I saw that video and all I can say is it's horrific. I can only imagine the pure desperation that people are feeling to take those kinds of risks.
I had 9/11 flashback videos of people jumping, that's the level of despair. People would rather risk certain death clutching to a plane midflight, then be where they are, where it would be much much worse.
The Taliban has been skinning people alive.
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I wonder if this also forces a reckoning in the US government regarding the status of Pakistan as an ally.
Pakistan has always been a ####ty ally to the West. Basically, they are just used for their geographical position. As a side effect of this, India has also pushed closer to Russia.
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"A pessimist thinks things can't get any worse. An optimist knows they can."
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What is your source for this remark? Enough atrocities are happening in Afghanistan right now that you don’t need to escalate feelings with misleading comments. I did a quick google search and one result came up for Afghanistan from 2016.
There might still be a sliver of hope. Only the Panjshir has not surrendered to the Taliban. The Mujahadeen are standing firm (so far) under Ahmad Massoud. It should be noted that neither the Soviets nor Taliban conquered the Panjshir. Follow the Lion! Whether Ahmad can live up to his father's reputation remains to be seen, but so far he is up to the challenge.
Baghlan Parwan Kapisa's military forces all entered the Panjshir Valley.
There are also unaccounted for ANA special forces troops as well as the ANA who were able to escape to Iran and Uzbekistan. There are sufficient numbers to launch an insurgency.
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"If you do not know what you are doing, neither does your enemy."
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Shut down the pipeline, destroying tens of thousands of US jobs and destroying its energy independence, meanwhile sending funds to the middle east for oil and guess what happens?
Such brilliant planning and leadership.
Thanks Uncle Joe! You ####ing dip####.
Biden withdrew 2500 troops who were mostly based in Kabul, that's it, they weren't holding back the Taliban, the threat of massive US retaliation was what was holding them back, Trump scrapped that
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This is eerily similar to the end of the Vietnam war. I’d highly highly recommend the documentary The Last Days in Vietnam if anyone wants a parallel to the logistics and difficult decisions going on as I type this. It’s surprisingly un political, just focusing on the human element of a large scale evacuation.
In the months leading up to this, how do you balance making evacuation plans and lists without completely undermining support and troop morale?
Where do you draw the line on who to save, and who to leave behind?
Among the 100s of thousands of claims, how do you verify who legitimately helped Canada and who are most at risk?
The usual armchair experts on here make it sound so easy. Logistically this has been a nightmare, even months before the fall of Kabul.
I don’t have an answer to any of these questions. Do you?
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There might still be a sliver of hope. Only the Panjshir has not surrendered to the Taliban. The Mujahadeen are standing firm (so far) under Ahmad Massoud. It should be noted that neither the Soviets nor Taliban conquered the Panjshir. Follow the Lion! Whether Ahmad can live up to his father's reputation remains to be seen, but so far he is up to the challenge.
There are also unaccounted for ANA special forces troops as well as the ANA who were able to escape to Iran and Uzbekistan. There are sufficient numbers to launch an insurgency.
I admit I know nothing of the area. Is the Panjshir region moderate and that's why the oppose the Taliban?
Afghanistan: We Never Learn
As the Taliban waltzes into Kabul, the look of surprise on the faces of top officials should frighten us most of all
Matt Taibbi 1 hr ago
Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, when asked months ago about the possibility that there might be a “significant deterioration” of the security picture in Afghanistan once the United States withdrew its forces, said, “I don’t think it’s going to be something that happens from a Friday to a Monday.”
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Alex Salvi
@alexsalvinews
Secretary of State Blinken (July 7th):
“We are not withdrawing, we are staying, the embassy is staying, our programs are staying … If there is a significant deterioration in security … I don’t think it’s going to be something that happens from a Friday to a Monday.”
August 15th 2021
1,487 Retweets2,439 Likes
Blinken’s Nostradamus moment was somehow one-upped by that of his boss, Joe Biden, who on July 8th had the following exchange with press:
Q: Your own intelligence community has assessed that the Afghan government will likely collapse.
