165 Canadian soldiers never came home again.
And now it seems that they, and all the other brave soldiers from various countries, died for nothing
I'm wondering how many Taliban have fallen, too, though. And if that matters.
And it looks like 20 years of progress is soon going to be wiped out in a matter of weeks.
All the soldiers that died, from NATO and other countries, all the money that was spent. And for what? Afghanistan will be right back to where it was in 2001, with the Taliban in full control.
All of it was for nothing.
Guess we learned the same bitter lesson the Russians did in the 1980's, when they tried impose Communism on Afghanistan and got a bloody nose for their trouble. In the end, they threw up their arms and left, after having lost countless lives and accomplishing absolutely nothing.
30 years later, history repeats itself.
It’s Saigon, 1975, all over again.
Not quite. It wasn't just the U.S. this time, many countries, Canada included, had soldiers over there.
165 Canadian soldiers never came home again.
And now it seems that they, and all the other brave soldiers from various countries, died for nothing
I hope Dubya likes heat. He will see a lot of it in the other place.
The French and then the Americans spent thirty years of war in Indochina trying to force their desired outcome. An average of 100 people a year are still killed today by bombs and shells left over from the Indochina Wars.
Afghanistan is headed back 20 years.
Too bad all our soldiers will still be dead.
I bet those butchers in Hanoi and Peking are laughing their arses off at the desperate Allied evacuation from Kabul.
The current lot in Vietnam like the U.S. and would welcome them and their money. Of course, Vietnam has China sitting next to it, and relations between those two countries are anything but cozy.
As for Afghanistan, once again, all for nothing.
it is possible that it will turn out for Biden like Ford’s pardon of Nixon and be vindicated by history. Ford was a good and decent man who got treated like •••• by the dementia candidate in the 1976 Republican primaries.
The reason that Biden is taking heat is because this happened on his watch. But he's right in saying that it wouldn't matter if U.S. troops stayed there another 20 years. If the Afghans are not willing to embrace change from within, then no outside force will do it.
The Russians learned this lesson in the 80's, and the U.S. is learning it now.
Francois’s buddy sums it up perfectly here. I also personally think that Tim is right- Biden is copping hear because it happened on his watch.
I agree with everything the chap said.
It's never easy to admit failure. It's always easier to say, if we stay another year, if we pour in more money, we can get this done. That of course is what Lyndon Johnson said about Vietnam, and the political dynamic in the US was the same in both cases. Vietnam ruined Johnson, and admitting defeat in Afghanistan in 2010 might well have ruined Obama.
Except Obama still got reelected in spite of that.
How long was the U.S. supposed to stay in Afghanistan, like the guy the video said. Another 20 years? 30? 40? 50?
As long as the Afghans were not willing to fight for their own country, then it was useless to try and force them to. The fact that the Afghan forces folded like a tent proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt.
An Afghan woman has been shot dead in the streets by the Taliban for refusing to wear a burqa.
And so it starts.
So much for those promises of a friendlier Taliban.
THIS IS MY OWN STATEMENT….
The successful rebuilding of Germany, Japan and (eventually) South Korea is a poor precedent for the USA trying to nation-build in a Muslim country like Afghanistan, which is deeply divided along ethnic and religious lines and has no history at all of actual democracy. Unfortunately the people who will suffer most from that are the people of Syria, Yemen, Libya and Somalia, because there will be no support whatever for interventions of any kind in those utterly failed states. Lebanon is heading the same way.
Of course, the U.S. is, in a way, responsible.
When the Russians invaded, who do you think armed the various groups that fought the Russians? Guess the U.S. thought those groups would quietly disband, once the Russians left.
Well, they were sure wrong on that account!
Like Victor Frankenstein, the U.S. meddling with things they had no business meddling with. And like the Frankenstein monster, it would turn on it's creator.
Ronnie Raygun: “hey, you some kind of Islamic freedom fighter? How would you like this case of Stinger missiles?”
Islamist: “well, Great Satan, since you ask…”
Yeah, that's more or less what happened.
those who take joy in USA defeat and use unreconstructed Trotskyist codewords such as neo-colonialist and imperialist can now not complain the next time a third world junta massacres its own civilians and the west looks on in indifference.
Most likely, yes.