TXSG8R

Yep, it’s it’s all hysterical, emotional bullshit. If they chose Bagram over HKIA the yelling would have been about how stupid Biden was for forcing Afghans to run the gauntlet out of Kabul when there was a perfectly usable airport within the city. The reality is until today they we’re able to evacuate over 20k people a day out of HKIA without any loss of life. How would longer runways matter when faced with that level of output? How many less people would have been able to get to Bagram from Kabul when facing a 30-40 mile run through Taliban controlled area? I haven’t seen anything suggesting we have a capacity or throughput issue for this evacuation, so Bagram being bigger is a complete non-issue.

Are you implying that people follow Biden's advice on potential life or death decisions without any other input? You may want to sit down for this...

Bagram is 30 miles from Kabul and in the same fucking valley. Stop. With. The. Bullshit.

That is absolutely true. Anyone that stuck their neck out for this was going to eat a gigantic shit sandwich because there was no good way to leave that country. Trump ran on this and had 4 years to do it, but when push came to shove he passed the buck but still wanted credit if things went well (see below). Even in the best case scenario Biden knew that people were going to die and they would hang all of this shit around his neck, and he went forward anyway.

The troop levels were reduced prior to Biden taking office. You know whats impossible with reduced troop levels? Maintaining a defensive posture at multiple locations. 2500 troops at one airfield is a hell of a lot more imposing than 500 troops spread across 5 locations. The previous admin forced the Afghan gov't to release 5k Taliban fighters from prison, knowing we only had 2500 troops on the ground. The Taliban is a 60k+ troop army. Stop with the bullshit.

Hummers break down driving 30mph on paved roads every day. The defense industrial complex didn't get this big by building shit that is cheap or easy to maintain.

The beauty of our equipment is that without direct support most of it will be useless in about a month. The Taliban just acquired a massive starving baby that they have no ability to feed.

I think anyone in uniform would prefer a fighting retreat over what they have to deal with. I still dont know what the hell we are going to do to secure those final cattle cars of troops. I do know there are probably a few pallets of white phosphorous grenades that got shipped in to prepare for that final movement though.

What does that say about the previous administration that sat down at the table with the rock throwing Neanderthals, organized the release of more rock throwing Neanderthals from prison, reduced the amount of American troops on the ground to counter to the rock throwing Neanderthals, and then ensured the next admin would either have to dramatically increase troop levels and fight a resurgent force, or leave completely?

There are a lot of reasons that heads don't roll. Some of it is political unfortunately. The other is this is the nature of the business. The DoD at a minimum operates almost entirely on risk assessment. They put together the best COAs they can and assign risk levels to them, and agree to use whatever gives them the best outcome with the lowest risk. I think that's important for some of the armchair SECDEFs to understand. If they were presented with 3 COAs and they all carried high risk, you're stuck with shitty, high risk options. I don't see many scenarios with this drawdown where that wasn't true. You're evacuating US troops, citizens, and civilians from a high threat area in deteriorating conditions, with an extremely small military footprint. The alternative is to increase your footprint and/or extend your deadline and likely incur attacks from the biggest force in the country that you have a temporary truce with. Its easy to just say you would 'Murica this shit and just start bombing shit, but the reality is a little more complicated.

Absolutely, and even for the ones on the up and up, there are definitely people moving into and out of the country for more nefarious reasons and were under the radar by choice. A lot of people rolled the dice and are now forcing US service people to leave a barely defensible position to bail them out. Bad decisions have consequences, even if they are for altruistic reasons.

After a quick look at a map, I think HKIA was chosen over Bagram since its in Kabul, and not 30 miles outside of it. While it would definitely be a more defensible position, it would also have been a much bigger logistical clusterfuck to evac people out. And lol the discussion about Kabul being some fishbowl surrounded by mountains and easy to hit with mortars. You just described every location in Afghanistan.

They had access to travel advisories and state dep't briefings on threat conditions for the area they are traveling to. I cant speak from experience about Afghanistan because I never had the joy of running through there, but I can tell you that the amount of briefings, warnings, and training you have to receive to go to South Korea as a defense contractor is staggering. There is no misunderstanding of what you are walking into, what your options are for when the shit hits the fan, and what risks you are taking by getting on the plane. Thats for a country that is first world economic powerhouse and tourist destination. No American citizen in Afghanistan was caught unware of what the situation on the ground was. The fact that contractors had big Karen/US tourist energy that the US would get them out no matter what is part of the problem here. I could understand citizens that were maybe collapsed to Kabul so they had one foot out the door so to speak. Anyone that wasn't within touching distance of the ridiculously small military footprint we had as we approached this mark on the wall is responsible for their own peril, full stop. A withdrawal was agreed to by the previous administration for May 1st. There was already a mark on the wall, Biden extended it to September, ostensibly because the May 1st deadline was completely untenable. Regardless, the US leaving Afghanistan wasn't a surprise that snuck up on anyone. The dates were public knowledge. Troop levels were reduced to 2500 in January. This wasn't a secret or buried in intel reports. It was in the fucking news, the SecDef made a public statement about it when it happened. The US closed Bagram on July 6th. In case anyone was dismissive of the withdrawal discussion and thought all this leaving talk was just more bullshit, this was a pretty obvious indicator that the withdrawal was real. Why HKIA was chosen over Bagram as the final extraction point, I don't know. What I do know is that trying to secure both with 2500 troops would have been foolish. Again, nothing secret or buried in intel reports that Americans in Afghanistan would not have been aware of. The Taliban took control of the first province in their advance on August 6th. A full month after we closed Bagram, and 11 days before they entered Kabul. Yes, Biden downplayed the Taliban threat in a public statement. That doesn't contradict or supersede the travel advisories and warnings coming from the DoD, State Dept, etc. Americans that stayed in country put themselves in danger. Americans that stayed outside of Kabul put themselves in grave danger.

