4 ms·

Author of the piece has a lot of criticisms but no suggestions as to what anyone could have done better. Not a serious person.

by woah 5y ago

coldtea 5y ago
Ah, the old "but doctor, you don't have anything better to propose replacing the tumor with" argument...
- dragontamer 5y ago
  How about the opposite? A tacit understanding that the US pullout we desired so much results in this chaos? That the chaos is unavoidable, that the Taliban were going to take over the country one way or the other when we left. -------- Now we can wax poetic about the details: should the troops have stayed put? If so, how many? Clearly, the Taliban were ready to surge (and surge they did: they've overwhelmed the entirety of the Afghan forces in just a week). That means that boots on the ground fighting would have been left to American forces yet again, a proposition that no one wants either. Its not entirely wrong for us to state: well... at least Americans aren't getting attacked right now. --------- And as much as this blogpost wants to discuss "non-serious people", I tune into CSPAN and actually hear the people in power having the difficult discussions. Senators (even Republican ones) aren't blaming Biden for the collapse, they're mostly focused on the timing and the details of the pullout. Biden was wrong to pull out the troops a few months ago (his pullout was aimed at 9/11/2021). The current situation is: Biden evacuated a bunch of troops, and then suddenly had to send them back into Kabul to secure the airport. An understandable mistake at a high level (Biden underestimated the speed of the Afghan government's collapse)... but also absolutely fair for Republicans to criticize Biden over. I don't have any answers, but frankly, the political process is __working__. The Republicans are asking the right questions and levying the correct criticisms. Biden is responding in kind with his statements today. Politics continue, the debate continues, but of course no one cares about these details. ------- In contrast, this blogpost is about how we're not serious about the issue by mostly posting bad twitter arguments. Aka: the stuff that doesn't matter. Lets talk about the details. Lets prove that we're serious. 6000ish boots on the ground entering Kabul (as per Biden's plan). Is this too many troops? Too few troops? Will the 9/11/2021 pullout be done in time (less than a month remains). The Taliban has not yet started their expected bloodbath. Can we trust them to honor their side of the agreement? Will they let us leave in peace? There seems to be no honor or glory in killing a bunch of retreating civilians, but I admit that I'm relatively ignorant of this Taliban (sure, the Taliban from the 90s would have started a bloodbath by now. But that Taliban is mostly dead, we killed most of those former leaders in the nearly 20 year war. I'm sure today's Taliban have different ideas than back then, and it may be important to discuss the differences) Sure, I know they massacre and genocide people who live there (at least, back in the 90s). But surely its in _THEIR_ best interests to let all of these Afghani civilians (and US forces / NATO forces) leave in peace? The last thing they want is for US forces to "fight seriously" against them right now.
  - runawaybottle 5y ago
    We spent more time talking about Afghanistan, and the consequences of a non-humanitarian pullout, and a non balanced power transfer over to the Taliban in the last three days than we have as a nation for the last ten years. That’s why we’re not serious. Did we discuss the possibility of a Taliban government coexisting with stipulations of certain human rights protections (women’s right to work, education) as a concession for American dollars? That’s the tough discussion. The easy discussion is ‘leave; this was a mistake’, and now ‘who fucked up the exit strategy?’. It’s not easy to maturely discuss this because ‘uh, Taliban bad’. Well Taliban is all there is now because we didn’t take the time to think seriously.
    - dragontamer 5y ago
      > We spent more time talking about Afghanistan, and the consequences of a non-humanitarian pullout, and a non balanced power transfer over to the Taliban in the last three days than we have as a nation for the last ten years. Bullshit. This discussion started last year when Donald Trump began negotiating with the Taliban for a withdrawal. The writing has been on the wall for over a year. (The wakeup call was when the USA + Taliban were having negotiations _WITHOUT_ Afghani government at the table. If you missed that detail last year then you deserve to be surprised by the situation this year) There was discussions over whether Biden would change the plans (and that was absolutely discussed during the election). Both Trump and Biden agreed: we're pulling out, one way or the other. That's both presidential candidates from both major political parties agreeing on this issue. That we'd leave Afghanistan this