It appears that many—perhaps most–of those translators and other Afghans who worked with and supported the US forces will be left behind to face murder by the Taliban. Establishing refugee status and getting them out of the country appears to be just too much trouble for the bureaucracy, and there is no driving force in the Oval Office to force the bureaucracy to perform.
Meanwhile, Biden/Harris are positioning an open southern border as something that is morally required as our duty to all possible refugees from all imaginable (or imagined) situations all over the world. But they appear to feel no sense of special obligation to those who have taken great risks by supporting us.
Perhaps if providing formal refugee status is too much trouble, the Afghans could simply be flown to Central America, dropped off in remote areas, and left to make their own ways to the US via the southern border. They would probably be exposed to a lot less risk that way rather than by remaining in Afghanistan.
They are following the Obama precedent and, if you will, the Hillary precedent. You could even trace it back to Vince Foster and the McDougals. Use someone, then discard them. There is no colder heart than that of a Democrat in the Hillary/Obama/Jeffrey Epstein model.
I would also hope that some leading Republicans…Bush and Trump, in particular…would make some strong public statements about this.
The Afghan army is laying down its arms and joining the Taliban in large numbers. It was always the wrong side the US picked, the Taliban were the good guys and the people they were fighting against were not. This is the American usage of ‘good guys’ BTW. ;)
Mullah Mohammad Omar in September 1994 in his hometown of Kandahar with 50 students founded the group. He founded it as he was tired of listening to the women being raped by the local war lords. This may be apocryphal but does seem to be the case.
So you picked the wrong side, and now you have basically lost to them.
More mush from the troll. We should have flattened the Taliban once and left. Afghanistan has never been a country. In its “golden age” the king was the “Mayor of Kabul.”
Yes, Afghanistan is defined as the place where states are largely irrelevant, a remote and inaccessible zone full of people content in their backwardness and jealous of their own independence and traditions.
Powerful countries who extend imperial boundaries eventually go crash in such places, which are better avoided except for the periodic punitive expedition. Certainly it does no credit to Western politicians and generals that they can’t resist the temptation to build nations where nations can’t exist, among peoples about whom they know nothing and who most sensible people are content to let stew in their preferred juices.
As for Bush and Trump . . . ha. Bush created the mess and to speak up would remind everyone of that; Trump will speak up if, and to the degree, he finds it advantageous to himself.
Cousin Eddie
“Afghanistan has never been a country.”
Pretty well defines your point of view, extremely short sighted. There have been settled places there for about 9000 years. One could attempt to define the actual start of the Afghan state at around 1750 when the Durreni Empire was established with its capital in Kandahar, which then moved to Kabul. One could also note that in 1919 they finished tossing out the British, and became independent of foreign influence.
“full of people content in their backwardness and jealous of their own independence and traditions.”
America today? ;)
Flattening the Taliban would have amounted to unloading a few bombs over random points, with 652,000 square km. Like when we used $million cruse missiles to flatten a few empty tents. It’s not likely we would have scored even a half starved donkey. Our greatest victory was that Bin Laden didn’t quite die of old age. I understand that American money bought a lot of fancy real estate in places like Abu Dahbi.
Afghanistan is so a country. Wikipedia says it has an anthem and a flag and everything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghanistan
Bush and Cheney are far too busy being statesmanlike and counting coop on the real enemy, Trump, to worry about the mess they made. This is more like bugging out of Vietnam. It’s not like the next poor schlubs we “liberate” will remember these Afghans any more than the Afghans remembered what happened to the Vietnamese. If only they were dogs, the protests would be deafening.
The part about the border with Mexico suggests that it might not be a completely ridiculous idea for a few people of means to underwrite some kind of plan to convey the translators in numbers to Central America and let them have a go at the border. Given what I’m hearing about the Darien Gap, I’d rather see them brought in at points north of there if possible. But I think Mr. Foster really has a point there.
