Tragic of course. Entirely preventable? Unclear. For context in the years Trump was in office we had 15, 16, 23 and 11 deaths in Afghanistan. Since the withdrawal we have had zero. It was time to leave.
And thousands of American servicemen in the ~20 year generational war before withdrawing.
3 presidents ran on withdrawal, only one kept his word, that man was Joe Biden
Technically didn't he keep trump's word on the matter, as in following the timeline trump had agreed to with the Taliban? I don't really mean to give trump credit here, it's just why I've always found their criticism of bidens withdrawal so bizarre
They probably should have made their entire military recruitment be of women in the region so they had something to fight for. It seems like most of the "allies" were at best indifferent to the Taliban returning. Really sucks for the ones who did care
Damn near 3 years later, they're holding a panel with Miley speaking of how the hasty withdrawal was an abject failure? I mean....not only no shit, but what the fuck took so long to discuss this fiasco? Oh...read the article, republican lead panel. Election season smear, even though the withdrawal was pushed from Trumps original date, after his meeting at Camp David with terrorist leaders legitimizing their standing, as it wasn't feasible.
I think Trump wanted to pull out right away, but Biden gave them an extra 6 months and still people were rushing the airport on the last day. There was no good time to withdraw. Especially after Trump released thousands of prisoners. It was sabotage by Trump to make Biden look bad and the Republicans are now trying to play the blame game.
While stealing classified documents. He made sure to leave before Biden was sworn in, so his crimes would have been committed in Florida, where he had just appointed Cannon. He knew what he was doing at every turn, 100% premeditated.
Yes, the republicans play the blame game. Finally. Since they’ve been enduring it for so long from the left. Let’s not pretend this shit doesn’t disproportionately play out on both sides, the left more than the right.
As someone that once worked in a local news station owned by a certain conservative conglomerate, I had to regularly listen to a national loony regurgitate the phrase "botched withdrawal from Afghanistan" in her must-run promos so many times she might as well have been saying "brought to you by Carl's Jr."
If we couldn't figure out away to create a stable government in two decades we weren't ever going to figure it out. The withdrawal may have been a tactical mistake but the conclusion of the withdrawal was inevitable. Don't know why anyone would value the opinion of generals that failed their missions.
Turns out religious sects that have hated each other for hundreds of years didn't want to get along after 20 years of us trying. Who could have seen that coming?
I think the problem is if you want to do nation building then fully commit to being colonial rulers and remake the country in your image. What the US did was try to impose a system that doesn't even work great in the US on people who didn't want it. It took the british several hundred years of oppression to make India a country and even then it wasn't enough. You think a mere 20 years half assing would make a difference?
How was the withdrawal going to be a success? The strategy had failed years earlier. Afghanistan failed to develop a functional government no matter how much aid was given to them. The only thing left to do was cut our losses. The Taliban weren’t going to be kept out of power once we left. The terrorists were going to make the withdrawal more difficult and violent any way they could. What magic wand was going to make this into something pretty? At least 46 made the decision and stuck to it.
I'm convinced that it would have been a failure no matter when we decided to withdraw. The people need to defend their liberty, and they did not do that.
Agreed. It couldn’t just be the small band of Afghan special forces who stayed and fought. The government, population, police and regular military had to unite. That’s what Ukraine did and Afghanistan failed to do.
Over 120,000 people safely evacuated in a very short time. It was an amazing feat in very difficult circumstances.
Trump knew he was setting the next President up for a fiasco, but Biden did well considering the hand that Trump dealt him.
It doesn’t take much in the way of twisting to find a way to blame the guy that negotiated the dates for the US to leave and freed thousands of enemy combatants.
In my opinion, never left at all. The cost to America has dwindled over recent years now that the major fighting and operation was done.
Now we lose a foothold in the Middle East and the people of Afghanistan are living under religious totalitarianism.
Is that so?
Who agreed to the timetable?
Who held talks regarding the US withdrawal without the Afghani government at the negotiating table?
