settle an argument for me about Afghanistan

[Hamlette]

4 of us talking over bridge. One guys says "Biden has no chance of reelection because of the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. I say "who the hell is thinking about that? Yeah, it was bad but there were reasons it was done that way (the Afghan gov't didn't want us to give advance warning etc) and I haven't heard anyone talking about it lately". All three of them "jump" on me saying it was so awful it will have an impact on 2022 blah blah blah.

Really? I don't see many people even thinking about that anymore. But I don't do "social media" so I may be missing something.

What say you?

[elleng]

1. I don't see many people even thinking about that anymore EITHER,

but repugs regularly drag up trash, and make it into 'something.'

[Hoyt]

2. Agree, although some BS criticism could always come up during election.

[captain queeg]

3. I think the Fox crowd will try to capitalize it somehow

But I think most Americans knew it wasn’t going to not end well and we needed to just get out. It was a colossal waste in lives and money. Only the warmonger crowd that sees it as a defeat of the mighty US military will complain. They have the propaganda fed to them since childhood that we always win and save the world. Hasn’t worked out in a long time. That being said I’ve been to Vietnam and felt no animosity anywhere. We need to stay out of other countries and let them figure things out for themselves. I spent 6 months in Afghanistan and admire their people but they have their own ways and their own society and trying to remake them in our image is just wrong. It was never going to work.

[elleng]

4. It was never going to work.

[tirebiter]

5. The war in Afghanistan cost $300 million a day for two decades,

Let that set in

[tirebiter]

9. And he'll be 86 when hes looking at retirement

That was $300,000,000/day for 20 years.

[Frasier Balzov]

6. Biden may not even be the Democratic nominee.

He will be approaching 82 during the 2024 campaign season.

[Demsrule86]

18. He will be the nominee if his health holds...the power of incumbency is huge...

We would be idiots to nominate anyone else unless forced to do so...and we still face the same issue...we need a moderate appearing candidate to take rust belt states and unless the win is convincing, we could spend months in court. Nope, Biden comes from a long-lived family and is doing a great job.

[Rhiannon12866]

7. Obviously the public has moved on, there are so many current stories

But we all know that Fox "News" rarely talks about current events, they're still bringing up Benghazi.

[blm]

8. It was actually pretty successful.

Pretty difficult under the most optimal circumstances to stop an ISIS suicide bomber.

Had the overall withdrawal been as truly disastrous as it was exaggerated, it would still be a concern. It wasn’t.

[Skittles]

10. you should have asked them how many soliders died in Afghanistan during Trump's presidency

I can guarantee you they would have zero clue it was sixty three.

[Vogon_Glory]

11. Ask your friend about how Desert Storm helped George

HW Bush get re-elected in 1992.

It didn’t. Despite the victory, the public wasn’t interested enough to give him a second term in office.

The Taliban remains our enemy, but I think they’ve learned that letting Al Qaeda go too far might mean that we’ll come back and tear up their country again. Unless the Taliban does something extremely stupid, like allowing terrorists to build bases for assembling nuclear terror bombs, not enough people are going to think about Afghanistan in 2024 to vote Republican.

[lapfog_1]

12. afghani-what?

sorry, nobody gives a rats ass about afghanistan.

Trump made the deal... we overstayed the deal by months and months... what was more time there going to do?

To go back on the bad deal that TFG made... we would have needed to invade with 200,000 troops, without popular public support, carpet bombed the Taliban strong holds (and killing a lot of civilians)... for what?

Just to become the Russians in the 1980s all over again?

Our ONLY choices were to leave or escalate. There was NO public or congressional support for escalation.

[Scrivener7]

13. It will be ginned up in a way that will be damaging, though I don't think it will cost an election.

But we didn't counter the republiQan message machine about it at the time, and I doubt we will come up with a reasonable message about it when it is brought back up.

If it does affect the election, it will be our own fault because of our poor messaging response.

[lees1975]

14. The polling data that is available

shows that a clear majority of Americans, between 60% and 70%, were in favor of getting out of Afghanistan.

I'm still trying to figure out where the "disastrous" withdrawal happened. In relatively short order, with little notice, over 120,000 people were airlifted out of the country including more than 6,000 Americans. And what you won't hear on the right wing media, and even on most of the mainstream media, is that the Americans who got caught are the ones who hesitated when they were told they needed to head to Kabul in a hurry. This was, in the history of recent US involvement in the middle east, one of the more outstanding and successful operations, compared to Bush's failures and Trump's inept strategic mistakes which are the main reason the Afghan government collapsed so quickly. Had he not undermined the elected government with his attempts at secret "deal making" with his Taliban friends, a quick withdrawal would not have been necessary. If you watch Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes and Joy Reid, they've lined up guests which have plenty of evidence to show Trump's policy and attempted manipulations was directly responsible for the Afghanistan government's quick collapse.

Biden was VP when the decision was made, during the last Taliban surge, to increase US military presence and retake areas of the country that had fallen under their control. He saw that it was not going to be possible to sustain an independent democratic government without continuous American support. Getting out was a campaign promise.

The bigger question is, why didn't Bush, and then Trump, if they were really interested in turning Afghanistan into a free, democratic, capitalist paradise, set up the Afghan army with the equipment and finances that it needed to defend its own turf and government?

The Democrats need to get control of their messaging. As to whether Biden can be re-elected or not, well, that depends a lot on what happens between now and 2024. I do not see a Republican who could win, and Trump running again would be a guaranteed GOP loss.

[Demsrule86]

15. First of all, it was not 'bad'. It was one of the most successful withdrawals I have ever seen...

Secondly, they said the same about Benghazi and Pres. Obama who served two terms...foreign politics rarely affect elections. And most people are glad we are out of there.

[dumbcat]

16. It's certainly fallen off my radar screens

And as a former career military person, I always knew it was going to end badly.

[planetc]

17. What I want to see the media take up is the situation at the moment the Afghan government ran:

In short, did TFG draw down all US forces until 2,500 soldiers were left on the ground, while encouraging the Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban fighters? If this was the case, then we might suspect malice on the part of TFG, not just ineptness. We might have a glimmer as to why the government fled. And we might then see US forces as having snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.

It's the news media who have set up a constant drum-beat of "chaos," which was certainly accurate for the first few days. But after the first days, prodigious efforts of organization, administration, and logistics produced an airlift of 120,000 people from Kabul to all points elsewhere. The American news media hate having to know anything themselves: they ask experts to talk, so they don't have to know anything. And the American media's saturation subject is American politics; they have no loyalty to truth, history, or accuracy. So the "chaotic" Afghan pull-out has become a piece in the game the media play. Mr. Biden has faced three major horrendous challenges while he's been in office: COVID, the Pressure of migrants at the southern border, and the Afghan withdrawal. While the media paint a cartoon for us, the Biden administration's nose is well above water in the real world.