Mess In Afghanistan

You volunteering?

We were getting nowhere in Afghanistan after 20 years. No real partnership there.

What we shoulda done, after we destroyed the AQ/Taliban training camps and such, was set up the most powerful anti-AQ/Taliban warlord with plenty of money and arms and get the hell out.

Now we just have to get the hell out.

They should airlift every vagina, including the goats, out of there.

~Jim Ward~

What is happening today would have happened if we pulled out 15 years ago or 15 years from now. I'm sure the Afghan people would welcome an International Brigade of volunteers to help them fight the Taliban, but I don't see any one stepping up. If the human rights abuses that are going to happen in Afghanistan is the bar for US intervention we better prepare to invade and occupy Sudan, Ethiopia, North Korea, and China as well. As soon as the news cycle moves on no one will care again, and America will be richer and no one will have to sacrifice their life for a country that was horrible before we got there and will be horrible for many generations to come. 

It's inevitable.  At least the folks in Afghanistan had a taste of modernity in the cities for a few years, but if the collective wants to go back to tribal, stone age ways, no sense in keeping to dump American blood and treasure into the whole shit show. 

it's what we do

#usa!usa!usa!

also what B quoted 

One of America's great national pastimes is

Savin' the day

Makin' it pay

'N goin' away.

(Apologies to Da Boids)

WE The US TROOPS ARE GOING BACK ! The Taliban Are Moving Back IN !

i heard 3800 Troops  That Number Will GROW This Time WATCH OUT TALIBAN !!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LasrD6SZkZk

we can't have health care, there are freedom fries to fling...

I hear it's actually about 8,000 US troops going back in to assist in a safe evacuation of all US personnel and Afghan allies.

This could be a real nightmare  coming in the next couple of weeks. Hope everybody gets out OK, including the troops.

Get the hell out of dodge ASAP.   And you know the Taliban are going to start fighting each other as soon as they overrun Kabul.

Don't forget to thank your ex Prez, Junior, for splitting the army to slaughter a made up nuclear threat in Iraq.  Because that is why we are where we are.

The OG of Republican liars.

Only the Repugnant party could come up with this century's Hitler.

Apparently sleepy joe didn't remember Isis raising holy hell after our last cut and run.  The U.S. is also surprised that the "well trained" Afghan forces are bailing in droves and even joining the other side.  We've all seen this story before and know how it ends.

Dumbest foreign policy decision since Trump abandoned the Kurds and left them to hang out and dry.

As much as it sucks, we'll back into this dust storm soon enough - IF we do ever actually get out. Colin Powell was right when he said that we'd own it once W stepped in it. 

....and about the vagina comment(s) above, who's gonna similarly airlift out the assholes? (which I understand are fully interchangeable in that neck of the woods)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmT0_hKSUrw

Ras,

"going back" implies that those Afghan hill tribes ever left the "Muslim stone age".

I'd suggest we never controlled it, never made a difference, and the Taliban simply bided their time until we left.

That Afghan "Army" we trained for 20 years is even worse than the Iraqi Army that fled ISIS.

This is a very interesting and informative thread on our involvement in Afghanistan:

(from a U Chicago International Relations Prof)

https://twitter.com/ProfPaulPoast/status/1426508097711968258

> the Taliban simply bided their time until we left<

About 15 years ago i heard  an interview with a taliban official who said, "You Americans have the watches, but we have the time."

https://www.arcamax.com/politics/editorialcartoons/darrinbell/s-2554211?...

It takes a certain mindset to be okay with living in a cave in the modern era.

The mujaheddin played the Soviets the same way 40 years ago.  It looks like the intelligence agencies of the U.S. and Russia have been carrying out a proxy war ever since.  Ultimately, it's the U.N.'s job to play World Cop, not ours, the Russians or anyone else.