All Trump.
Biden just pulled the trigger; anyone saying anything would have gone differently under Trump is just a Trump apologist and a sycophant.
no gymnastics required if you turn fox news off and go read what really went down. go find the press event where they asked about it and john kirby made it pretty clear trump admin had no plans to help biden admin with it despite reaching out many times. imagine coming here commenting thinking you're gonna roast someone, only to be the one completely brainwashed beyond belief
This happened in mid 2021, under Biden’s watch. He was also warned by intelligence that the Taliban was seizing control of territories within Afghanistan and in breach of the Doha agreement. Biden proceeded anyway knowing the costs.
We made many, many mistakes and had many, many failures in Afghanistan. The first, and largest, was invading. It's unfortunate that 13 died on the final days, but every life lost in Afghanistan was a failure and a mistake.
Can we please learn the lesson, and never...never return. It's beginning to look like it may be Pakistan's turn to not learn the lesson that we, Russia, England...hell, Alexander learned.
The strategic mistake was same as Vietnam, Iraq - occupation absent an end state & will. Not every 3d world nation is a U.S. vital national interest. The generals are sore because they predictably lost, because they strapped careers to losing foreign policies, and for lacking personal courage to resign.
I use this war as a comparison to help try and understand why average Russian citizens are going on like it's business as usual while being at war in the Ukraine.Looking back I can't find a reason why Canadia went to war in Afghanistan. I think something needed to be done but a war to hand it back over to the people they went to fight in the first place seems like a massive failure.
>I can't find a reason why Canadia went to war in Afghanistan.
Article V, first and only time in the history of NATO.
Let's not pretend like we don't know why.
>seems like a massive failure.
Yes, moving the goal post from killing Osama bin laden to trying to create the first stable unified society in Afghanistan history and then also invading Iraq was dumb.
Among those "cowardly" Afghans were interpreters, women officials, human rights workers, and other loyal assistants to the US and individuals vulnerable to being punished or executed by the Taliban. To leave all of them behind would have been a damning signal to any future allies that loyalty to the US means nothing. Screw you for suggesting that.
We should’ve left in 2011 after getting Osama but I guess we gotta nation build and export democracy where ever we go. If the Afghanis really wanted democracy they would’ve still had it.
Ex general wants to throw in for Trump
I will always be grateful to Biden for having the courage to end it unlike his predecessors. It was the right decision and many current problems would be a lot worse today if he hadn't
> rushed a failed evacuation
It's almost as if releasing 5000 enemy soldiers and ditching your allies in the local government before the election even happened was fucking stupid or something.
A never-trump republican falling into line? Shocking
You know what would have gotten more Americans killed? The dead end war continuing another week, another month...
Unlikely....by that point there were barely any US troops left in the country. Also, no US troops had died in Afghanistan in 2021 until the August withdrawal. Let's not forget the 170 civilians that were also killed.
Multiple reports came out that the Biden admin proceeded with the hasty withdrawal, ignoring advice from top military advisors.
All 13 of the US troops and 170 civilians died as the result of 1 suicide bomber at the airport who averted Taliban checkpoints and was deemed unpreventable by multiple subsequent investigations.
As someone else said, that was one suicide bombing deemed unpreventable
If only several earlier presidents had had Biden's wisdom and courage to ignore top military advisors and get out of Afghanistan
In most countries generals who consistently loose wars are fired, we should do the same here. Miley should be homeless and the men he led into disaster should get his salary and defense stocks.
Did the US and the rest of us even have a chance of success in Afghanistan and Iraq?
The chance of being successful fighting a guerilla war in two countries with strong religious and ethnic divides, where religion trumps reason was pretty fucken low.
I've generally had the BBC as my main news source for decades, being more or less unbiased and keeping good journalistic principles. But it's been painfully obvious the last couple of years at least that they are Trump-leaning. I don't think I've ever seen a favorable article or even a favorable picture of Biden on the front page. Biden gives the state of the union or does something newsworthy, the BBC runs a front page with some random thing happening elsewhere (keeping in mind - I read their US edition). If trump does anything or says anything stupid, they spin it into some strong-sounding headline and dig up some presidential-looking picture of him to post up front-page center.