BIDEN: That is not true, they did not reach that conclusion… There is going to be no circumstance where you see people lifted off the roof of an embassy… The likelihood that you’re going to see the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.
Down to their own stunningly (perfectly?) inaccurate mis-predictions of what would take place once our military forces left the country, Biden administration officials could not have scripted a worse ending to the twenty-year disaster that has been our occupation of Afghanistan.
Every image coming out of Afghanistan this past weekend was an advertisement for the incompetence, arrogance, and double-dealing nature of American foreign policy leaders. Scenes of military dogs being evacuated while our troops fire weapons in the air to disperse humans desperate for a seat out of the country will force every theoretical future ally to think twice about partnering with us:
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ABC News
@ABC
U.S. military dogs in Kabul evacuated from the city’s airport among other officials as Taliban takes control of Afghanistan.
abcn.ws/3g9h6JF
August 16th 2021
488 Retweets1,952 Likes
News that the military was forced to re-deploy troops to Afghanistan in order to ensure an “orderly and safe” withdrawal is being met with justifiable eye-rolling worldwide. It’s a little late for that:
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Mujtaba Haris
@mujtaba_haris
Afghans are running after C130 aircraft without any fear of being hurts.
Chaos, fare and desperate
Darkest days of history in humanity!
Afghan Lives no matter
August 16th 2021
The pattern is always the same. We go to places we’re not welcome, tell the public a confounding political problem can be solved militarily, and lie about our motives in occupying the country to boot. Then we pick a local civilian political authority to back that inevitably proves to be corrupt and repressive, increasing local antagonism toward the American presence.
In response to those increasing levels of antagonism, we then ramp up our financial, political, and military commitment to the mission, which in turn heightens the level of resistance, leading to greater losses in lives and treasure. As the cycle worsens, the government systematically accelerates the lies to the public about our level of “progress.”
Throughout, we make false assurances of security that are believed by significant numbers of local civilians, guaranteeing they will later either become refugees or targets for retribution as collaborators. Meanwhile, financial incentives for contractors, along with political disincentives to admission of failure, prolong the mission.
This all goes on for so long that the lies become institutionalized, believed not only by press contracted to deliver the propaganda (CBS’s David Martin this weekend saying with a straight face, “Everybody is surprised by the speed of this collapse” was typical), but even by the bureaucrats who concocted the deceptions in the first place.
The look of genuine shock on the face of Tony Blinken this weekend as he jousted with Jake Tapper about Biden’s comments from July should tell people around the world something important about the United States: in addition to all the other things about us that are dangerous, we lack self-knowledge.
Even deep inside the machine of American power, where everyone paying even a modicum of attention over the last twenty years should have known Kabul would fall in a heartbeat, they still believe their own legends. Which means this will happen again, and probably sooner rather than later.
Pakistan has always been a ####ty ally to the West. Basically, they are just used for their geographical position. As a side effect of this, India has also pushed closer to Russia.
Colonization isn’t always the worst thing eh.
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No, no…I’m not sloppy, or lazy. This is a sign of the boredom.
No... this is what a hastily thought out retreat from a country that had massive insurgent elements looks like.
Ending a war and putting in the proper elements to modernize and stabilize the country would have looked a lot more like Korea, Japan, or Germany... but Afghanistan had 50 years of prior war, religious tribalism, no clear sense of national identity, and urban/rural divide that would have taken generations to fix in a stable modernized society.
Americans did not have the political will to properly do this longer term since it would have required a long term permanent military presence and significant investment capital. There was no real driving force or huge enemy to motivate this type of investment nor resources they could gain from Afghanistan. Not to mention Trump or not talking about the US should never have been in there in the first place.
What is your source for this remark? Enough atrocities are happening in Afghanistan right now that you don’t need to escalate feelings with misleading comments. I did a quick google search and one result came up for Afghanistan from 2016.