Well, it looks like the end is nigh for the Afghan government and America's big Afghanistan adventure.   Taliban are entering Kabul and doesn't look like anything is stopping them.   Let's just hope everyone who needs to get out is getting out and the Taliban have sense enough not to attack the airfield until the evacuation is complete.

The various factions and tribes will start fighting each other over the spoils as soon as the last plane leaves..

EZ Peazey, right? It's a fantasy to believe that we'll ever really be outta there. The U.S. can never consistently decide whether or not we are or will continue to be the global police force, especially when we can somehow benefit or appear to look good as we try to force our "values" onto other nations or people.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/biden-sends-5-000-troops-210600567.html

Europe or the World should pay for it this time as Crazystan is closer to them. 

Nah, the U.S. has to save the day, as usual (and/or step in expensive, long-term shit storms in the name of "spreading democracy")

The Russians failed at trying to control that area, now we've failed...

Rumor of the oil companies wanting to put a pipeline thru the area to get to India / China (Fail)

Or big pharma wanting to control the poppy fields (Fail)

Now we'll be back as soon as nuclear non-powerhouse Pakistan starts to fail, which should come shortly after the Taliban takes over....

Wonder what the Kurds have to say about this?   

That place will be forever known as an epic on-going failure....unless it is from the Taliban perspective

Strange coincidence that Haiti gets hit with a 7,2 quake leaving over 300 dead so far with totals expected to climb much higher, on the same day the Taliban makes it to the outskirts of Kabul.  Tough day for a couple of countries that have experienced more than their fair share of misery in recent times.   

20 years of nation building down the drain in two weeks.  What a colossal waste.   

I've No More F***s To Give (ALMOST Family Friendly Version!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWluWyaYMng

It's over.  Afghan government has formally surrendered to the Tailban.   At least they minimized casualties by handing over many of largest cities without a fight.

Taliban to start fighting each other in three, two, one . . .

we've been fighting there for my entire adult life + 5 years. my entire political outlook was shaped by 9/11, afghanistan and then iraq. a huge part of growing up and learning about the world for me was being exposed to anti-war activism and anti establishment politics when i was 14-16. it was these experiences that led me to learn about the 60's anti war movement, and then the hippies, and then ginsberg/burroughs etc beats, and eventually to psychedelics and eventually the dead.

at least from my perspective, this is really huge, like the fall of the berlin wall or something. its the end of the war that became the genesis for who i grew up to be. as much as i dislike joe biden, ive got to give him massive credit for leaving, assuming he actually does so, and assuming the situation does not turn into some kind of CIA/mercenary black op.

15 year old me was saying this would happen decades ago. scary to think of what that means about the intellect of those who were beating on the war drums at the time.

I was seventeen when Saigon fell, Daylight.  Similar yet different. 

18 years ago I read a book by Peter Lance called 1000 years for revenge about the 9/11 attack on the US. If you transfer this mind set to what is going on in Afghanistan, we were set up to lose. It he war lords were paid by us to back the gov't, now the Taliban is paying better. The men running the nation don't care about what happens to the women living there as long as they are getting paid

#1 source of cash (used to buy food) in Afghanistan?

Opium Poppies.

Guess what the US tried to eradicate?

Saigon revisited. 

https://mobile.twitter.com/SultanFaizy/status/1427124254114525187

We had to leave there at some point. Trump made the deal to be out by September 1, and if we didn't honor it the Taliban would have gone full offensive.

It sucks ass for the Afghanis who don't want to live in the 11th century. They can feel free to do something about it. We did train and arm 300,000 of them.

Once we get our folks out I guess we'll be free to "bomb them back to the stone age" - oh, wait - they're already there.

That won't stop us.

Afgahanistan Bananastan

But will the price of hash go up?

>>>>Opium Poppies. . . . Guess what the US tried to eradicate?

I never understood the eradication efforts.   Seemed like it would have made way more sense to buy up the harvests and use it in pharmaceuticals.     

>>>>>We had to leave there at some point.

