Hard to take this post seriously when it completely dismisses the substance of Blinken's responses as "a deer-in-the-headlights stare and canned remarks" without spending 2 seconds explaining what they even were. Blinken explained their rationales very calmly and clearly in that video, whether we like with them or not. That deserves consideration, and, if the rationale is wrong, a substantive rebuttal. Not a backhanded dismissal like this.
Blinken on July 7: “We are staying, the embassy is staying, our programs are staying. If there is a significant deterioration in security...I don’t think it’s going to be something that happens from a Friday to a Monday.”
> "If there is a significant deterioration in security -- that could well happen, we've discussed this before -- I don’t think it’s going to be something that happens from a Friday to a Monday."
So the administration mispredicted something that was presumably obvious. You'd think the blog post about having serious discussions could actually explain that and attempt to have a serious discussion around it instead of mischaracterizing the interview and ignoring the content.
Misprediction? They are simultaneously surveilling everyone in the world and are getting nothing out of it. Confident statements from the administration are no longer worth a dime.
If they're not worth a dime then don't mention them at all. If they're worth something then they need to be discussed "seriously", as the blog post itself preaches. Not mischaracterized, and not used to mislead readers about their contents. All the arguing you're doing needs to be in the blog post, not here.
The insane thing here: the _financial_ cost of the war in afghanistan, which lasted deacdes and involved hundreds of thousands of people, and logistical operations spanning the globe, is less than the amount of money we printed in 2020.
Death toll of the formerly perpetual occupation of Afghanistan:
American military members: 2,448
U.S. contractors: 3,846
Afghan military/police: 66,000
Other allied troops: 1,144
Afghan civilians: 47,245
Taliban/opposition fighters: 51,191
Aid workers: 444
Journalists: 72
Remember that it used to be that casualties, being deaths and injuries, used to be about 1:1. Since body armor and the like the amount of injured is 10x the deaths, and conveniently accounting of casualties by the government in media changed to deaths to make casualties seem much lighter than they were.
There are 26 days before the 20th anniversary of 9/11. I expect the volume of frustration and anger with us politics on this war to increase substantially over that time.
I thought the most interesting part of the text was unrelated to the war:
"American society(...) can only understand the world as projections of the country’s own domestic neuroses. (...) Who is the PoC? Who is the Nazi?"
I've recently realized how much of the discourse around the word HAS to be trapped within terms the Americans can understand. Every experience that is not translated to Americana is 'confusing' or 'irrelevant'. Much like the Author himself points, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party has no idea what to say about a victory of an extremist group against the American Military-Industrial complex to the loss of minorities who themselves hate or dislike American progressivism.
Can someone explain to me the partisan tilt this coverage has had? Both parties seem to have wanted to get out of Afghanistan and this past few weeks is (at least per my understanding) the culmination of the plan the Trump administration had put into motion (signing the peace treaty with the Taliban, releasing their prisoners, etc). Is there something specific the Biden administration bungled? What would a better plausible outcome have looked like?
And yes, the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and on “terror” have clearly been mismanaged from the start in exactly the ways that critics predicted, but I don’t see meaningful differences in the way all administrations have bungled these things.
Same reason Clinton was blamed for NAFTA even though it was a GOP initiative that Bush was ready to sign but they delayed because it gave them political ammunition if the bill landed on the new guy's desk.
"On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, Amber Smith, author, veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and deputy assistant to the Secretary of Defense during the Trump administration, joins Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky to discuss how U.S. leaders spent two decades lying to taxpayers about the war in Afghanistan."
