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Understanding what's happening in Afghanistan

By islander
August 23, 2021 8:10 am
Category: Politics

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Heather Cox Richardson has written an excellent piece that gives a good history of how and why we ended up where we are in Afghanistan today. As we all know, we are in an extremely complex and difficult predicament over there with no easy, clear cut answers.

How this is going to end, we don't know, but whether you agree with it or not, it looks like a path has been chosen.

Cited and related links:

  1. heathercoxrichardson.substack.com

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Comments on "Understanding what's happening in Afghanistan":

  1. by Donna on August 23, 2021 8:34 am
    Still reading it, but I found a falsehood in the third paragraph:

    "Taliban leaders in control of Afghanistan sheltered al-Qaeda, and after the attacks, the U.S. president, George W. Bush, demanded that Afghanistan hand over the terrorist leader believed to be behind the terrorist attack on the U.S: Osama bin Laden. In October, after Taliban leaders refused, the U.S. launched a bombing campaign."

    Not true. Taliban leaders did not "refuse" to hand over bin Laden. They offered to hand him over on the condition he would receive a fair trial, and the US refused.

  2. by Donna on August 23, 2021 8:40 am
    The rest of the piece is accurate.

  3. by islander on August 23, 2021 9:21 am
    Good catch Donna !! Thanks !

  4. by Curt_Anderson on August 23, 2021 10:06 am
    Wouldn't there be a big difference between what one country would consider a fair trial and what another country would consider a fair trial? I assume the Taliban has a Sharia law version of what they consider a fair trial. There isn't a universal agreement on what constitutes a fair trial.

  5. by HatetheSwamp on August 23, 2021 10:14 am

    "Taliban leaders did not "refuse" to hand over bin Laden. They offered to hand him over on the condition he would receive a fair trial, and the US refused."

    I'm not doubting you, Donna, but can you provide a source?


  6. by HatetheSwamp on August 23, 2021 10:25 am

    The article is a reasonably fair treatment of the history of US involvement in Afghanistan for the past 20 years.

    However, it doesn't take seriously the colossal incompetence of the Biden administration and, particularly, the three pants on fire lies Joe told on Friday.

    You Bidenbots are not going to be able to hide the truth about Joe in the larger Afghanistan picture. Joe's stewardship of the withdrawal is, by far, our datkest Afghan hour.

  7. by Donna on August 23, 2021 11:00 am
    I think you want this to be our darkest hour, hts. I think you would be ecstatic if it got even darker.

    I think our darkest hour happened sometime in the early phases of the occupation when both of our political parties decided to pivot to nation-building in Afghanistan.

  8. by Ponderer on August 23, 2021 11:01 am
    The article doesn't take Biden's incompetence seriously because he hasn't been incompetent. Not being omniscient enough to be fully prepared for any eventuality after being handed a massive cluster fuck of a situation is not incompetence. It's called being human.

    I wish you would hold Republicans to one tenth of the responsibility for shit going bad that you giddily hold any Democrat to.

    You are a fucking hypocrite of immense scale, pb.

  9. by Donna on August 23, 2021 11:02 am
    Here you go, hts:
    google.com

  10. by Ponderer on August 23, 2021 11:04 am
    Donna, if these fucking assholes were going to make a case that Benghazi was justification for not electing Clinton, they are gonna have a field day with something like this. They have to. It's all they got. They've got to make as much out of this horse shit as they possibly can.

  11. by Donna on August 23, 2021 11:11 am
    For some unknown reason, that link isn't working. Curt was right when he questioned the kind of trial the Taliban were demanding, which was an Islamic court in Afghanistan. But the Taliban also offered to send OBL to a neutral country, which Bush declined.




  12. by Curt_Anderson on August 23, 2021 12:23 pm
    I think Heather Cox Richardson had it right in saying that the Taliban refused to handover OBL. If a ridiculous and unworkable stipulation is demanded before something is done, that's tantamount to refusing.

    What would be a "neutral country" to the Taliban? The crime happened in America where the planes were hijacked and crashed. The witness were mostly in America. Would they all be sent to some "neutral country" to testify? What about the prosecuting attorneys? Presumably our attorneys wouldn't be allowed to try the case in a foreign nation. Would any foreign country even allow a case outside of their jurisdiction to be tried?

    As I recall the Taliban's stipulation of a "neutral country" was simply a stall tactic allowing OBL time to get away.

  13. by islander on August 23, 2021 12:37 pm

    Hmmm... This makes it a little murkier. Is this the offer from the Taliban?

    "The Taliban would be ready to discuss handing over Osama bin Laden to a neutral country if the US halted the bombing of Afghanistan, a senior Taliban official said today.

    Afghanistan's deputy prime minister, Haji Abdul Kabir, told reporters that the Taliban would require evidence that Bin Laden was behind the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US.

    "If the Taliban is given evidence that Osama bin Laden is involved" and the bombing campaign stopped, "we would be ready to hand him over to a third country", Mr Kabir added.

    But it would have to be a state that would never "come under pressure from the United States", he said.
    theguardian.com

  14. by Donna on August 23, 2021 1:10 pm
    It was clear that Bush didn't want a trial. In fact he said he wasn't that concerned about OBL. I don't recall any reporter ever asking him "Why the hell not?"

    Under Obama when he ordered the Navy Seals to hunt down and kill OBL, the general sentiment from Republicans was "ho hum". The body language I saw from Bush at that time seemed to suggest to me that he was shocked and upset about it, as if that wasn't supposed to happen.

    I don't think that either political party wanted to put OBL on trial, probably because they were afraid that he would divulge uncomfortable truths about his connection with the CIA, going back to his time with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and probably other secrets we're not supposed to know about.

  15. by oldedude on August 23, 2021 11:47 pm
    Islander- One of the major differences in this "negotiation" is that you're dealing with someone that uses "negotiation" to stall so they can get the upper hand and know what you have. So in this case, it was a good idea to tell them to FO. This whole thing was an "insha'llah" thing anyway. It wasn't going to happen. When dementia joe actually reached an "agreement" with the Taliban, I knew we were fucked. They reserve the right in their religion to lie to the enemy. This agreement means nothing to them. They duped dementia joe and they now have the upper hand. They'll murder thousands of coalition citizens on Sept 11, in celebration of the martyred UBL did. Thanks to the gullible USofA sheeple for falling for it.

  16. by oldedude on August 23, 2021 11:49 pm
    Oh, Donna. UBL wanted dementia joe kept alive because he was so easily manipulated.

  17. by islander on August 24, 2021 4:59 am

    old dude, can you clarify what you mean? It seems as though you are saying that you think that when Trump was negotiating with the Taliban, the deal Trump worked out with the Taliban was fake and Trump had no intention of going through with it.

    What do you think would have happened and what would we do if, after the release of the 5,000 Taliban prisoners, the reduction of out troops down to 2500 etc. Trump reneged on the deal at the end?

  18. by HatetheSwamp on August 24, 2021 5:31 am

    I think our darkest hour happened sometime in the early phases of the occupation when both of our political parties decided to pivot to nation building."

    That was a dark hour, but this?!!!!!

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