Don't blame me, I voted for the other guy. (Politics General)

@lonewolf
$100 says 10 years or less. It WAS 10 years between the fall of the Soviet Union (1991) to the day where those goddamn jihadis deliberately crashed into the World Trade Center (2001).

I mean we did initially created or recruited the Taliban to fight the Ruskies, didn’t we?

So how long before the Tally waggers…. i mean Taliban regroups and does another 9/11 on us?

Sadly, a lot of resources and hard work were poured into there, but it was like putting air into a balloon with a hole in it.

Sullivan added that part of the reason for the speed of collapse “is because that end of the day, despite the fact we spent 20 years and tens of billions of dollars to give the best equipment, the best training and the best capacity to the Afghan national security forces, we could not give them the will and they ultimately decided that they would not fight for Kabul and they would not fight for the country.”

Sullivan said that Biden had “bad choices” in Afghanistan but insisted it wouldn’t have made a difference if the U.S. had remained in the country longer.

“What we have learned over the course of the past two weeks is if we had stayed one more year, or two more years, or five more years, or 10 more years, no amount of training, equipping or money or lives lost by the United States was going to put the Afghan army in a position to be able to sustain that country on its own,” Sullivan said.

This had to happen. If we ever wanted to leave, it had to happen.

When I came into office, I inherited a deal that President Trump negotiated with the Taliban. Under his agreement, U.S. forces would be out of Afghanistan by May 1, 2021 — just a little over three months after I took office.

U.S. forces had already drawn down during the Trump administration from roughly 15,500 American forces to 2,500 troops in country, and the Taliban was at its strongest militarily since 2001.

The choice I had to make, as your President, was either to follow through on that agreement or be prepared to go back to fighting the Taliban in the middle of the spring fighting season.

There would have been no ceasefire after May 1. There was no agreement protecting our forces after May 1. There was no status quo of stability without American casualties after May 1.

There was only the cold reality of either following through on the agreement to withdraw our forces or escalating the conflict and sending thousands more American troops back into combat in Afghanistan, lurching into the third decade of conflict.

I stand squarely behind my decision. After 20 years, I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces.

That’s why we were still there. We were clear-eyed about the risks. We planned for every contingency.

But I always promised the American people that I will be straight with you. The truth is: This did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated.

So what’s happened? Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight.

If anything, the developments of the past week reinforced that ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision.

American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves. We spent over a trillion dollars. We trained and equipped an Afghan military force of some 300,000 strong — incredibly well equipped — a force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies.

We gave them every tool they could need. We paid their salaries, provided for the maintenance of their air force — something the Taliban doesn’t have. Taliban does not have an air force. We provided close air support.

We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future.

As tenacious as the Taliban may be, they still have serious weaknesses. For one thing, they’re almost totally dependent on their safe havens in Pakistan, where their leaders live openly. Pakistan is also the Afghan insurgents’ chief portal for cash, supplies, munitions, and explosives, without which the Taliban would be hard-pressed to survive. And yet Pakistani authorities seem unwilling to interfere with Taliban leaders or their operations. In fact, senior American officials say the Pakistanis are pouring resources into the Haqqani network, a Taliban-allied group of Afghan insurgents who are believed to have played major roles in the Rabbani assassination and the attacks on the Inter-Continental and the U.S. Embassy. (The Pakistanis vehemently deny any such collusion.)

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has repeatedly given Pakistan what amounts to an ultimatum. “The message they need to know is: we’re going to do everything we can to defend our forces,” Panetta told reporters two days after the embassy siege. “I’m not going to talk about how we’re going to respond. I’ll just let you know that we’re not going to allow these types of attacks to go on.” The CIA already has paramilitaries leading local forces inside Pakistan’s tribal areas, but so far their targets have been limited to Al Qaeda commanders. Will their mission now expand to target the Haqqanis? Or will the administration nerve itself to send regular troops over the border? One U.S. official with vast experience of Afghanistan tells Newsweek he thinks it’s “more than evens” that the U.S. could send troops over the border by the end of the year.

Carl von Clausewitz observed, “There is nothing more common than to find considerations of supply affecting the strategic lines of a campaign and a war.” As Secretary of Defense James Mattis prepares to dispatch more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, the Trump administration needs to consider how, as military scholars have written, “Logistical considerations will account for the feasibility of entrenching on a given piece of ground.” What policies will enable those troops and their supplies to get there and allow Afghanistan to develop the resources to entrench its own forces?

Military and economic access to landlocked Afghanistan depend on transit through Pakistan, Iran, or Russia — all of which some in the Trump administration and Congress seem bent on confronting simultaneously. The only alternative, a path that snakes from northwest Afghanistan to Turkey through Central Asia and the Caucasus via the Caspian Sea, lacks capacity and is vulnerable to both Russian and Iranian pressure. Afghanistan’s forbidding location poses obstacles to overextended U.S. ambitions.

@Background Pony #77FB

Some Trumpists are going to use this to bring their Dear Leader back to the White House – although they should have known that their Dear Leader already planned to bring the troops home before Biden did.

There’s the #BidenFailure hashtag on Twitter for that.