year was inevitable from an American political perspective. --------- Biden's plans changed slightly from Trump's. Indeed, Trump's plans changed (Trump originally wanted to leave in January, but the generals asked for more time, and ultimately Trump left the job to Biden. Biden then gave our generals until Sept. 11, 2021, and we still have ~6000ish troops in Kabul securing the withdrawal). So now I ask: how would you have withdrawn differently? And remember, Trump negotiated the withdrawal with the Taliban last year. I don't know the full details off the top of my head, but... the Taliban have not moved into the airport (as of yet). I can only assume the peaceful withdrawal of US troops was part of that negotiation. The Taliban's actions so far have focused on Afgan government, and not as many attacks on US-held areas. Clearly, its diplomacy in action. We're well past due on Trump's original May-withdrawal timeline, but perhaps Biden has decided that the keeping our troops beyond Trump's original pullout negotiation date is well worth the hassle (and given the results this past week, I'm happy that our troops are providing security there right now. We need those troops to buy more time for everybody) ----- > That’s why we’re not serious. Did we discuss the possibility of a Taliban government coexisting with stipulations of certain human rights protections (women’s right to work, education) as a concession for American dollars? They don't want our dollars. They want us to leave. EDIT: They also wanted 400 of their leaders released from Prison, which Donald Trump gave them back in August 2020. And we're leaving. And so far, they're not attacking us as we leave. (I know its a volatile situation and this could change any moment. But as of right now, we're getting what we want, and they're getting what they want). They've taken over the Kabul Green Zone. Its 100% within the Taliban's power to attack the airport if they so desired. -------------- Back to "seriousness": > “My office has heard from over 100 Americans who need help getting out of Afghanistan,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) told me. “We can’t fly planes or open gates, but we can at least give people information. The Biden administration needs a plan to get our fellow Americans out.” Bam. We're serious. Senator Cotton has a list and is publicly shaming Biden into making a plan to get these 100 Americans safely back home. In just two or three sentences, our leaders are proving themselves more "serious" than any armchair blogger sitting at home. There's work to be done and the appropriate discussions seem to be happening. Blogposts like this one are just a distraction from what matters.
runawaybottle 5y ago
I think he/she is making the point that our society is not comprehensively discussing topics with all angles covered. The progressive wing of the party in power—Bernie, AOC, the 'squad', the whole crew that normally tweets 10 times per day and has opinions on everything—goes absolutely mute when confronted by some hard, inconvenient reality outside the US liberal bubble like Cuba or Afghanistan. As the situation in Afghanistan worsened, the charismatic new face of progressive politics was…enthusing about public libraries. Yay! AOC’s tweet: Shout out to libraries and library workers. We love and appreciate you that’s all These same liberals would have been tweeting about ‘leave Afghanistan immediately, we need to spend that money on school lunches’ a year ago, or tweet something about inspiring Afghan women going to school. They would speak up when speaking up was inconsequential. Well, ok, how about now? We left, and now there is the Taliban. It’s the same with defunding the police. Even a small pullback of policing increased crime in many US states. Let’s give homeless people tents. Well, ok, now there are entire encampments of homelessness in LA. Let’s let transgender compete in their gender-of-choice sport. Great, now we have men literally beating women unfairly. Back to the War on Terror, we all know the answer to this problem was time sensitive, we needed to leave Iraq/Afghanistan as soon as we killed Bin Laden. But now that we stayed 20 years in one of these countries, we have an actual responsibility. You know, like not leaving the child you just gave birth to. Are we prepared to discuss it like that? That’s way too mature of course.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  After 20 years, you are allowed to leave the child you gave birth to. (If you mess up too badly, the state takes the child away before that.) Afghanistan was a mess. We didn't make it better. We weren't going to be able to fix it, even with more time. So... why stay? To help them? It wasn't helping. (The way we left was disgracefully incompetent, but leaving was sound.)
quantified 5y ago
I think we don’t need to have the author enumerate them. We’ve taken a lot of small-to-medium-sized wrong turns over the last 40 years or so

