Today's the day. :amerikkka-clap: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED :ameri
lmao CNN literally has a helicopter escaping from a roof on their frontpage, HAHAHAHA :matt-jokerfied:
We had to create the Mujaheddin. Otherwise the Soviets and PDPA would have gone in there with their feminism and given women equal rights. And think of the homefront. Why would any American be proud of their dying country if it wasn't attacked on 9/11? We needed to create every condition for 9/11 so that we could invade Afghanistan and give women equal rights.
Absolute insanity the whole story. The fact that the Afghanistan government is going down without any sort of fight is just mind-blowing to me, a Brit that grew up on BBC propoganda.
It really is impressive just how quickly the country fell apart. All of that time and money spent training ANA forces and they just rolled over instantly.
I remember as a kid hearing on BBC World Service the first US-backed Afghan Government (hilariously called "Islamic State") go down as the Taliban took Kabul. What would become the Northern Alliance really gave them hell.
First time as tragedy, second as Farce
You, a pleb: this was about channeling money to private military contractors :cheems:
Me, ascendant: this is kicking out 20-year lease renters, because no eviction moratorium in afghanistan, taliban are landlords :swole-doge:
The libs will use this whole episode to defend future Western interventions. "Look how bad things can get without US involvement. We should intervene more!" Of course, they forget that the region is so fucked because of Western interventions, going back to at least WWI.
Good thing we didn't traumatise multiple generations of children across an entire region and then give them an iconic image of America abandoning them by helicopter. If we did that, imagine how many terrorists that would create. We'd just have to go to war in response to another single attack.
what if they do a 9/11 sequel, but like times 10?
I remember reading somewhere (no idea where, or how much if it is true or just conspiracy theory) that the original plan for 9/11 attacks was to have like 15 separate attacks all across the country at the same time
Wait, wasn't there an article posted here less than 8 hours ago about how it was assumed that the Taliban would take 3 days to reach Kabul? They didn't even make it one, Jesus Christ. Pretty mad to think that the Afghanistan war, which has been going on my entire life, is literally older than me, will be coming to an official end within the next week or so
will be coming to an official end
Imagine it's 2025 and President DeSantis (or equivalent GOP ghoul) decides we need to go war again against the Taliban (in other words Afghanistan). We gotta go back to remove the terrorist nests.
This time the US will win - guaranteed win - because we'll use as many nukes as necessary.
DeSantis will be campaigning for an invasion of Cuba. No American will remember Afghanistan exists once Twitter and Google shut down all mention of it for fear of alienating the next administration.
Wait, wasn’t there an article posted here less than 8 hours ago about how it was assumed that the Taliban would take 3 days to reach Kabul?
We went from 3 months to a month to 3 days to less than a day
Maybe I'm being naive, but at this point the only alternative was a long and painful siege, right? I hope the transfer of power stays peaceful, the Afghan people have been through enough
From what I've read keeping an eye on military communities, Kabul was the only city that was properly hardened with defensive lines. There was some faith that the government could consolidate with local militias in an anti-Taliban stronghold that they immediately abandoned, but anyone who believed in the ANA for some reason listed Kabul as the city that could hold them off.
Ground reports suggest that Kabul's only active defense was a piano suspended above a plate with a big roast turkey on it. Taliban commanders did not approach despite the sign saying "free turkey".
I also read that there were some mousetraps with cheese set up, but the Taliban kept grabbing the cheese using a stick while using a second stick to safely activate the traps.
I also read that one ANA commander was so angry that the traps didn't work that his face turned red and steam blew out of his ears.
So much time was wasted painting tunnels onto mountains which could have been spent digging trenches. The highway to Kabul was filled with signs redirecting the Taliban to Albuquerque but they had GPS and there's just that one highway.
Seems like the Afghan government was the only military force in the country not funded by the US. I just hope it ends and the Yankees go the fuck home
Wasn't there various corruption scandals where whole military/police units and training bases just didn't exist and the money went straight into the propped up Afghan government's pocket?
The Taliban have achieved something considered impossible. Anti-Roadrunner intel.
Roadrunner is now a confirmed Taliban asset. How else could he have known if he wasn't receiving their intel reports?
I think they all did the same gags. He just did it to Elmer Fudd. I like to imagine the ANA as Wiley Coyote because coyotes are shit wolves that get stomped to death by donkeys.
Hopefully my mistake was simply a sleepy brain fart. If not - it could be a symptom of early onset senility. I'm sure it's not that. By the way - where are my glasses - have you seen them?
Oh, it's okay. I'm wearing them.
coyotes are shit wolves
Oof - that's harsh!
Not that I wanted the war and occupation to continue, but I feel really, really bad for the people of Afghanistan with the prospect of Taliban rule approaching. If only the Watan party was militarized....
I'm curious to see if it will be as bad as Yemen or something more akin to Syria's exodus/interventions. Nobody really needs to give a shit about Yemen geopolitically, apart from the piracy threat they already face from Somalia in that area, while OPEC is strategically important to them. Afghanistan's location makes stability there important to all of its regional neighbours. That's Pakistan's support of the Taliban, China's belt-and-road infrastructure, and India's militarism all being dangled over their heads on top of any international aid. Everyone has some reason to negotiate with, influence, or undermine the Taliban while it's at its most unstable.
I do honestly think whether the Taliban infiltrated the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police (or secretly recruited soldiers and officers) and when the time came they sabotaged any kind of meaningful attempt to stand their ground and/or basically just deserted... or soldiers and officers don't view the Taliban as their ultimate enemy, perhaps the US organized an army without regarding internal ethnic, religious and political divisions, expecting them to have some sort of military cohesion out of nowhere.
I'm asking that because it seems that this is a repeat of the Iraqi Army that was just steamrolled by Daesh in the opening stages of the war, some Iraqis were sent to fight to areas they don't have any personal connection to, I know that soldiers fled from Mosul because "Holy shit I'm not going to die here, this isn't my community, they are not even my people", maybe this is happening again. I don't think neither were particularly motivated to fight their respective enemies, for a variety of reasons, low morale, insanely corrupt officers and high command, local ethnic and political differences undermining cohesion and maybe, for them, it's just not worth it, maybe the Taliban do make sense for some of them.
i know several provincial governors who apparently just up and handed the Taliban the keys to the city in exchange for letting them flee to Kabul or actually cut a deal with the Taliban to join them. Everyone in Afghanistan, especially the ANA soldiers, know the government is a dead horse and they don't want to be caught hitched to it.
Everyone in Afghanistan, especially the ANA soldiers, know the government is a dead horse and they don’t want to be caught hitched to it.
This is exactly it. When the most optimistic reports are "lol they're fucked in 90 days," you can either spend weeks fighting and get executed at the end or you can surrender right now and at least have a shot. There's no illusion that you're going to be able to win.
Maybe it professionalised in recent years, but I heard nothing positive about the ANA when deployments were higher and there were more first-hand accounts. Individual soldiers might be recklessly brave but most were minutemen conscripts using it as a job corps. They'd smoke heroin and hash on post and were considered less professional than the Iraqi forces we were outfitting. Afghanistan doesn't really have a national ethnic identity so it's a paycheque for frustrated young men facing an enemy that could shoot them or give them an incel utopia. When even the president is too much of a coward to Allende himself for any kind of national project, even without being infiltrated there's nothing for them to fight for.
Gosh darn it, we had something so special planned for September 11!