So everyone knew the ANA was going to shit the bed, everyone knew we only had 2500 soldiers remaining in country, everyone knew Bagram was closed, and Biden warned everyone to leave the country months ago, but it’s still Biden’s fault that these people stayed? ok

That’s a great question, and I think it’s important to answer it related to time. In 20 years? I don’t think there’s a chance in hell. Over a longer period with a better application of resources and strategy? Still pretty hard. There are so many ethnicities and cultures playing tug of war, and the further you get away from the cities, the harder it is to enact any significant change. You are probably better off cutting the country up into smaller pieces and giving some of those people their own little fiefdoms and be done with it, or hand them over to the outside countries that use those regions to squeeze Afghanistan anyway.

Did you read the linked article? It goes into a lot of details on what was wrong. This paper was written by a boots on the ground commander and is a pretty good forecast on what was coming if/when we pulled out. This is all specific to Afghanistan, so if you’re looking for some blanket template to apply to all future nation building, it’s not helpful. I think that’s largely our problem. We try to apply a generic freedom/democracy templates to complicated ethnic and cultural issues and expect to money whip the outliers into place. In case you are a TLDR guy, the highlights I took from it were: - A laughable 8 week training course to train illiterate poppy farmers to become the entire structure of their military, including NCOs. We purposely denied entry for the mujaheddin, which starved the new fighting force of what little functional fighters the country had, and handed them to the Taliban. - Trying to force diversity to unit structure in a ham fisted attempt to overcome centuries of ethnic and cultural issues. This further broke unit cohesion and also starved units of qualified bodies because guys from the north couldn’t even speak to guys in the south, too many of one tribe volunteered so they sat unused because unit x already had met that quota, etc. - Never addressing infrastructure beyond the big cities. Volunteers struggled to get to training centers. Trained soldiers struggled to get home on their vacations, so they just went home and never bothered to come back. Supplies and facilities in the remote areas (the places where the taliban was) were starved of resources, which led to further attrition. - Grossly overpaying volunteers in an effort to juice recruitment to achieve goals, despite the Afghan gov’t telling the US not to do it because they would never be able to maintain it. Coupled with the above it became a “go to a training center for 8 weeks and get a fat check” program that didn’t remotely impact retention. Guys got paid and went AWOL. - Providing resources that the illiterate army could never hope to maintain, which meant they had to rely on contractors to keep their army running. Of course, those contractors will GTFO the second the US pulls up their stakes, so this well trained, well equipped army was dead from the jump.

SIAP, but this is a great read on all the underlying reasons this went south so quickly. Article and the thread it came from. David Tracy is a great follow if you are a Jeep/wrenching/automotive geek.

Selfishly, I’m ecstatic about having another chance to watch Florida play without having to board a plane. Bonus that I don’t have to go into the erector set in CS and hear all the crazy chanting and shit to do it.

I think the mistake is thinking that the gov't forces are remotely cohesive. Its more like the Mexican gov't forces, they may wear a federal hat, but they are all way more local/regional in loyalty and action. Even when the Taliban was fairly in check, we still had to keep an eye on all the gov't forces to see who was going to turn a gun on friendlies or trainers. A fair number of these guys blow with the wind, and right now the wind is strongly behind the Taliban again. They will at best walk away and leave the gov't guys hanging, or more likely, brush off their old Taliban hat and use gov't training and weapons and do what they have always done. Suck up to whoever is in power and try to survive. The bulk of Afghans are just Macs.

Just found out a cousin, her husband, and both kids tested positive today in Savannah. They never got vaccinated. The husband is an engineer for Gulfstream, so he’s not a dummy, but I guess he went down the anti vaccine rabbit hole and held his family out. So frustrating.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/daily-mail/

Every time I open this thread.

Certainly points to bats or pangolins being absent, but it couldn't be conclusive due to the market shutdown. They also seem to rely pretty heavily on the "we weren't working with the authorities so they didn't have any reason to hide stuff from us" idea pretty hard for their collected data prior to Covid. The biggest reason I think BY's position about Fauci funding GOF research and a lab leak is bullshit is because its the most convenient out in the world for China to use, and they haven't. If this was true, China would have evidence of the funding, approvals, etc for this research and could conveniently shift the blame to the US for killing millions of people worldwide. They could use the "rogue lab working with the west" excuse to continue poisoning the Chinese population against all things US. They could use the "US is outsourcing dangerous research" to the UN and WHO and shift blame for the origin of the virus. There is no downside to using this excuse if it exists.

The ocean is a lot further away from Wuhan than your bat population, but you can get seafood there. You can probably get elephant tusk and all kinds of other exotic shit there too. I don't think the speculation about the bat vector was because the horseshoe bat is local, its because the horseshoe bat (and pangolin, and other potential vectors) are part of the local wet market.