“My friend was able to give me a play-by-play over the next 48 hours until he disappeared from the communications medium we were using,” Maloney related in a 900-word account of his Afghanistan observations for Legion Magazine.
“‘What else is happening,’ I asked him. The Taliban are skinning captured police alive before killing them. ‘How do you know?’ We can hear them die.
“My comfortable life in Canada, one that I thought I had earned from years of going back and forth to Afghanistan risking my existence in pursuit of my task, came crashing to a halt.”
In Spin Boldak, Kandahar, the Taliban massacred dozens of civilians in revenge killings. These murders could constitute war crimes; they must be investigated & those Taliban fighters or commanders responsible held accountable.
Do you seriously think that every revenge killing as part of a massacre is being performed as a merciful execution?
There's tweets from Afghanis who lost loved ones, including one from the Afghani woman I posted (her cousin was killed despite assurances from the Taliban).
Dead men tell no tales, as we say.
If we didn't have hundreds of phones showing people falling from the planes and going viral on social media, that would have been silenced by the media most likely and passed along as hearsay and fake news. The video of the 2 dead Afghanis shot dead at the airport was dismissed until the Pentagon confirmed the 2 killings.
People aren't rushing planes and falling to their deaths in despair because the Taliban is known to be merciful.
I admit I know nothing of the area. Is the Panjshir region moderate and that's why the oppose the Taliban?
It's Tajik ethnically and they're moderate compared to the Taliban. Amad Shah Massoud opposed the Taliban's fundamentalist interpretation of Islam. He was a leader the people of Panjshir followed.
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"If you do not know what you are doing, neither does your enemy."
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“You know they do this as punishment as shown in the well publicized 2016 killing, and you are actually questioning if they are doing it?”
I’m not questioning that atrocities are happening in Afghanistan. I was the one to post the link regarding a flaying from 2016. Are there many people being skinned alive currently as your post suggests? You have not posted any accounts aside from one that is speculation based on what people have heard. What I do question is your motivation for suggesting that skinning people alive is a common occurrence and is happening now. When I read your comment, it created a heightened sense of anxiety and fear for what is happening there. I suspect that is what you were after.
“You know they do this as punishment as shown in the well publicized 2016 killing, and you are actually questioning if they are doing it?”
I’m not questioning that atrocities are happening in Afghanistan. I was the one to post the link regarding a flaying from 2016. Are there many people being skinned alive currently as your post suggests? You have not posted any accounts aside from one that is speculation based on what people have heard. What I do question is your motivation for suggesting that skinning people alive is a common occurrence and is happening now. When I read your comment, it created a heightened sense of anxiety and fear for what is happening there. I suspect that is what you were after.
I don't think I need to do that when people are literally falling from planes to escape the Taliban instead of meeting their fate at their hands.
You can tell them that they are just experiencing a heightened sense of anxiety and fear and should calm down.
[QUOTE=In the months leading up to this, how do you balance making evacuation plans and lists without completely undermining support and troop morale?
Where do you draw the line on who to save, and who to leave behind?
Among the 100s of thousands of claims, how do you verify who legitimately helped Canada and who are most at risk?
The usual armchair experts on here make it sound so easy. Logistically this has been a nightmare, even months before the fall of Kabul.
I don’t have an answer to any of these questions. Do you?[/QUOTE]
The thing about this situation that angers me is that the allies didn’t have months to make arrangements. They had two decades. During those years, did the governments fail to maintain records of who worked as interpreters, etc? Surely, the Canadian government knows who helped our forces. I’m sure the Afghans who helped us and didn’t get out just got a death sentence.
As to who to save and who to leave behind, it is difficult. My first thought is that the immediate families of those who aided us would have been given visas. Even with that, I would assume the taliban would target the extended families.
Given the state of Afghanistan now, I have no idea how you would locate those who helped our forces or how to evacuate them.
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