Biden Foreign Policy

[teachercd]

14 minutes ago, Scarlet said:

 

One of the reasons I love Joe is because of his huge balls.

 

Also, why is it okay for women to talk about balls but if a man mentioned a woman's breasts...

[FrantzHardySwag]

10 hours ago, Archy1221 said:

How does this happen?  I’m confused on why these service dogs were not on the same planes out as the service members. 
 

 

Debunked. Along with the dude being hung by a heli. I'm sure you will have new talking points tomorrow though!

 

[Archy1221]

17 minutes ago, FrantzHardySwag said:

Debunked. Along with the dude being hung by a heli. I'm sure you will have new talking points tomorrow though!

 

I had no talking points nor  talked about a dude from a helicopter but I’m sure you will have more snark tomorrow.  
 

We should all be happy if there are no service dogs being left behind.  
 

 

[Dr. Strangelove]

1 hour ago, Archy1221 said:

I had no talking points nor  talked about a dude from a helicopter but I’m sure you will have more snark tomorrow.  
 

We should all be happy if there are no service dogs being left behind.  
 

 

Archy... we finally agree on something.

[RedDenver]

I found an article with a whole bunch of fact checks of things being reported about the withdrawal from Afghanistan:

https://news.yahoo.com/fact-check-roundup-true-false-194714534.html?_guc_consent_skip=1629491533

 

A few of the interesting ones:

Quote

 

CLAIM: A video shows the Taliban taking over the presidential palace in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Our rating: False

Footage from 2015 of rebels in Idlib, Syria, was misrepresented as showing the Taliban taking over Afghanistan's presidential palace.

 

Quote

 

CLAIM: A video shows a man riding outside a moving plane to escape the Taliban.

Our Rating: Altered

A video claiming to show an Afghan civilian riding on the engine of an airplane in an attempt to flee the Taliban is actually a digital creation from 2020 by a Vietnamese artist.

 

Quote

 

CLAIM: A video shows the Taliban hanging someone from a helicopter

Our rating: False

A video claiming to show the Taliban hanging someone from a helicopter is mislabeled. A different angle of the incident shows the man in the video was alive, and Afghan media outlets reported the man was a Taliban fighter attempting to hoist a flag.

 

Quote

 

CLAIM: The Biden administration 'gifted' the Taliban $80 billion in weapons and wants to take 9mm pistols away from Americans

Our rating: False

The U.S. spent $28 billion, not $80 billion, on military equipment for the Afghan National Security Forces. Some of the equipment was recovered by the Taliban, not "gifted" by President Joe Biden's administration. Biden has not proposed taking 9mm pistols away from Americans.

 

 

[teachercd]

I think the second one listed was just a scene from Mission Impossible 9.

[TGHusker]

 

Why did we 'lose' the war.  Culture  so says this article. 

 

Former Afghan interpreter says 'vast majority of Afghans' view Taliban as 'lesser of two evils' compared to the US (msn.com)

 

•  

Quote

 

• America's lack of undersanding of Afghanistan's culture led to its failures there, a former interpreter said.
• Front-line troops were not given any training in "cultural literacy," and it had major consequences, he said.
• Experts and a Congress-created watchdog have made similar points.

An Afghan who served as an interpreter for the US during the war in Afghanistan in a Washington Post op-ed said America's lack of knowledge about the culture of the country contributed heavily to its failures there.

 

"Many Americans have been asking ... how could Afghanistan have collapsed so quickly? As a former combat interpreter who served alongside U.S. and Afghan Special Operations forces, I can tell you part of the answer - one that's been missing from the conversation: culture," wrote Baktash Ahadi, who served U.S. and Afghan special operations troops as a combat interpreter from 2010 to 2012.

"When comparing the Taliban with the United States and its Western allies, the vast majority of Afghans have always viewed the Taliban as the lesser of two evils. To many Americans, that may seem an outlandish claim," Ahadi went on to say. "But the Americans also went straight to building roads, schools and governing institutions - in an effort to 'win hearts and minds' - without first figuring out what values animate those hearts and what ideas fill those minds. We thus wound up acting in ways that would ultimately alienate everyday Afghans."

The Taliban terrorized Afghanistan for years as it waged a brutal insurgency in the country after being knocked from power via the US invasion in 2001. The militant Islamist group is now back in control of the country, and the US military has fully withdrawn.

Ahadi emphasized that in most cases the only interactions Afghans had with the US and its allies "came via heavily armed and armored combat troops."

He said the US mistook the Afghan countryside for a "theater of war" as opposed to a place where people "actually lived."

Ahadi said America's failure to take culture into account extends well beyond Afghanistan.

"When it comes to cultural illiteracy, America is a recidivist. We failed to understand Iraqi culture, too, so that now, many Iraqis see Iran as the lesser of two evils," he said. "Before that, we failed to understand Vietnam. And so on. Wherever our relentless military adventurism takes us next, we must do better."

Front-line troops were not given any training in "cultural literacy," Ahadi said, bringing up the example of US Marines "mistaking" his exchange of Koran verses with fellow Afghans as "extremism rather than shared piety."

Ahadi's observations about why the US struggled to achieve its goals in Afghanistan have been echoed by experts on the region as well as a watchdog created by Congress to monitor the billions of dollars allocated for reconstruction in the country.

Western powers exhibited "hubris" in viewing "Afghan traditions as an obstacle to be overcome when, it turns out, they were the lifeblood of the country's political culture ... And this left the door open for the slow return of the Taliban," Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings Institution, recently wrote in the Atlantic.

 

 

[TGHusker]

Surprise endorsement by Ann Coulter of Biden's pull out. 

 

Ann Coulter Hails Joe Biden's Afghanistan Speech (mediaite.com)

 

 

 

[Archy1221]

Hopefully this gets followed up by the WH Press Corp and news organizations to find out if this is valid or not 

 

 

[ZRod]

I'm absolutely shocked that so many are outraged now that a Democrat is in office. But nary a peep the previous four years...

[Archy1221]

18 minutes ago, ZRod said:

I'm absolutely shocked that so many are outraged now that a Democrat is in office. But nary a peep the previous four years...

All we had from Democrats and media was outrage the previous four years.  I’m absolutely shocked you weren’t aware of this.  

[ZRod]

8 hours ago, Archy1221 said:

All we had from Democrats and media was outrage the previous four years.  I’m absolutely shocked you weren’t aware of this.  

Because you had a racist, grifting, sexual predator, conman in office and people like yourself were ok with that.

[Archy1221]

2 hours ago, ZRod said:

Because you had a racist, grifting, sexual predator, conman in office and people like yourself were ok with that.

As opposed to the racist, grifting, sexual predator, conman that we currently have in office that people like yourself are ok with? 

[nic]

Never heard of this news org, but he did name some sources for a change.

 

A new report from investigative journalist John Solomon claims text messages between military service members and private citizens paint a picture of stranded U.S. citizens "waving passports" to no avail at soldiers stationed at the gates of Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul near the end of President Biden's withdrawal.

[BigRedBuster]

20 minutes ago, Archy1221 said:

As opposed to the racist, grifting, sexual predator, conman that we currently have in office that people like yourself are ok with? 

 

You really do consume some interesting media.