US and Nato withdrawal from Afghanistan...- threadbanned users in OP

What was Ghani supposed to do? If he tried to stand in the way of the Taliban he would have ended up like the last Afghan president to face the full onslaught of the Taliban, swinging from a traffic light. And how would that have benefited the Afghan people, if the government and the army had 'gone down fighting'? Likely many of them would have ended up as 'collateral damage'.

It's not down to any one president tho. Bush went in but then allowed Afghanistan become secondary to Iraq. Obama didn't do much either imo, Trump made agreements and gave the Taliban the opportunity to wait the Americans out and Biden was the final nail in the coffin.

Not sure why everyone is so surprised at the collapse of the Afghan army. Almost every book about the conflict highlighted it's inadequacy and reliance on NATO for support and to do the heavy fighting.

For sure there were elements of the army or police who were good and could be relied on. But when everything else around you has packed it in and run away why should they sacrifice themselves for what would be a lost cause?

Hardly. He puled out a lot of troops last October allowing the Taliban to fill the vacuum. He also signed a peace deal with the Taliban which specifically didn't include the actual Afghan government. This revisionism that Trump would have done better is just utter tosh.

I'm avoiding watching them. Poor people.

Sorry igCorcaigh, my politics are firmly to the Left and unfortunately NullZero is right. In the 90s, it was generally accepted that compulsory hijabs and worse was bad. Following 9/11 there was a fairly swift change of stance, initially with very far left groups suddenly switching and defending items like the hijab. I remember reading online arguments between SWP members about whether or not they should be protesting France's hijab ban in schools in 2004. The party was officially protesting it but many members were uncomfortable at supporting something that's history is in religious repression. And while there were legitimate arguments about the ban leading to girls being removed from schools and ultimately less integrated, ultimately it was just another step on the polarisation of political stances, where if your political opponent opposes something, you must defend it regardless of how it actually fits with your beliefs or not.

It has led to the point where in 2017, Swedish Finance minister Magdalena Andersson posted a photo of her and two colleagues wearing hats implying their choice to wear hats in Sweden was the exact same as women being forced to wear hijabs (realistically the niqāb is enforced on most Iranian women) in Iran. Following the New Zealand mosque attacks, hijab wearing was temporarily taken up by western women as a show of solidarity with muslim people. A well-intentioned gesture sure, but one that completely ignores the many, many women of muslim backgrounds who have been fighting hard against being compelled to wear the hijab. With many women from these backgrounds saying in the months after that it lead to increased pressures from their families to go back to wearing headscarves. The first panels of the first issue of Ms Marvel, Kamala Khan, from 2013, features as friend of the main character explaining why her hijab is a feminist choice and gives her the power of remaining unseen. Not a literal power in a world of superheroes, it's genuinely a running theme through the comic series that hijab wearing is a choice made by women because of the metaphorical power it gives them. This was written by muslim convert G. Willow Wilson a white American with a non-religious upbringing who converted to Islam apparently because she had a bad reaction to a contraceptive hormone that made her seek out god. She is now lauded in many circles as a modern voice of Islam.

The liberal left has, collectively at it's leadership levels, and among many in it's grassroots, decided that hijabs are empowering. I have spoken with many, many 'leftwing' people who refuse to or can not acknowledge that it is for the majority of women a tool of oppression. Because it is. I support anyone's free choice to wear it, in any situation where it is acceptable to wear a head covering. However I do not believe that the majority of women who wear it are making a genuinely free choice to wear it. It represses women and frankly, it insults men. But among my political peers, it's rarely ok to say that anymore.

I think id rather grab an AK off a deserting soldier then hang onto the wing of plane.

Can't really get my head around that kind of mentality.

One of the main failure points was the failure of the US to take on the warlords, they were basically allowed to continue with business as usual. Had they controlled them, there was a good chance of success. Japan was a success story, but there were great differences, first they literally demolished two large Cities, and had to power to demolish every other city as well, so complete and utter surrender was the only choice, Then you have to take the mindset of the Japanese, when the Emperor surrendered, all of Japan surrendered. So they had "clean sheet" to work with, and in fairness, the Japanese are good to work with, and they had good co-operation, and it all came together. Like wise Germany, they devised a recovery plan for after the war ended, and that also worked out extremely well. But Afghanistan is different in many ways,,,,look at what happened after the russians left....total war between the various warlords, and between them, they caused as much damage and destructuon as the Russians did. And as has been mentioned several times, outside the cities, in rural Afghanistan, the culture and mindset has remained pretty much the same in the last 100 +years. Modern thinking and Technology is slowly catching up, but its a slow process. If they had to do it all over again, they would do it in a far different manner I'm sure, but how?, is the question.

Counterfactuals are rarely useful but thinking that Trump would have been more engaged or tactically astute has no basis in reality

he probably would have been more heavy handed and led to even more carnage with higher death tolls but ultimately the same result. The Taliban have retaken Afghanistan, the Islamic fundamentalism that was seeded and by the CIA and MI6 in a proxy war against the Soviets has caused more ‘blowback’ than they anticipated

Operation Cyclone still blowing 40 years later, countless lives ruined

its a few fools turning this into Trump v Biden. Most people can see beyond that.