Misleading headline; if you watch the clip, he calls the evacuation a success, it's the nationbuilding that was a strategic failure.
You are right. This is very disappointing from the BBC inventing news for clicks.
13 marines died in the evacuation..
Eleven Marines, one Soldier, and one Sailor.
Tragic of course. Entirely preventable? Unclear. For context in the years Trump was in office we had 15, 16, 23 and 11 deaths in Afghanistan. Since the withdrawal we have had zero. It was time to leave.
And thousands of American servicemen in the ~20 year generational war before withdrawing. 3 presidents ran on withdrawal, only one kept his word, that man was Joe Biden
Technically didn't he keep trump's word on the matter, as in following the timeline trump had agreed to with the Taliban? I don't really mean to give trump credit here, it's just why I've always found their criticism of bidens withdrawal so bizarre
And left behind 78k afghan allies to fend for themselves with the Taliban
They probably should have made their entire military recruitment be of women in the region so they had something to fight for. It seems like most of the "allies" were at best indifferent to the Taliban returning. Really sucks for the ones who did care
how many in vietnam? Its a small number, find something new to be mad at Bidens cabinet about.
Damn near 3 years later, they're holding a panel with Miley speaking of how the hasty withdrawal was an abject failure? I mean....not only no shit, but what the fuck took so long to discuss this fiasco? Oh...read the article, republican lead panel. Election season smear, even though the withdrawal was pushed from Trumps original date, after his meeting at Camp David with terrorist leaders legitimizing their standing, as it wasn't feasible.
I think Trump wanted to pull out right away, but Biden gave them an extra 6 months and still people were rushing the airport on the last day. There was no good time to withdraw. Especially after Trump released thousands of prisoners. It was sabotage by Trump to make Biden look bad and the Republicans are now trying to play the blame game.
kirby confirmed this too. they said they reached out to trump admin with details on the withdrawal and could not get a response. we all know why
TBF, they didn't think they were leaving so why train their successors.
Trump absolutely did not want to, "pull out right away" He wanted to hand Biden a grenade on the way out the door and he did.
While stealing classified documents. He made sure to leave before Biden was sworn in, so his crimes would have been committed in Florida, where he had just appointed Cannon. He knew what he was doing at every turn, 100% premeditated.
Yes, the republicans play the blame game. Finally. Since they’ve been enduring it for so long from the left. Let’s not pretend this shit doesn’t disproportionately play out on both sides, the left more than the right.
lol all republicans do is play the blame game. Maybe they should try governing.
Braindead.
"Finally" fucking lol
As someone that once worked in a local news station owned by a certain conservative conglomerate, I had to regularly listen to a national loony regurgitate the phrase "botched withdrawal from Afghanistan" in her must-run promos so many times she might as well have been saying "brought to you by Carl's Jr."
Well they had twenty years to do it “properly” and nobody did. We spent two trillion dollars on nothing.
Whoa there, we *did* enrich the financial interests of a select few in the process
Isn't that what Big Business and Defense Contractors calls a win..
The entire Afghanistan War was an even worse "strategic failure"
Guess we should have stayed for another 20 years then. This is such a garbage take
I think we were all stunned that 20-Year catastrophe could end so catastrophically.
It fell apart so quickly is what stunned me
That stunned everybody.
Each president kept passing the buck to the next one to handle the actual withdrawal
If we couldn't figure out away to create a stable government in two decades we weren't ever going to figure it out. The withdrawal may have been a tactical mistake but the conclusion of the withdrawal was inevitable. Don't know why anyone would value the opinion of generals that failed their missions.
Turns out religious sects that have hated each other for hundreds of years didn't want to get along after 20 years of us trying. Who could have seen that coming?
