[jimjam]

“Our secretary of state signed a surrender agreement with the Taliban,” Mr. Trump’s second national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, said of Mr. Pompeo during a podcast interview with the journalist Bari Weiss on Wednesday. “This collapse goes back to the capitulation agreement of 2020. The Taliban didn’t defeat us. We defeated ourselves.”



Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state at the time, meeting with the Taliban’s chief negotiator, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, in November.

[Politics_Observer]

@jimjam

I seriously doubt these generals are "lobbyists" for the military industrial complex. They are just military professionals, many of which attended the military academies like West Point. Many of them are very well educated attending prestigious institutions such as Harvard University, Princeton and Yale to earn Masters degrees. However, there has also been times when generals try to "box in" a President like JFK during the Cuban Missile Crisis and this could have happened as well a few times here in the recent wars because nobody wants to lose after a bad foreign policy decision is made.

Civilian leaders shouldn't be "boxed in" by the generals and they should also hear out BOTH the generals and other experts in the field and not just outright ignore or disregard such advice which has happened too. Sometimes the generals and in many cases, the other professional experts, are right. No civilian decision maker should feel "boxed in" and no general or professional expert should be felt their advice was not even considered or listened to. But that has happened on both sides of the equation.

Edit: Now, after generals retire from military service, they might become a lobbyist for defense contracting companies but I can't say for sure if they do or not. I don't know. I don't know if there is any rules against that after the generals retire from military service.

[Godstud]

Trump was right to start the process to remove US troops from Afghanistan. Biden was right to continue the process. End of story.

Let the Afghans rule themselves, in the manner that they see fit.

[colliric]

How many stories do we read or hear or see about American soldiers at war compared to stories of refugees created by wars led by the United States? Civilian war stories disturb our mind-set of conducting perpetual warfare as an unquestioned American privilege. For Afghans, the war hasn’t ended simply because we, the United States, declared it to be over.

The only beneficiaries of the wars the U.S. has fought in my long lifetime are the generals and the war industry, and the generals have not suffered the consequences of their terrible advice to our presidents and the American people, not even to the point of creating adequate skepticism.

I bipartisanly agree completely.

[Skynet]

The decision during a huge famine to abandon Afghanistan was a coincidence, but comes in the right moment in the west.

The Taliban rule but 70% of their population has not enough to eat. So they have to negtioate.

[Skynet]

The Taliban rule but 70% of their population has not enough to eat. So they have to negtioate.

Error. They do not have to negotiate with the West, they have China.

They do not care about the hunger. In a country where many man are dead or cripples after a 40 Years of war, to forbid women to work means starvation for many families.
The Taliban are not good Sunni's! According to Sunna (way of prophets life)... Mohammeds wifes did not just work they traded... Burka is a theological innovation which is a big haram especially for follower of the school of Wahab, because the prophets women did not wear Burkas...

[colliric]

More loss porn still being released...

[Rich]

“Our secretary of state signed a surrender agreement with the Taliban,” Mr. Trump’s second national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, said of Mr. Pompeo during a podcast interview with the journalist Bari Weiss on Wednesday. “This collapse goes back to the capitulation agreement of 2020. The Taliban didn’t defeat us. We defeated ourselves.”

H.R McMaster is a moral coward and insists on living in the pathetic fantasy world where 9/11 had nothing to do with Islam. Both the Right and the Left were deeply infected with the disease of Islamophillia.

The failure to take on Saudi Arabia and Pakistan was cowardice pure and simple. We should have demanded the de-nuclerisation of Pakistan and unfettered access to investigators and unfettered access to our military forces to protect those investigators. Any failure to comply with any of our demands should have led to the rubbling of Pakistan and Saudis military and military industrial infrastructure. Of course its vital to learn the lessons of 1914. In sich situation where you are dealing with government backed, international so called terrorism, there must be no hesitation in making the demands and no hesitation in going to war if those demands are not meant. Austro-Hungry paid a terrible price for the hesitations and delays caused by their peace mongers in July 1914.

[late]

The failure to take on Saudi Arabia and Pakistan was cowardice pure and simple.

Way, way, way back in the real world, things are neither pure, or simple.

We have had a special relationship with the Saudi that started in WW2. We have a military base in their country. You see, they have people like you, but they're Arabs... So that base is always controversial. Attacking allies is not how you do it, at least in the real world.

Pakistan is a very different story. But it's a lengthy story, with lots of Republicans screwing up again and again, and I am tired of Republicans screwing up again and again.

[Rich]

Attacking allies is not how you do it, at least in the real world.

Saudi officials within the United States aided in the preparation for the 9/11 attacks. The investigations into Saudi complicity in 9/11 were making progress despite the repeated obstruction by deep state traitors inside the American government. But they were shut down by Barrack Hussein Obama.

[late]

Saudi officials within the United States aided in the preparation for the 9/11 attacks. The investigations into Saudi complicity in 9/11 were making progress despite the repeated obstruction by deep state traitors inside the American government. But they were shut down by Barrack Hussein Obama.

Man, you'll believe anything, which isn't helped by the fact you know nearly nothing...

[Rich]

Man, you'll believe anything, which isn't helped by the fact you know nearly nothing...

There are a number of posters who I would say overall have a greater historical / cultural knowledge base than myself. None of them would say I now nothing or nearly nothing. No those who say that inevitably expose their own ignorance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nnz0YRy6So
Even the most basic knowledge of so called terrorism, should enable one to recognise that 9/11 was a complex operation and an incredible feat to pull off. Anyone who knows anything about so called terrorism understands that terrorism is really, really, hard and that even seemingly very simple terrorist operations are in fact much more difficult to pull off with a reasonable chance of success than they appear to the uneducated eye. Bear in mind that one failure can lead to the rolling up of your whole network. There are many, many people in the world with the motivation to commit spectacular destructive terrorist attacks, for all sort of reasons, causes and grievances, but the fact that they are so relatively rare is testament to their difficulty. Germany's Red Army Faction might have looked like a bunch of incompetent fools compared to Al Qaeda, but even they couldn't have achieved what they did without support support from states.

Anyone who says there was no state involvement in 9/11, is either a liar, totally ignorant or a cretin.

[Rancid]

Trump was right to start the process to remove US troops from Afghanistan. Biden was right to continue the process. End of story.

Indeed. Basically, anyone that is still bothering with politicizing this as some sort of Biden failure is a fucking moron.

One of the rare things Trump got right.

[late]

Even the most basic knowledge of so called terrorism, should enable one to recognise that 9/11 was a complex operation and an incredible feat to pull off.

There was also a ton of luck.

Let's start with something even you might be able to understand, Bush2 was president. The Bush family had been close to the ruling Saudi family for over a generation. So, after it happened, Bush saw to it Saudi royalty got away safely. I don't have a problem with that. They also suppressed the investigation into links between the terrorists and some of the Saudi royalty. The Saudi religion is Wahhabism. There's about a thousand Saudi princes, the rulers want to maintain good relations with the West. But there are extreme Wahabbis among them, and they did fund all sorts of things we don't like. We don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater...

If you want something to b*tch about, Clinton and his people warned the incoming Bush crowd, and Bush himself, that their top priority should be OBL and his terrorists. They were ignored. When the country's top security guy warned the White House there was a situation, they were ignored. When he showed up at the White House and told them this was serious, he was sent to a small office in the Midwest and told never to contact the White House again.

And then we got 9/11/.

By the time Obama became president, all the big stuff had happened. If he was to open that can of worms, people would have gone nuts, and things would have gotten worse. The decisions had been made, he had no real choice but to maintain the policies his predecessor had instituted.