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

The problem isn’t leaving the problem is leaving American civilians and allied civilians behind.

Sorry it seems you want someone to confirm some bias for you ?In 2018 there was 14,000 trump reduced that over those years. Dramatically especially in 2020 down to 2500.

It's your assertion that Biden should have increased the troop count? By how many ? And why ? And how would he have got that by Congress , especially the republicans who had put in gates related to the negotiations trump initiated.

Can you give some detail as to what you think should have been done and how and why, rather than asking to be given information. Then being given it and throwing it away out of hand.

You seem a bit agitated. I've zero skin in the game here. Could care less what geriatric is in the white House. So calm your knickers.

The article said in November there was 4k troops and that was reduced to 2.5k as Biden took office. So in my admittedly, completely uninformed opinion that doesn't seem like the type of no turning back scenario.

If redeplowing that 1.5k troops meant the difference between an easy taliban march to Kabul or not then yes I think Biden should have tried to do that.

So his portion of blame lies around that side of this $hitshow imo.

What military?

Genuine question.

The Afghan was the military in control. But picture a world where their leadership and command were not invited to negotiation talks in 2018 for their country. Are they still the people in power ? Are they not ?

How does military maintain control with that spectre over their head?

So when you say military do you mean reinforcing US troops back up to 10,000? To maintain control as you say whilst orderly retreat. How does this play on Congress? To the public ?

Over simplification of the issues at hand seems to be common.

Why do you not want to discuss the deals made and with whom they were made?

Quite a few of these people are Afghans who actually live in Ireland but who haven't yet acquired Irish citizenship. Simon Coveney was explaining yesterday that such people had returned home to Afghanistan to visit relatives because it's August and then been unable to get back out again when things kicked off.

It's not about reneging on a deal with Taliban, it's about the practicalities of pressing reset on the entire process and getting Afghanistan to the point where America could withdraw under Biden's preferred conditions within the constraints of a four-year presidential term.

A cousin of an ‘Irish citizen’ was on RTE news last night, trying to get out. You can’t take half the country. How do you know they aren’t extremist sympathisers? Just look at the number of terror attacks in mainland Europe.

there was a lot of talk of ;not knowing the Taliban would advance so fast/that Afghan defence would collapse so fast' but if 31 August was the deadline , what difference did the advance/collapse matter. (Were the western nations hoping to call their citizens to the airport and the Afghans with papers may not have rushed to the airport too?

Did people think the Afghan admin were going to be able to negotiate a government with the Taliban (as they have now, with a few token ministers from previous admin)

Probably just talking to anyone they can get on the phone out there but I’m guessing he’s hoping we’d take him.

Sure, going back in would be nightmarish, but I was talking about doing it properly in the first place.

A substantial number of soldiers overseeing an orderly withdrawal of US staff, Afghan staff, and then themselves, would be a lot better than what we did see.

Sir, As I’m sure you are aware our Scottish protestant immigrants didn’t integrate very well. Once we have that situation resolved we will investigate the matter.

It also gave us Sinn Fein so swings and roundabouts.

That was the plan put in place. When Trump signed this deal with the Taliban, the Afghan government weren't even at the table. They were simply told to sort things out between the Taliban and themselves later. That's how haphazard this thing was.

I suppose the idea was that the US pull out and leave the Afghan Army to duke it out with the Taliban. The US didn't reckon on the Taliban sweeping through 90% of the country because A. they think that Kabul is Afghanistan (it isn't), B. didn't reckon on possible Taliban support in the rural areas of the country and C. never contemplated an Afghan Army collapse.

There's also now a D. they completely ignored the problem of ISIS-K. Which as we've seen is proving to be a loss of life scenario, and it's more than likely that ISIS-K are behind the suicide bomb attack yesterday. I doubt that that will be the only one planned.

had the West they recalled their own citizens earlier there would atleast be a few less thousand people coming to the airport in the last week.