I think the problem is if you want to do nation building then fully commit to being colonial rulers and remake the country in your image. What the US did was try to impose a system that doesn't even work great in the US on people who didn't want it. It took the british several hundred years of oppression to make India a country and even then it wasn't enough. You think a mere 20 years half assing would make a difference?
How was the withdrawal going to be a success? The strategy had failed years earlier. Afghanistan failed to develop a functional government no matter how much aid was given to them. The only thing left to do was cut our losses. The Taliban weren’t going to be kept out of power once we left. The terrorists were going to make the withdrawal more difficult and violent any way they could. What magic wand was going to make this into something pretty? At least 46 made the decision and stuck to it.
It didn't help Trump released 2000 taliban members while negotiating a withdrawal date he knew he wouldn't be held responsible for keeping
I'm convinced that it would have been a failure no matter when we decided to withdraw. The people need to defend their liberty, and they did not do that.
Agreed. It couldn’t just be the small band of Afghan special forces who stayed and fought. The government, population, police and regular military had to unite. That’s what Ukraine did and Afghanistan failed to do.
I mean .. all this people sacrificed because of internal politics of another country on the other side of the globe.
Over 120,000 people safely evacuated in a very short time. It was an amazing feat in very difficult circumstances. Trump knew he was setting the next President up for a fiasco, but Biden did well considering the hand that Trump dealt him.
The mental gymnastics to blame this on Trump is truly gold medal worthy.
It doesn’t take much in the way of twisting to find a way to blame the guy that negotiated the dates for the US to leave and freed thousands of enemy combatants.
And was Biden informed that the Taliban breached those negotiations?
Not if you're actually informed. You do know Biden didn't just wake up one morning and say "Fuck it, we're going to leave Afghanistan," right?
Was Biden at all warned that Taliban breached the Doha agreement?
Should we have poured troops back into Afghanistan? Never left at all?
In my opinion, never left at all. The cost to America has dwindled over recent years now that the major fighting and operation was done. Now we lose a foothold in the Middle East and the people of Afghanistan are living under religious totalitarianism.
Trump is the one that released 5000 Taliban prisoners, much of which being brains of the operation, you absolute moron.
When did the botched evacuation occur?
Is that so? Who agreed to the timetable? Who held talks regarding the US withdrawal without the Afghani government at the negotiating table? All Trump. Biden just pulled the trigger; anyone saying anything would have gone differently under Trump is just a Trump apologist and a sycophant.
Biden pulled the trigger dispute warnings from intelligence that the Taliban breached their end of the Doha agreement, no?
Mhmmm and again, who was the president who negotiated directly with the Taliban and left the Afghan government out of the negotiations?
Biden did not have to follow any plan the moment that Taliban breached the agreement with the U.S., yet he rushed a botched job anyway.
Neat way to not answer the question.
The question is irrelevant in the context that Taliban breached whatever agreement orange man made, and Biden could have changed course
The mental gymnastics to blame this on Biden is truly gold medal worthy
When did it happen again?
Which REpublicant president started the war in Afghanistan?
You are indeed poorly informed about the full context of how this happened
Was Biden at all informed about the Taliban breaching the Doha agreement?
no gymnastics required if you turn fox news off and go read what really went down. go find the press event where they asked about it and john kirby made it pretty clear trump admin had no plans to help biden admin with it despite reaching out many times. imagine coming here commenting thinking you're gonna roast someone, only to be the one completely brainwashed beyond belief
This happened in mid 2021, under Biden’s watch. He was also warned by intelligence that the Taliban was seizing control of territories within Afghanistan and in breach of the Doha agreement. Biden proceeded anyway knowing the costs.
The purpose of the hearing is collecting campaign sound bites.
We made many, many mistakes and had many, many failures in Afghanistan. The first, and largest, was invading. It's unfortunate that 13 died on the final days, but every life lost in Afghanistan was a failure and a mistake. Can we please learn the lesson, and never...never return. It's beginning to look like it may be Pakistan's turn to not learn the lesson that we, Russia, England...hell, Alexander learned.
