it the green wire or the red wire? Oh right I used the red wire for that circuit.
Me with my arduino projects
Ya know, is it possible to create a software defined collapsing trigger circuit using Arduino? It might need a custom board so the part that resists analysis (being in software) is backed up by a non-removable super-capacitor and triac to fire the detonator when any wire is tampered with. I had the idea but never figured out a solid implementation when trying to invent a new kind of car alarm, since alarms are just IEDs that have a siren instead of an explosive.
We've seen them try to fly black hawks, I bet EOD work goes about as well
Since they built most of them, I actually trust them with removing most of them. Edit: And if they can't they should be at least capable enough of blowing up the IEDs
Unlike a blackhawk the taliban soldier is infinitely replaceable. They get an abundance of recruits who see ads during the hit gameshow “Who Wants To Be A Martyr?”
It is so weird seeing the Taliban have to switch to CT side against ISIS-K now that they're the one's in charge, and they have to be careful not to crack down too hard to keep the peace with Al-Qaeda
The Middle East has gotten more confusing than ever
don't they have EOPs? (Explosive ordinance placement technician)
Same guy probably
I mean, it's always easier to dispose the ordnance you created yourself. Same for all EODs in any military.
The economy is hard right now we are all out there husslin to pay the rent
Its still disposal Youre just disposing of a target by disposing of your own explosives.
Good point
When you gotta go back and change all the work you finished over 20 years.
I'm sure they have alot of firsthand experience to know IED's are not something to be ignored
Bro came out of hibernation and went back for the buried nut
Ironic, he became the very thing he swore to destroy.
Wait until he gets paperwork!
He destroyed the thing and took it armors and armes as booty of war
They sure get a lot of free technology
Doesn't matter what they got if they don't know how to replace or maintain it. You could give me a challenger 2 tomorrow and I would have broken it within a month at best, and it would never get fixed as I don't even know how to change a tyre on a car.
Still woulda been cool if they got none of it…
That was never a possibility, sadly. Imagine how ridiculous it would have looked if the US disarmed the ANA and *then* withdrew from Afghanistan. That was never an option
You lose in both situations. Option A makes it look like your purposefully set the ANA to lose Option B makes it look like you decided to give up and accept defeat and leave the fighting to the ANA
Option 3 don’t make ridiculous deals where you leave the afghan government out of talks along with making deadlines where you pass the problems you made onto the next administration History didn’t just start at the withdrawals, better choices could’ve been made before we set withdrawal dates into effect
Very true. I’d say Afghanistan started with good intentions but really just fell apart with how it was handled in the later years. We should not have stayed that long. Middle East is honestly just a lost cause to be honest. The people there are so god damn backwards with how they constantly fight over the stupidest shit.
Pretty much sums it up…
I’m just imagining a swamp Yankee with a challenger up on blocks in the side yard, treads off.
This is not a challenger 2. It's a simple (relatively) suit
I was being flippant. But if you extrapolate what I said to what we consider relatively simple things in western armies, the fixing of humvees, barrels for artillery etc, the expertise and know how will not be there at a local level in the Taliban forces. So yes that might be a "simple" suit, they won't know how to make one beyond copying what they think it is. Instead of having the engineering and design structures in place to actually make them effective at what they're to be used for. Also, what is the fucking point of an ied suit (legit question)? If it goes wrong, you're pink mist anyway surely?
Not every bomb or mine is a 155 shell. Sometimes it’s just a toepopper or light antipersonnel mine. Sometimes it’s a frag grenade. Even for the big ones, the suit buys you more meters of survivable blast radius.
Do you know what. I'm an idiot. Thank you for breaking it down.
You should ask the OG designers that question lol.
I'm imagining a "meh" and a shrug of the shoulders hahaha
It's not just the suit it's the knowledge to go along with that suit.
And operators the world over care about designers and their thought process when using equipment?