Author of the piece has a lot of criticisms but no suggestions as to what anyone could have done better. Not a serious person.

by woah 5y ago

Author of the piece has a lot of criticisms but no suggestions as to what anyone could have done better. Not a serious person.

coldtea 5y ago

Ah, the old "but doctor, you don't have anything better to propose replacing the tumor with" argument...

dragontamer 5y ago
How about the opposite? A tacit understanding that the US pullout we desired so much results in this chaos? That the chaos is unavoidable, that the Taliban were going to take over the country one way or the other when we left. -------- Now we can wax poetic about the details: should the troops have stayed put? If so, how many? Clearly, the Taliban were ready to surge (and surge they did: they've overwhelmed the entirety of the Afghan forces in just a week). That means that boots on the ground fighting would have been left to American forces yet again, a proposition that no one wants either. Its not entirely wrong for us to state: well... at least Americans aren't getting attacked right now. --------- And as much as this blogpost wants to discuss "non-serious people", I tune into CSPAN and actually hear the people in power having the difficult discussions. Senators (even Republican ones) aren't blaming Biden for the collapse, they're mostly focused on the timing and the details of the pullout. Biden was wrong to pull out the troops a few months ago (his pullout was aimed at 9/11/2021). The current situation is: Biden evacuated a bunch of troops, and then suddenly had to send them back into Kabul to secure the airport. An understandable mistake at a high level (Biden underestimated the speed of the Afghan government's collapse)... but also absolutely fair for Republicans to criticize Biden over. I don't have any answers, but frankly, the political process is __working__. The Republicans are asking the right questions and levying the correct criticisms. Biden is responding in kind with his statements today. Politics continue, the debate continues, but of course no one cares about these details. ------- In contrast, this blogpost is about how we're not serious about the issue by mostly posting bad twitter arguments. Aka: the stuff that doesn't matter. Lets talk about the details. Lets prove that we're serious. 6000ish boots on the ground entering Kabul (as per Biden's plan). Is this too many troops? Too few troops? Will the 9/11/2021 pullout be done in time (less than a month remains). The Taliban has not yet started their expected bloodbath. Can we trust them to honor their side of the agreement? Will they let us leave in peace? There seems to be no honor or glory in killing a bunch of retreating civilians, but I admit that I'm relatively ignorant of this Taliban (sure, the Taliban from the 90s would have started a bloodbath by now. But that Taliban is mostly dead, we killed most of those former leaders in the nearly 20 year war. I'm sure today's Taliban have different ideas than back then, and it may be important to discuss the differences) Sure, I know they massacre and genocide people who live there (at least, back in the 90s). But surely its in _THEIR_ best interests to let all of these Afghani civilians (and US forces / NATO forces) leave in peace? The last thing they want is for US forces to "fight seriously" against them right now.
- runawaybottle 5y ago
  We spent more time talking about Afghanistan, and the consequences of a non-humanitarian pullout, and a non balanced power transfer over to the Taliban in the last three days than we have as a nation for the last ten years. That’s why we’re not serious. Did we discuss the possibility of a Taliban government coexisting with stipulations of certain human rights protections (women’s right to work, education) as a concession for American dollars? That’s the tough discussion. The easy discussion is ‘leave; this was a mistake’, and now ‘who fucked up the exit strategy?’. It’s not easy to maturely discuss this because ‘uh, Taliban bad’. Well Taliban is all there is now because we didn’t take the time to think seriously.
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    > We spent more time talking about Afghanistan, and the consequences of a non-humanitarian pullout, and a non balanced power transfer over to the Taliban in the last three days than we have as a nation for the last ten years. Bullshit. This discussion started last year when Donald Trump began negotiating with the Taliban for a withdrawal. The writing has been on the wall for over a year. (The wakeup call was when the USA + Taliban were having negotiations _WITHOUT_ Afghani government at the table. If you missed that detail last year then you deserve to be surprised by the situation this year) There was discussions over whether Biden would change the plans (and that was absolutely discussed during the election). Both Trump and Biden agreed: we're pulling out, one way or the other. That's both presidential candidates from both major political parties agreeing on this issue. That we'd leave Afghanistan this year was inevitable from an American political perspective. --------- Biden's plans changed slightly from Trump's. Indeed, Trump's plans changed (Trump originally wanted to leave in January, but the generals asked for more time, and ultimately Trump left the job to Biden. Biden then gave our generals until Sept. 11, 2021, and we still have ~6000ish troops in Kabul securing the withdrawal). So now I ask: how would you have withdrawn differently? And remember, Trump negotiated the withdrawal with the Taliban last year. I don't know the full details off the top of my head, but... the Taliban have not moved into the airport (as of yet). I can only assume the peaceful withdrawal of US troops was part of that negotiation. The Taliban's actions so far have focused on Afgan government, and not as many attacks on US-held areas. Clearly, its diplomacy in action. We're well past due on Trump's original May-withdrawal timeline, but perhaps Biden has decided that the keeping our troops beyond Trump's original pullout negotiation date is well worth the hassle (and given the results this past week, I'm happy that our troops are providing security there right now. We need those troops to buy more time for everybody) ----- > That’s why we’re not serious. Did we discuss the possibility of a Taliban government coexisting with stipulations of certain human rights protections (women’s right to work, education) as a concession for American dollars? They don't want our dollars. They want us to leave. EDIT: They also wanted 400 of their leaders released from Prison, which Donald Trump gave them back in August 2020. And we're leaving. And so far, they're not attacking us as we leave. (I know its a volatile situation and this could change any moment. But as of right now, we're getting what we want, and they're getting what they want). They've taken over the Kabul Green Zone. Its 100% within the Taliban's power to attack the airport if they so desired. -------------- Back to "seriousness": > “My office has heard from over 100 Americans who need help getting out of Afghanistan,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) told me. “We can’t fly planes or open gates, but we can at least give people information. The Biden administration needs a plan to get our fellow Americans out.” Bam. We're serious. Senator Cotton has a list and is publicly shaming Biden into making a plan to get these 100 Americans safely back home. In just two or three sentences, our leaders are proving themselves more "serious" than any armchair blogger sitting at home. There's work to be done and the appropriate discussions seem to be happening. Blogposts like this one are just a distraction from what matters.

