The Batlord

No. I mean you keep harping on this but what would your genius solution be to propping up a fake country?

How about not leaving?

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rubber soul

That's an easy one. Covid.

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jwb

i mean even if you are going to pull out you could have done so in a way where you aren't literally being chased out of the country while the entire region collapses in a matter of weeks lol. Even the iraq withdrawal and ****, even Trump's withdrawal from Syria went smoother than this lol. You keep ignoring this and acting as if there aren't gradients to how rapidly destabilizing and demoralizing such an operation can be, rather than treating it as some absurd binary where you either demand the perfect solution or else accept pretty much the worst case scenario as your only option.

I have a really hard time thinking people would have the same attitude about this mess if trump won and he was the one over seeing this nonsense.



honestly if we didn't leave nothing would've happened but the same old same old... This is definitely worse than that.

I don't think so.

The Batlord

No, you're ignoring the actual reality of Afghanistan to lazily spout vague nonsense about how it could have been done better, dawg. It wasn't a functioning state. It was being held together with American cash and drone strikes.

You remind me of how smug I was as an enlightened centrist right after I stopped being a right winger. Don't worry I'm sure your journey isn't over.

Yes it's better that we perpetually destabilize the region and oversee a civil war killing thousands every year so long as hate for us drives recruitment. If you care so much I'll pay for a one way ticket to Afghanistan so you can go fight the Taliban.

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jwb

I'm actually questioning whether it could've been done better, you're the one asserting that it's all or nothing and that the aftermath we see right now was 100% inevitable as long as we decided to leave the country at all. You have yet to substantiate that with anything beyond vague gestures to how ****ed the 20 year quagmire has been. But yeah, I'm the one being lazy by wondering whether maybe the **** I'm watching unfold couldn't have been handled better. Got it.



yes clearly my statement was very smug where as yours was as humble as Christ . Keep giving me free psychoanalysis though i don't mind. Though of course you get what you pay for.



alright. Buy the ticket pal. Sure it's going to take you a couple months to save up lol might be over by then bud

SGR

Of course, to jwb's main point, it most certainly could have been done better. Could it have gone worse? Most certainly. Hindsight is 20/20. The problem is that we don't really have enough information released publicly at this point to know why everything went down the way it did and to determine who's primarily at fault. Is it Biden's fault? Maybe/maybe not. His generals? Maybe/maybe not. If Trump's admin was heading this, would it have gone better? Maybe/maybe not. It's all speculation.

It will be used politically against Biden and it will be effective, at least to a degree and for some unknown amount of time. If Republicans are smart, and the public cares enough, they could frame it quite well as Biden's Jimmy Carter moment ala the Iran hostage crisis. I don't think anyone believes he's running for a second term, so whoever the Republican nominee is may not be able to use this event as a weapon against the Dem nominee unless said nominee is Kamala (unlikely, imo).

I agree with some semblance of what jwb is saying: This doesn't look good for Biden, at all. Keep an eye on his approval ratings released soon, they'll likely go down. Both partisan factions of the media are essentially admitting that this withdrawal was botched and has evolved into a disaster. Much of said media is pinning the blame on Biden. As president, that's the burden he bears, but whether it's actually his fault, or whether it was someone else's fault, or if any other president would've done better is just speculation.

Frownland

The media is full of warhawks because war is an excellent content farm that they don't want to lose.

jwb's right that Biden's poll numbers are dropping in response to this, I just think that its relevancy is outweighed by the positive of ending what's universally recognized as a pointless war. The fact that the pull out went to **** so quickly is just an affirmation of how useless prolonging it was.

If you want to talk horse races, I feel like this was a pretty good move to court the progressives in his party that oppose him.

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Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.

SGR

100%.

In addition to warhawks in the media, we've also got the warhawks in the military. Guaranteed that most of them didn't want to get out - at least the upper-ranks didn't. I would bet money that this had a negative effect on the success of the withdrawal efforts. i.e. the idea of "managing up" in a corporate environment

The Batlord

No you're just saying it could have been done better and using Biden's negative media portrayal as proof. How do you micromanage the sustainability of a country when it's own president abandons it the week of pulling out? What options were there to actually do anything short of sending a new invasion force?

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WWWP

he could have not pulled out all the elite troops and left everyone else behind to fend for themselves until the kids showed up to absorb the impact

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#DEMODFROWNLAND
#TERMLIMITSFORMODERATORS