The Pentagon brass refused to withdraw from Afghanistan for Trump, but seems ok to do so now for Biden, so I have no idea why you’d expect any sort of decency or morality from them…
Americans content in backwardness, and jealous of our traditions, etc?
Many of us, certainly, and why should we be different than anyone else? Imagine some infidel pervert foreigners trying to pacify and develop South Central LA, or the remoter regions of Appalachia.
Works both ways–don’t count me among the crusaders.
Cousin Eddie
Were any of you alive during the 1970s? Did you miss the way we treated the people that rallied to our cause in Southeast Asia? What are you, delusional?
This has always been the way we’ve done business. Embrace that–We’re faithless bastards, as a nation. Nobody cares, nobody is getting up in arms about this, and nobody is going to do anything. The Afghans and Iraqis who came over to serve us are simply foolish victims of their own trust in whatever we told them. They could have looked at the track record, and known better.
Day is coming when the bill for all these betrayals will come due. The same assholes responsible for this will one day go out to recruit among the formerly gullible, and they’re going to find out that nobody trusts them. Look at the broken promises we’ve made our own veterans–I have recruiting materials given me when I originally enlisted back during the early 1980s that spoke clearly of “lifetime free medical care” for those of us who made a career of the military. I’m now paying for just about everything, and I expect that I’ll be going to the back of the bus when the time comes for prioritization, while the indigent wastrels that make up the Democrat voting base will be given everything for free.
So, don’t act all surprised at this latest affront to national honor. Y’all did jack and shit when we did the same thing after the end of the Vietnam War, re-electing the same set of country-club “elite” assholes over and over again. You have no honor because you demand none from your politicians. Don’t act all surprised when the piper calls his due, and you are paying the price.
No worries, the Biden Administration has a plan:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/us-relocate-allied-interpreters-translators-before-complete-afghanistan-withdrawal
Does it bemuse anyone else how fast the narrative arc of the U.S. military has gone from “The Sands of Iwo Jima” to “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight”? You might think that pulling out of a 20 year commitment with thousands of killed and wounded leaving more of Afghanistan under control of the Taliban than when we started would have had something to do with it. Instead, all it seemed to take was a few rainbow flags, a few drag queens and a reading list.
This morning it occurred to me that the descendants of the Moslem separatists that gave a young Lt. Douglas MacArthur some of his first taste of combat more than a century ago and enlivened his inter-war years are still troublesome today.
It’s fair to remember that the parade of “leaders” that delivered such outstanding results in Afghanistan and Iraq were selected by the civilians in charge as is the law. It’s also fair to point out that they were selected from what were supposed to be the outstanding senior ranks of the military establishment.
We aren’t voting for the wrong party, we’re voting for the wrong people.
Competency among the perfumed princes making up our military’s upper echelons is not what they’re concerned with. Political compliance, graft enablement, and all the rest are. The civilians don’t ask for good leaders or competent ones; they want the guys who will do what they tell them to, not argue with them when it’s something like Benghazi, and who’ll help them rape the taxpayers.
Stewardship of the lives entrusted to them by the mass of the public? Guardianship of the Constitution? LOL… Not even on the list of criteria or questions to be asked at confirmation hearings.
It’s been that way for a very long time, going back to the pre-WWII era. Douglas MacArthur famously put FDR in his place, when FDR tried cutting the military to the bone, but that was about the last time that was tolerated. My first experience with general officers in person showed me that the majority of them were ego-driven small-minded men with far too many sycophantic yes-men surrounding them like so many remoras. They’re cosseted and catered to, led to believe their excrement smells only of roses, and that their ideas are nothing but good.
Meanwhile, the reality is that the majority have no real idea what is going on in their units or areas of responsibility. The last time I saw a general actually out inspecting routine daily training events was back during the 1980s, and he was unusual enough that everyone in the division considered him to be insane. Out of all the general officers I actually encountered in person, that guy was either the only one who was doing what he should, or a consummate actor that utterly fooled me.