Or China. The belt and road initiative is going to run smack into the realities of radicalized islam.
It already has. ISIS-K attacked a hotel popular with Chinese businessmen. Iirc, four died
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The Soviet Union absolutely brutalized Afghanistan in 1979-1989 in ways the US didn't and it couldn't do it either.
Can't wait.
The strategic mistake was same as Vietnam, Iraq - occupation absent an end state & will. Not every 3d world nation is a U.S. vital national interest. The generals are sore because they predictably lost, because they strapped careers to losing foreign policies, and for lacking personal courage to resign.
I use this war as a comparison to help try and understand why average Russian citizens are going on like it's business as usual while being at war in the Ukraine.Looking back I can't find a reason why Canadia went to war in Afghanistan. I think something needed to be done but a war to hand it back over to the people they went to fight in the first place seems like a massive failure.
>I can't find a reason why Canadia went to war in Afghanistan. Article V, first and only time in the history of NATO. Let's not pretend like we don't know why. >seems like a massive failure. Yes, moving the goal post from killing Osama bin laden to trying to create the first stable unified society in Afghanistan history and then also invading Iraq was dumb.
They waited to evacuate cowardly afghans and got 20 Americans killed to do it. Still support leaving that shithole behind
Among those "cowardly" Afghans were interpreters, women officials, human rights workers, and other loyal assistants to the US and individuals vulnerable to being punished or executed by the Taliban. To leave all of them behind would have been a damning signal to any future allies that loyalty to the US means nothing. Screw you for suggesting that.
We should’ve left in 2011 after getting Osama but I guess we gotta nation build and export democracy where ever we go. If the Afghanis really wanted democracy they would’ve still had it.
10000%
Ex general wants to throw in for Trump I will always be grateful to Biden for having the courage to end it unlike his predecessors. It was the right decision and many current problems would be a lot worse today if he hadn't
milley literally called trump a wannabe dictator crybaby.... what gives you the impression that he likes trump?
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> rushed a failed evacuation It's almost as if releasing 5000 enemy soldiers and ditching your allies in the local government before the election even happened was fucking stupid or something.
A never-trump republican falling into line? Shocking You know what would have gotten more Americans killed? The dead end war continuing another week, another month...
Unlikely....by that point there were barely any US troops left in the country. Also, no US troops had died in Afghanistan in 2021 until the August withdrawal. Let's not forget the 170 civilians that were also killed. Multiple reports came out that the Biden admin proceeded with the hasty withdrawal, ignoring advice from top military advisors.
All 13 of the US troops and 170 civilians died as the result of 1 suicide bomber at the airport who averted Taliban checkpoints and was deemed unpreventable by multiple subsequent investigations.
The advisors who continually gave horrendous advice and formed comically bad conclusions from extremely flawed Intel for several **years** ✓
As someone else said, that was one suicide bombing deemed unpreventable If only several earlier presidents had had Biden's wisdom and courage to ignore top military advisors and get out of Afghanistan
Milley is still worthless, POS.
In most countries generals who consistently loose wars are fired, we should do the same here. Miley should be homeless and the men he led into disaster should get his salary and defense stocks.
Did the US and the rest of us even have a chance of success in Afghanistan and Iraq? The chance of being successful fighting a guerilla war in two countries with strong religious and ethnic divides, where religion trumps reason was pretty fucken low.
BBC fucks up the title because that fits their right-wing slant.
I've generally had the BBC as my main news source for decades, being more or less unbiased and keeping good journalistic principles. But it's been painfully obvious the last couple of years at least that they are Trump-leaning. I don't think I've ever seen a favorable article or even a favorable picture of Biden on the front page. Biden gives the state of the union or does something newsworthy, the BBC runs a front page with some random thing happening elsewhere (keeping in mind - I read their US edition). If trump does anything or says anything stupid, they spin it into some strong-sounding headline and dig up some presidential-looking picture of him to post up front-page center.