runawaybottle 5y ago

I think he/she is making the point that our society is not comprehensively discussing topics with all angles covered. The progressive wing of the party in power—Bernie, AOC, the 'squad', the whole crew that normally tweets 10 times per day and has opinions on everything—goes absolutely mute when confronted by some hard, inconvenient reality outside the US liberal bubble like Cuba or Afghanistan. As the situation in Afghanistan worsened, the charismatic new face of progressive politics was…enthusing about public libraries. Yay! AOC’s tweet: Shout out to libraries and library workers. We love and appreciate you that’s all These same liberals would have been tweeting about ‘leave Afghanistan immediately, we need to spend that money on school lunches’ a year ago, or tweet something about inspiring Afghan women going to school. They would speak up when speaking up was inconsequential. Well, ok, how about now? We left, and now there is the Taliban. It’s the same with defunding the police. Even a small pullback of policing increased crime in many US states. Let’s give homeless people tents. Well, ok, now there are entire encampments of homelessness in LA. Let’s let transgender compete in their gender-of-choice sport. Great, now we have men literally beating women unfairly. Back to the War on Terror, we all know the answer to this problem was time sensitive, we needed to leave Iraq/Afghanistan as soon as we killed Bin Laden. But now that we stayed 20 years in one of these countries, we have an actual responsibility. You know, like not leaving the child you just gave birth to. Are we prepared to discuss it like that? That’s way too mature of course.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
After 20 years, you are allowed to leave the child you gave birth to. (If you mess up too badly, the state takes the child away before that.) Afghanistan was a mess. We didn't make it better. We weren't going to be able to fix it, even with more time. So... why stay? To help them? It wasn't helping. (The way we left was disgracefully incompetent, but leaving was sound.)

quantified 5y ago

I think we don’t need to have the author enumerate them. We’ve taken a lot of small-to-medium-sized wrong turns over the last 40 years or so