Indeed.  And now that we have seen how fundamentally unmotivated or otherwise compromised the Afghan army really was, should have left a long time ago.   Sucks for the Afghans who supported modernity and secularism, but this was bound to happen at some point and we were just spending billions and billions just postponing the inevitable.   Don't blame the current administration for the Taliban taking over (it would have been the same regardless of who was in charge), but there was clearly a gross intelligence failure in not being prepared for the sheer speed in which the Afghan government folded and the ongoing clusterfuck at the Hamid Karzai International Airport shouldn't be happening.  

Can we have nice things now?

Will the pandemic wipe them out now? 

The people to blame for this mess it the military leadership that lied for 20 years and always said victory was just around the corner. The incredible mass delusion of on twitter and MSM is mind blowing. This was always going to be the outcome. Most of MSM has been there and have friends there, which is so obviously skewing their reporting. The pearl clutching from everyone saying how sad they for the Afghan people is just disgusting. Are those same people sad about the equally horrible conditions in North Korea, Syria, and Sudan. The world is a bad place that America can't fix. Unless you are willing to personally go there or sponsor a family member to go it's time to STFU. 

Just like Vietnam.  The locals hate the foreign devils more than the Taliban.

They will take shitty homerule over imperialism.

Anyone want to go fight there?

Trump calling on Biden to resign over this.

Laughable.

Oh right, it would have gone just exactly perfect if it had gone down under his watch.

Right.

>>>>>it would have gone just exactly perfect if it had gone down under his watch.

It would have been the greatest pull out of troops ever.  Totally peaceful.  Like nothing we have ever seen before.

Maybe the Mexican Cartels could go to war with the Taliban! ...but it would be brutal if they join forces:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/taliban-mulls-flooding-west-heroin-161242...

GOP scrubbed news/pix of Trump's deal from their site.  Go fig.

nice thread here:

https://twitter.com/DamonLinker/status/1427021653976965123

Very Good Read here:  https://www.stonekettle.com/2021/08/bitter-pill.html

the essay ends with this quote:

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,

And the women come out to cut up what remains,

Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains

An' go to your Gawd like a soldier
-- Rudyard Kipling

1. I thought the taliban was anti heroin?

2. The military industrial complex made billions in profit from that war. Follow the money.

War Machine was a satirical film with some terrible acting but extremely on point, and provides a good summary of the US involvement in the Afghanistan debacle  

>>>   billions in profit from that war. Follow the money.

If Afghanistan cost $2 Trillion, what % went to US Defense contractors?

50% seems like a decent guess, but I have no idea.

Joe Biden, Foreign Policy Expert for over 4 decades...

Pretty sure we never made a "serious" effort to eradicate the poppy crop.

Too much money in it.

This was a lose/lose for Biden. If he staid in past the terms negotiated by Trump, the Taliban would have gone full offensive requiring us to send in tens of thousands more troops. The Dems and Reps would have been livid. Pulling out would create a humanitarian nightmare, which would also piss everyone off.

There was no "right" time or way for the US to pull out. It just had to be done.

Defund the War Machine 

This was always the way it was going to unfold, after our withdraw. It's one of the reasons no president wanted to it to happen on their watch.  

War Machine 'Star' HR McMaster is making the rounds on the news programs decrying the withdrawal and continuing the lie that we should stay because Afghanistan wants us there and we can still win the war 

War Machine 'Star' HR McMaster is making the rounds on the news programs decrying the withdrawal and continuing the lie that we should stay because Afghanistan wants us there and we can still win the war

Let's make a rule that if you're 70 years of age or older you can't run for president. Biden should be snowbirding in AZ rather than trying to lead the free world. 

did we get the kush seeds at least?

Obama should have gotten us out of Afghanistan right after Bin Ladin was popped. It was a pointless exercise that ended in an entirely predictable fashion.

>> continuing the lie that we should stay because Afghanistan wants us there and we can still win the war 

The greatest empires in the history of the world have tried and failed at conquering Afghanistan. It's just the way it is.