It’s all Courtney Massengale, these days. Sam Damon won’t make it past about Captain before burning out on the bullshit and calling it quits. None of the junior officers that I worked with and thought would be men I’d like to follow to war actually ever gained command above company grade. The one guy who I’d still drop everything to go do as he said chose not to take up battalion command, but to go into the Army Corps of Engineers as a district commander, never fulfilling the promise he showed as a leader. Can’t say I blame him, either–He was a marked man, among the anointed. They did not like that he was a former enlisted West Point graduate, or that he was competent and could inspire his subordinates to move mountains. He was the kind of man they should have promoted to very senior leadership positions, but who would never make it there these days because he had these nasty things, ethics and standards.
You get what you select for, with senior military leaders. We’ve been selecting for and rewarding the wrong things for generations, now. Milley is only the latest rotten fruit from the decaying tree.
This is The Fourth Turning in action. We have incompetents at all levels of government, so of course they’re going to do stupid things that don’t work and will blow up in their faces.
All things considered, it’s a plus that only a small number of Afghans are apparently going to be betrayed by our idiot regime, if only because the US appears to have precious little support in that bastion of the 7th century. That may well suggest that they’ve learned not to trust the US and hence refuse to commit to the government we’re subsidizing, or maybe most Afghans are just incorrigible savages. Either way, we have no reason to keep playing this game. They attacked us, back on 9/11, and as Mike K appropriately points out, we should have noticed that and reacted accordingly.
Instead, we embarked on a multi-trillion dollar foreign aid expedition- including the Iraq War- because our idiot elite remembered the Marshall Plan and moronically decided it was a good idea despite the vastly different circumstances.
Similarly, these same folks still support NATO, reflexively and religiously, after its reason to exist has long since passed, still support “free trade” despite myriad economic disasters, love open borders, etc, etc.
But they appear to feel no sense of special obligation to those who have taken great risks by supporting us.
You could and should say the exact same thing about how our so-called elite treats actual American citizens. They hate us and are always willing to throw us under that metaphorical bus. Foreigners who support us get even less consideration.
To use a cliche, this won’t end well, but it will end. And perhaps it already has.
The U.S military has adopted the up or out system. While this prevents the 40 year old Privates and 50 year old Lieutenants that were common before, it launches each member on his own private trajectory to make his numbers for the next round of promotion. It’s the exceptional officer that looks up from his personal treadmill to see if the numbers add up to something that advances the enterprise and an even more exceptional one to raise the question when it doesn’t. Historically, these officers have supplied the leaders that came through when it counted. Not a few had to be called back from a forced retirement after the “best and brightest” had left us in the deep excrement.
The problem is that an army that only fights a war every 30 years has a lot of time to collect dead wood. At the same time, the formations have to be manned and the organization charts filled out. You have to find a way to use the people you have, not the perfect soldier you want.
The next real war probably won’t last long enough to separate much of the wheat from the chaff, so it’ll come mostly down to luck. You can be sure that any enemy overrunning an American division headquarters will find all the paper work in perfect order.
I grew up on military bases in the 80s. There was always a healthy contempt for senior officers from the lower officers (O5 and below), and for officers in general from the enlisted. It’s clear things have gone really badly off the rails, with the senior officer corps. My vague impression would be that the post-9/11 spending boosts completely broke the defense industry–way too much money was thrown around for way too long, way too easily. Also, it seems that you’ve got a bunch of wannabe Colin Powells, i.e., guys with stars on their shoulders who think they should be the ones making policy, not just carrying it out. And of course basically none of them have any accomplishments to point to to prove their worth, a phenomenon that has infected all of society. Finally, any program that sends military members to the Ivy League needs to be eliminated immediately, and anyone who’s gone through them purged without remorse. Heck, honestly as the son of someone who went to USAFA fairly early in its history, I think we should probably consider eliminating the academies altogether, and recruiting from elsewhere, like A&M, etc. There’s nothing to suggest the current system is working at all, and it seems to be getting worse.