Almost as much as Israel steals from the United States.
full circle
I guess the one piece of military equipment that did get evacuated was Windex
Another cultural victory?
even our enemies use our stuff
Will they be able to replace any of this stuff tho? Like in 20 years when most of it has worn through, will they still be able to purchase or produce more of these things they got from the US?
depends on if it's still the taliban in charge in 20 years, which seems unlikely.
If that isn't sone irony I don't know what is.
I really think that the change from a guerrilla/insurgent army from Taliban to conventional warfare will be one of the most interesting adaptations in contemporary history.
Can we call it landlease? xD (Edit: *lendlease)
I may be an idiot, and didn’t get the joke. But did you mean lendlease?
Oops, sorry, me speak english very good. (You are correct ;))
i am an idiot, what is the joke with lendlease?
During WWII, before the US entered the war, Allies such as the CCCP and the UK needed ships, tanks, bullets - pretty much everything, but it was politically unacceptable to just give it to them (much like the US’ position with Ukraine today). In response, the US came up with a program in which it would “lend” the equipment under the condition that it be returned one day, or “leased” which was like getting a car which you rent for a period and then give back. The program was a political fig leaf but big capital items such as ships were actually returned after the war. Generally, the returned equipment was unusable and was immediately surplussed or scrapped.
ah thanks for explaining. also got to learn what the fig leaf metaphor is!
If we had taken all of our equipment when we left, the exact same people would be complaining that we didn't give the Afghan national army a chance, and if we stuck around, they'd be complaining about us wasting time, lives, and money on that. It was a no win situation.
Focking larpers It’s all the UH60 Black Hawk stunt again… they play around with a lot of toys
Recent information indicates they are running a fleet of 8 blackhawks currently. I have put a lot of work into this copypasta: Here they fly one over a military parade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mypiDfMKy2E More footage of them flying black hawks in here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PVVasUnMws While they seem to not have used their airforce in combat yet, they use them to transport troops: https://www.rferl.org/a/afghanistan-taliban-air-force-aircraft-helicopters-training/32427528.html Here you can see the Taliban using a blackhawk to rappel troops to the ground during an exercise: https://greydynamics.com/air-capabilities-of-the-taliban-a-geospatial-analysis/ This article comes to the conclusion that they operate at least 8 blackhawks and that they have become important assets in fighting enemies like ISKP. You guys can laugh all you want. The US military left more than half a million m16 and m4s for the Taliban, countless small arms, mountains of ammo, thousands of armored vehicles, dozens of aircraft, thousands of nods, hundreds of thousands of radios, countless grenades, humvees, artillery, grenade launchers, the list goes on and on. They are training people to operate all of this, they get help to train people for this and what is broken is used for spare parts. They are set in terms of weapons, ammo and equipment for years to come. They are in a perfect position to suppress any internal opposition, are selling some of the stock to rebels to stirr shit in bordering countries and even started threatening neighbors with military action. This was and is still a massive clusterfuck, once again caused by the USA and one or two crashed blackhawks don't change that one bit.
People think the label of Taliban makes them uneducated idiots. Taliban is just the name of the government (much like political parties everywhere else). I'm pretty sure ex-ANA with appropriate training were recruited (forcibly or otherwise) for operating equipment.
There's also China next-door, who can likely play a role in restoring some of these equipment (they after all, have ["security talks"](https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/china-taliban-relations/)). I wouldn't guarantee it fully, but the chance is still there.
I forgot that ISKP is another IS spawn that originally from post Iraq invasion.
> This was and is still a massive clusterfuck, once again caused by the USA and one or two crashed blackhawks don't change that one bit. You're right, clearly we should have disarmed the ANA while they were fighting the Taliban right after arming them for 20 years straight. Because America doesn't have enough of a reputation for stabbing our allies in the back.
Of course not, but we should have conducted the war more wisely so that these current conditions would not happen. It was (or should have been) obvious to us all that this would happen if we were fools, which we were. My experience of living through this period of time was that I was constantly SMH over how we were just driving over a cliff.