Let's make a rule that if you're 70 years of age or older you can't run for president. Biden should be snowbirding in AZ rather than trying to lead the free world.

for real, JR. i guess that would have excluded the big homie sanders but maybe its for the best. its totally absurd that we start getting concerned with peoples ability to remain productive at work or continue to safely drive around that age, yet they are almost exclusively running the world, and when you dare discuss one of these peoples inability to remember enough words to string a coherent sentance together, you are a very mean person making fun of a nice old mans stutter. what a joke. 

Well at least Dead and Co is touring.

https://mobile.twitter.com/bennyjohnson/status/1427421688141123584?ref_s...

CNN can't even spin this cluster fuck.  

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/world/asia/afghanistan-military-abuse...

Afghan Pedophiles Get Free Pass From U.S. Military, Report Says

On 5,753 occasions from 2010 to 2016, the United States military asked to review Afghan military units to see if there were any instances of “gross human rights abuses.” If there were, American law required military aid to be cut off to the offending unit.

Not once did that happen.

That was among the findings in an investigation into child sexual abuse by the Afghan security forces and the supposed indifference of the American military to the problem, according to a report released on Monday by the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, known as Sigar.

The report, commissioned under the Obama administration, was considered so explosive that it was originally marked “Secret/No Foreign,” with the recommendation that it remain classified until June 9, 2042. The report was finished in June 2017, but it appears to have included data only through 2016, before the Trump administration took office.

The report released on Monday was heavily redacted, and at least in the public portions it did little to answer questions about how prevalent child sexual abuse was in the Afghan military and police, and how commonly the American military looked the other way at the widespread practice of bacha bazi, or “boy play,” in which some Afghan commanders keep underage boys as sex slaves.

“Although DOD and State have taken steps to identify and investigate child sexual assault incidents, the full extent of these incidences may never be known,” the report said, referring to the departments of Defense and State.

Sigar said it had opened an investigation into bacha bazi at the request of Congress and in response to a 2015 New York Times article that described the practice as “rampant.” The article said that American soldiers who complained had their careers ruined by their superiors, who had encouraged them to ignore the practice.

“DOD and State only began efforts to address this issue after it was raised by The New York Times,” said John F. Sopko, the special inspector general. “And even after that story, the sufficiency of policies they’ve put in place and the resources they’ve committed seem questionable. When Congress passed the Leahy laws they prioritized the issue of gross human rights violations. As our report clearly shows, both agencies failed to live up to that task.”

A former Special Forces officer, Capt. Dan Quinn, who beat up an Afghan commander for keeping a boy chained to his bed as a sex slave, said at the time that he had been relieved of his command as a result. “We were putting people into power who would do things that were worse than the Taliban did,” said Captain Quinn, who has left the military.

Sgt. First Class Charles Martland, a highly decorated Green Beret, was forced out of the military after beating up an Afghan local police commander in Kunduz who was a child rapist. Sergeant Martland became incensed after the Afghan commander abducted the boy, raped him, then beat up the boy’s mother when she tried to rescue him. Congressional inquiries apparently led to Sergeant Martland’s reinstatement.

The Times article also cited the suspicious death of Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr., a United States Marine who was killed at a checkpoint where he was stationed with a notorious commander who had a retinue of bacha bazi boys. Corporal Buckley had complained about that commander and was killed, along with two other Marines, by one of the commander’s boys.

...

...

American military commanders in Afghanistan have repeatedly denied that there was any policy to condone child sexual abuse.

The Sigar report recommended restricting the use of that “notwithstanding clause” to evade the provisions of the Leahy Law, and a draft defense appropriations bill supports that recommendation.

The practice is so widespread that at least one of the 2014 Afghan presidential candidates was a onetime C.I.A.-backed warlord, Gul Agha Shirzai, who was widely accused of being a pedophile who keeps bacha bazi boys.

