There’s a lot of loony and crazy in this thread but there is also an active mission in Kabul to evacuate tens of thousands of people and it seems to be moving pretty well. Also, there’s a lot of notice that Kabul itself seems to be a much safer city right now with reporters able to move relatively freely. No. I don’t expect this to be the case going forward too much longer but for now it’s a lucky break that the Taliban are looking to get us out as much as we are looking to get out.
New York Times sticks it up Biden's bo-bo. Never a good sign if you are a dem. Intelligence Warned of Afghan Military Collapse, Despite Biden’s Assurances Even as the president was telling the public that Kabul was unlikely to fall, intelligence assessments painted a grimmer picture. Mark Mazzetti, Julian E. Barnes and Adam Goldman Aug. 17, 2021Updated 1:13 p.m. ET WASHINGTON — Classified assessments by American spy agencies over the summer painted an increasingly grim picture of the prospect of a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan and warned of the rapid collapse of the Afghan military, even as President Biden and his advisers said publicly that was unlikely to happen as quickly, according to current and former American government officials. By July, many intelligence reports grew more pessimistic, questioning whether any Afghan security forces would muster serious resistance and whether the government could hold on in Kabul, the capital. President Biden said on July 8 that the Afghan government was unlikely to fall and that there would be no chaotic evacuations of Americans similar to the end of the Vietnam War. The drumbeat of warnings over the summer raise questions about why Biden administration officials, and military planners in Afghanistan, seemed ill-prepared to deal with the Taliban’s final push into Kabul, including a failure to ensure security at the main airport and rushing thousands more troops back to the country to protect the United States’ final exit. One report in July — as dozens of Afghan districts were falling and Taliban fighters were laying siege to several major cities — laid out the growing risks to Kabul, noting that the Afghan government was unprepared for a Taliban assault, according to a person familiar with the intelligence. Special offer: Subscribe for $1 a week. But key American decisions were made long before July, when the consensus among intelligence agencies was that the Afghan government could hang on for as long as two years, which would have left ample time for an orderly exit. On April 27, when the State Department ordered the departure of nonessential personnel from the embassy in Kabul, the overall intelligence assessment was still that a Taliban takeover was at least 18 months away, according to administration officials. One senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the classified intelligence reports, said that even by July, as the situation grew more volatile, intelligence agencies never offered a clear prediction of an imminent Taliban takeover. The official said their assessments were also not given a “high confidence” judgment, the agencies’ highest level of certainty. As late as a week before Kabul’s fall, the overall intelligence analysis was that a Taliban takeover was not yet inevitable, the official said. Spokeswomen for the C.I.A. and the director of national intelligence declined to discuss the assessments given to the White House. But intelligence officials acknowledged that their agencies’ analysis had been sober and that the assessments had changed in recent weeks and months. During his speech on Monday, Mr. Biden said that his administration “planned for every contingency” in Afghanistan but that the situation “did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated.” Facing clear evidence of the collapse of Afghan forces, American officials have begun to cast blame internally, including statements from the White House that have suggested an intelligence failure. Such finger-pointing often occurs after major national security breakdowns, but it will take weeks or months for a more complete picture to emerge of the decision-making in the Biden administration that led to the chaos in Kabul in recent days. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/17/us/politics/afghanistan-biden-administration.html
Wallet: Biden chose a hurried withdrawal that caused a mess we are facing today Also Wallet: Trump, who did a great job with a pandemic, surely would've done a great job with an even earlier withdrawal deadline.
Trump definitely wanted them out earlier before the spring summer fighting season began but he was not there to do it obviously. Every military intelligence person - whether under Trump or Biden- knows that the withdrawal needed to take place in the winter while most Taliban were either in Pakistan or by winter conditions. No President would withdraw in the summer unless he was a complete idiot. Oh wait. In addition, no president or military person with half a brain cell would withdraw troops and give away the military bases to the enemy before withdrawing American personnel and civilian allies. No one, except a complete fucking idiot.
Actually, no. You need to stop watching Russian state television. You’re turning into a little here4corpses yourself. It’s ok to not hope for dead Americans. There’s lots and lots of accounts of Americans and Afghans being allowed to move freely to the airbase for evac now. As I said, we need a few weeks of this.