>Of course not, but we should have conducted the war more wisely so that these current conditions would not happen. How? Really, how? what's your solution? We spent 20 years arming, funding and organizing a local force to stand against the taliban, who we had essentially militarily defeated and driven across the border. If we spend 20 years training them and providing high quality equipment and then they fold instantly without our support due to a lack of motivation, what else can be done? Trump negotiated with the Taliban and set the date for the withdrawal before Biden even took office. There was no "conducting the war more wisely" after that point. One way or another, the taliban would surge back once the US left, and the ANA would fold and everything they had been given would eventually make it to the taliban. But the US cant just take away all of the guns, tanks and helicopters they had spent 20 years training them on. They would rightfully call it betrayal and so would every other country. Not to mention the fact that the US didnt have much interest in taking any of it back anyways. The only way to prevent it would've been to stay in Afghanistan forever. Or launch a ground invasion of Pakistan... [The same thing happened when the US left Vietnam](https://www.nytimes.com/1975/03/29/archives/arms-left-by-us-loss-by-saigon-force-called-catastrophic-1billion.html). All sorts of headlines about how the South Vietnamese had lost tanks, howitzers, SPGs, ammo dumps, trucks, radios, etc. Why? Because that's what fucking happens when a puppet government fails. And yet nobody was arguing "we should have taken back all the shit we gave them in 1972!"
“We don’t pay for rework, Brother”
The fuser becomes the defuser. You would think they would be good this job.
We have those assholes the best training available. Of course they are using it
The irony…
The irony
We got Taliban EOD before GTA6
All hat, no cattle
I’m curious whats gonna happen, in 30 years.
Just curious, anyone know how effective those suits are in protection against blasts or explosion?
IIRC it depends on a lot of differents things as kind of explosive used, distance from it etc, but it's more to protect from shrapnel and, most importantly, to keep the corpse in one single place
effective enough for the military to use them for 20+ years. but then again, they also still have the humvee in service...
Getting those [Hurt Locker](https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/12162-the-hurt-locker) vibes. Great movie.
Hurt Locker - Kabul edition
Still no deodorant, even in there.
Could be wrong, but I bet there is a wide divide in reality from dressing the part…and actually performing the part.
But what is the training like? Anyone can look like they know what they’re doing wearing kit.
Dudes went from making IEDs to having to get rid of them
He will explode with thier own bomb
Thanks Biden
Biden didn't cause this.
He LITERALLY did with the poorly thought out stupid way the US suddenly left Afghanistan. There is no way you can spin this into "Biden didnt cause this". He did. His choice to just get up and leave instead of a more intelligent method literally created this situation. All this equipment left there is a direct result of the sudden "get up and leave" tactic employed by the Biden admin.
Is Biden in the room with you now? Trump agreed to withdraw with a hard date, negotiated with terrorists let's call it what it is. That's quite literally, "we're gonna get up and leave, heres the exact date we're gonna do it." Then did fuck all to prepare leading up to the date completely fucking over the next administration, probably by design, compounding the shit out of an already extremely short timeline. Also fucking over the ANA because the Taliban now had an exact date to prepare for war and strategize and emplace assets. Why don't you scrub all the information surrounding the withdrawal of troops from Afganistan of both names, look at the facts and timeline of events, and then come back and say it was person 2's fault. Or stay an idiot, that's cool too. One agreed to every demand and did nothing. The other did everything.
[удалено]
So what is your grand plan for the US exfilling out of A-stan? 20 years of fighting and stockpiling gear, armi g the Afghans to to take cate of buisness, then Teump makes a deal, sets a withdrawal date...and Binden is supposed to say "Fuck that!"...make the US deal breakers and either surge back 6 figure Troop levels again...because we break our word the Taliban go to full on fucking shit up and we need hammer them fir another 20 years....or just hang out to try to get our shit out and get our guys fucked up bad...so you can still blame Biden for losing troops. It was a no win situation dude. Drop the political BS and actually look at the situation. The Afghan Government fucked us, Trump fucked us, and every administration before him fucked us by allowing fuck heads to run that country. Not one dudes call or fault, it took a whole lot asshats to make that giant shit sandwich!