President Ashraf Ghani vowed to end the practice in a 2015 speech, but there have been few, if any, prosecutions by the Afghan authorities for bacha bazi practices. Mr. Shirzai is now the minister of border and tribal affairs in Mr. Ghani’s government.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/world/asia/us-soldiers-told-to-ignore...

KABUL, Afghanistan — In his last phone call home, Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr. told his father what was troubling him: From his bunk in southern Afghanistan, he could hear Afghan police officers sexually abusing boys they had brought to the base.

“At night we can hear them screaming, but we’re not allowed to do anything about it,” the Marine’s father, Gregory Buckley Sr., recalled his son telling him before he was shot to death at the base in 2012. He urged his son to tell his superiors. “My son said that his officers told him to look the other way because it’s their culture.”

Rampant sexual abuse of children has long been a problem in Afghanistan, particularly among armed commanders who dominate much of the rural landscape and can bully the population. The practice is called bacha bazi, literally “boy play,” and American soldiers and Marines have been instructed not to intervene — in some cases, not even when their Afghan allies have abused boys on military bases, according to interviews and court records.

The policy has endured as American forces have recruited and organized Afghan militias to help hold territory against the Taliban. But soldiers and Marines have been increasingly troubled that instead of weeding out pedophiles, the American military was arming them in some cases and placing them as the commanders of villages — and doing little when they began abusing children.

...

...

When asked about American military policy, the spokesman for the American command in Afghanistan, Col. Brian Tribus, wrote in an email: “Generally, allegations of child sexual abuse by Afghan military or police personnel would be a matter of domestic Afghan criminal law.” He added that “there would be no express requirement that U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan report it.” An exception, he said, is when rape is being used as a weapon of war.

The American policy of nonintervention is intended to maintain good relations with the Afghan police and militia units the United States has trained to fight the Taliban. It also reflects a reluctance to impose cultural values in a country where pederasty is rife, particularly among powerful men, for whom being surrounded by young teenagers can be a mark of social status.

...

...

Some soldiers believed that the policy made sense, even if they were personally distressed at the sexual predation they witnessed or heard about.

“The bigger picture was fighting the Taliban,” a former Marine lance corporal reflected. “It wasn’t to stop molestation.”

Still, the former lance corporal, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid offending fellow Marines, recalled feeling sickened the day he entered a room on a base and saw three or four men lying on the floor with children between them. “I’m not a hundred percent sure what was happening under the sheet, but I have a pretty good idea of what was going on,” he said.

But the American policy of treating child sexual abuse as a cultural issue has often alienated the villages whose children are being preyed upon. The pitfalls of the policy emerged clearly as American Special Forces soldiers began to form Afghan Local Police militias to hold villages that American forces had retaken from the Taliban in 2010 and 2011.

When he asked a superior officer what more he could do, he was told that he had done well to bring it up with local officials but that there was nothing else to be done. “We’re being praised for doing the right thing, and a guy just got away with raping a 14-year-old girl,” Mr. Quinn said.

Village elders grew more upset at the predatory behavior of American-backed commanders. After each case, Captain Quinn would gather the Afghan commanders and lecture them on human rights.

Soon another commander absconded with his men’s wages. Mr. Quinn said he later heard that the commander had spent the money on dancing boys. Another commander murdered his 12-year-old daughter in a so-called honor killing for having kissed a boy. “There were no repercussions,” Mr. Quinn recalled.

In September 2011, an Afghan woman, visibly bruised, showed up at an American base with her son, who was limping. One of the Afghan police commanders in the area, Abdul Rahman, had abducted the boy and forced him to become a sex slave, chained to his bed, the woman explained. When she sought her son’s return, she herself was beaten. Her son had eventually been released, but she was afraid it would happen again, she told the Americans on the base.

She explained that because “her son was such a good-looking kid, he was a status symbol” coveted by local commanders, recalled Mr. Quinn, who did not speak to the woman directly but was told about her visit when he returned to the base from a mission later that day.

