With numbers as high as 250k Afghans, NY Times estimate, still there that worked with the U.S. I don't see how anything short of extending not just the evacuation but the full war footing would have gotten this amount out and kept them back away from the airport and the city.
You might be right
The mightiest weapon going for the US is the dollar and the banking system.
Short of remaining in Afghanistan and continuing with business as usual, the other options were all losing ones. Getting out was always going to be messy due to the large about of Afghans who qualify for SIVs and all the Americans scattered across the country.
OMG it would be horrendous, the USAF C17s are taking out 100's at a time.
Problem for Biden is, he doesn't know who to hit. The suicide attack was not from the Taliban. If it was Trump he probably would have started indiscriminately dropping bombs without regard who they hit. Actually...that has happened under pretty much every US president hasn't it.
The US starts arming the Taliban to defeat ISIS-K?
ISIS want to kill Afghans as well. And they view the Taliban as apostates and want to kill them all.
Imagine being on the last plane out.
It's IS-K (for Khorasan), technically.
They probably don't, they've been brainwashed into being willing to do this. But whoever did that and sends them in has definitely thought this through.
Most likely.
Surely the Taliban don't need help to beat them? Not supposed to be very numerous.
Biden does what he's told, I have a hard time believing he's done anything but follow the majority opinion, whatever his military advisors said. There doesn't seem to be much disagreement between Republican and Democrat presidents on using the military to maintain the American Empire.
For some clarity, this is the very same Taliban that said, 'No Afghans are permitted to leave the country' and 'The August 31st date is a red line'
Yeah, would carpet bombing even register? Besides bringing back all the troops and reoccupying I don't see what he can do.
BBC reporting 72 with 12 US troops
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It's about saving face. Watch the western military/political establishment drop all that talk about Taliban reprisals against collaborators, women's rights and massacres of minorities like the Hazara and start talking about the Taliban as partners.
Eeeesh that's fecked. The Taliban know the US is not gonna risk inflaming things by sending more troops in now, so the people on that list are at the Taliban's mercy.
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Something tells me they just wanted to get the withdrawal done as quickly as possible and perhaps they calculated the voting public would quickly forget how bad it went.
Now there are US casualties. No chance of quick forgetting.
Yeah... it will be one of the overriding narratives in the 2022 elections and if the republicans retake the house I expect a benghazi type investigation
yes and several top news agency writers/pundits at the beginning, last Monday and Tuesday were hinting that exact sentiment. I'm guessing the White House press sec. Jen Psaki had said it to a group of people off the record. One specific example had been Maggie Habermann of the NY Times
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Apparently the US military didn't learn their lessons after leaving trillions of dollars of equipment in Iraq. The clean up of that resulted in flattening several cities.
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The US has been dropping bombs all over Afghanistan for the last 20 years. Their indiscriminate bombing campaigns are probably a massive reason why the Taliban are so popular in rural Afghanistan. I doubt the Taliban/IS are gonna change their plans because there are US warplanes in the sky - if anything that would increase the tension.
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