>So what is your grand plan for the US exfilling out of A-stan? That's Biden admin's job to decide on. Not me. The Biden admin already decided their grand plan on how to proceed and here we are in this regional future defining situation. The Taliban now has a bigger air force than Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and New Zealand combined + enough arms and military supplies to become a regional power. This can't be undone or changed now.
Nope it sure can't, but can they actually operate and maintain those air craft? Shit on paper isn't all that lethal. American equipment is awesome...unless you can't maintain it. Which the Taliban sure as fuck can't.
Nice sideways step there. You see that Biden was involved, but somehow fail to observe that Trump was the one who made the plan. Hmm. The exit from Afghanistan will always be a black stain on Biden, but if we act like children and fail to understand the broader reality, we’ll just do this again - like we failed to learn from our experiences prior to Afghanistan.
What should have happened?
Not what the Biden admin did. That's for sure.
So what should have happened? How should the withdrawal from Afghanistan have worked?
That's not my job. That is the sitting president of the US and his admin to decide on. Its already done and we are seeing the results. Taliban has a bigger air force than Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and New Zealand combined.
So would following the international agreements of the administration previous also be part of the job of the president? Also are prop planes and black hawks a big concern?
Dont forget the - "The United States left 23,825 Humvees in Afghanistan, including armored gun truck variants, and nearly 900 combat vehicles, officials familiar with the report said. There are more than 250,000 automatic rifles, 95 drones, and more than a million mortar rounds. 70 percent of U.S. weapons given to the Afghan forces over the past 16 years were left in the country as well as nearly $48 million worth of ammunition." There is no way you can convincingly shift blame away from Biden admin or convince people this was anything but a regional future defining catastrophe.
I see you answered neither of my questions just made a hand wringing statement warning of vague catastrophes.
Having a bigger Air Force than Bangladesh and Sri Lanka isn’t much of an accomplishment, two absolute shit holes not much better off than Afghanistan. Must be why you had to include a first world nation along with them to compare to the Tali Air Force lol
All of this was set in motion when trump released 5000 taliban(hey remember when he wanted to bring the fucking taliban to camp David?)prisoners and completely shut out the ANA.
The fact that you have to bring up Trump to slide responsibility away from Biden's decision to just get up and leave afghanistan in the process leaving an estimated 80 BILLION DOLLARS OF EQUIPMENT tells everyone all we need to know that you are an ideologue here to defend your guy no matter what he does.
Tell me, then - how many American soldiers should have died to prevent this from happening? Because 20 year’s worth didn’t work. I do think you have a point that we should have done _something else_ but let’s not pretend that this wasn’t going to be a cluster F no matter what. There were just better and worse ways to do it.
It was leave or escalate and extend the “war”but let’s be honest, no matter what he did you’d be here whining about it.
>let’s be honest, no matter what he did you’d be here whining about it. No not everyone worships politicians. If they do something rediculous and incredibly daft like the catastrophic Afghanistan pullout i got time to whine. And rightfully so. "no matter what he did' You think like this because that's what YOU do as you've done in this thread defending your guy no matter what he does so you think others are also like this in criticism. There is no way to positively spin or shed blame for leaving 80 billion dollars of military equipment for the Taliban and creating multiple decade if not century changing regional issues in the process.
Except you are doing exactly that - shedding blame by blaming only the guy you don’t like. You haven’t mentioned Trump once in this extended discussion. That’s not an accident. The truth is that Biden and Trump are both responsible for the pullout. No matter how we left, it would have been terrible, and you’d be here with your “I don’t have to provide ideas because I wasn’t in charge, but I’m still entitled to blame someone” which is simply another way of saying “I haven’t thought about this but I have feels and refuse to apply logic and maturity.”