...

Blah blah blah, follow the money and look the other way at some other shiny thing

(((Shiney  burqas)))

satire 

Afghanistan is a seriously fucked up place.

Not obvious we were helping.

I vote to impeach Joe. Time to get Mamala in there to run the show. 

If it makes anyone feel any better, all those ex military and CIA schmucks are full of shit. Anyone with half a brain and even a little knowledge of Afghanistan knew that the Taliban would roll back in as soon as we left. Maybe, if we had done it differently, it would have taken them 7 days instead of 3.

On top of that, in spite of all the money and deaths over the last 20 years, we're leaving the place no more of a humanitarian disaster than we found it in.

Everyone wanted us out of Afghanistan, except the war profiteers. Nobody could come up with a way to do it that wouldn't end up with Taliban rule and humanitarian issues. Well, except the war profiteers.

I agree with Ras. Fuck anyone who blames this on Biden. At least he was willing to do what no other POTUS would, and he owns it. Fuck the hypocrites on the far Left double as hard. They're the ones who have been screaming for this the longest and loudest. Did they really think that this would end any other way?

Yes you cannot pin this on Biden, but 

he is the leader of the Military and in charge of the removal of our citizens, allies and assets and it was a cluster fuck, and that buck is his, and it is/was an absolute failure. 
 

no one bats 1000

It's not necessarily an "absolute failure." We still control the Kabul airport, and flights are moving in and out freely and thousands and thousands of people are leaving. From what I've read and heard, not one US citizen or asset has been captured. Plus, the Taliban is at least bullshitting about women's rights and treatment of collaborators.

Again, I ask, what other way could this have gone? Should he have brought in 100,000 troops to facilitate a withdrawal?

JR 

WOW

At least you get dead and company

lost in space 

Anyway let's get another beer together in Fairfax whatever the hell it was sometime

It is clearly a tough situation but I am surprised that Biden punted and fell back onto tRumph's "negotiated plan" without trying to make it at least a little better/smoother. That said, it seems like we should help those whom want to get out as orderly as possible and then cluster-bomb the shit out of the place.

woah bro, so edgy

A Twenty years effort covered in one quote. 

“There will be no democratic system at all because it does not have any base in our country,” Hashimi said in an interview with Reuters. 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2021/aug/19/afghanistan-live-news...

I think they should do a reality TV show showing members of the Taliban being introduced to western culture. I find it kind of funny seeing them riding bumper cars holding their machine guns, and also them dancing with their rifles.

I know I am going to burn in hell for these impure thoughts. 

Joe Biden totally , totally fucked up the exit. I wish he would have accepted and acknowledged his blame in an acceptable manner. 

>I find it kind of funny seeing them riding bumper cars holding their machine guns<

i read that the amusement park was burned down 

Great Todd song about a carousel burning down

https://youtu.be/YcRm7hgpaXY

Taliban are going to have their own problems soon.   In the last 48 hours, there have been deadly protests against them in several cities.   Plus, the old Northern Alliance is getting back together.

Violence and commerce can't really coexist. 

Like I said in another thread, religion is evil.

Now it is clear why Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey went out of business.

They could no longer compete with the Clown Show our government has become 

i don't understand.

like they had 20 years to figure out how to cut n run...

What don't you understand? It's Afghanistan. It was never a war that we could win, and it was never going to be a clean withdrawal. 

the lack of a cohesive plan?

fucking people that helped us, you know...

leaving all the tax payer's equipment behind..

you better believe this will be a huge election issue.

Those people haven't yet been fucked. Not even all Americans are out yet. How about waiting to see what really happens before convicting?

As for that taxpayer equipment, lol. My son just got done working on a major project for the Afghani military. The joke is that they had to get parts on EBay and Radio Shack because it was all so antiquated. We left not much of value.

What isn't a huge election issue, especially when people are looking for issues?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/confidential-state-department-cable-in-july...

you're right, it's going great. never mind.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/taliban-seizes-billions-us-supplied-23055...

Of course Kabul was going to fall, and quickly. It didn't take an expert to figure that out.

However, we still control the airport.

Had we not pulled out by 9/1, the Taliban would have gone full offensive and drawn us back into a major war. Let's not overlook that.

Again, there was no "right" way of doing this. I'd love to read some wonderful armchair quarterbacking, though.

BK, you should apply for a job in the Biden PR department, your making a shit sandwich without bread sound like an ice cream cone 

This has nothing to do with Biden. We've been there for 20 years and it's no less of a shitshow now than it was before we got there. It was only better for the Afghanis while we were there. We couldn't stay there forever. There''s a reason who no other president dealt with it. Your average bonehead could see this happening.

It's funny how many of the people screaming for us to pull out ASAP now don't think that we should have. Face it, it was always going to be a shit sandwich, and it's one that will be a mark on Biden, whether fully deserved or not.

no they should have left. should have never been there.

seems they could have done it better, what/how that is i dunno, not a miliatary logistics expert.

and yes, everyone could see it happening.

biden just stomped on the burning paper bag of shit left on his doorstep. funny thing is he knew it was there and still stomped on it.

 We left not much of value.<<

Many items "of value" left behind will explode/be rendered useless under mysterious circumstances.  And it won't be on the news.  Unless it happens at a wedding.

It would take years to get that crap out of there. You can bet that they have already removed anything deemed "high value."

Focus, people, focus. We have until September 1 to be out, and in that time we have to exfiltrate tens of thousands of Americans, plus thousands of Afghani assets. Nobody is wasting time and energy on 15 year old humvees, and APCs with seized engines.

>>> Many items "of value" left behind...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sebastienroblin/2021/06/30/one-month-700-tr...

EDITORS' PICK | Jun 30, 2021,11:53pm EDT | 80,852 views

One Month, 700 Trucks: Afghanistan’s U.S. Military Vehicles Fall Into Taliban Hands

An investigation of imagery posted on social media concludes that in the month of June alone the Taliban has captured a staggering 700 trucks and Humvees from the Afghan security forces as well as dozens of armored vehicles and artillery systems.

Those shocking numbers reflect that local defense forces in some districts are evaporating in the face of Taliban pressure—sometimes without a fight, due in part to the perception that the government is doomed due to the imminent U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan later this year. 

And that in turn implies huge volumes of military equipment donated or sold to Afghanistan to help it fight the Taliban may instead continue pouring into that very group’s hands.

Summing up the Damage

The tally come from a open-source investigative report published at the Oryx blog by Stijn Mitzer and Joost Oliemans. The continuously updated talley has catalogued hundreds of photos posted online by the Taliban of destroyed or captured Afghan military equipment. The blog was earlier distinguished for its detailed open-source investigation on equipment losses in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

As of the evening of June 30, the study found evidence of 715 light vehicles falling into Taliban hands, with another 65 destroyed.  Obviously, there are likely many more lost vehicles that gave gone uncounted due to not being recorded in photos or videos.

The confirmed vehicle losses notably include:
270 Ford Ranger light trucks
141 Navistar International 7000 medium trucks
329 M1151 and cargo-bed configured M1152 Humvees. These variants feature enhanced armor protection and more powerful engines.
21 Oshkosh ATV mine-resistant armor-protected vehicles

For context, in 2018 the Afghanistan’s armed forces reportedly operated 26,000 vehicles including 13,000 Humvees of various marks, while Mitzer writes that a total of 25,000 Humvees have been transferred to Afghanistan by 2021. During periods of intensified fighting, the Afghan government typically lost 100 Humvees a week.

===================================

This is BEFORE the Afghan politicinas bailed and their army "gave up".

Don't these vehicles have some kind of lojack to disable any that are lost/captured?  Better yet, boobytrapped, as suggested by Bluestnote?

The Taliban probably won't use that shit anyway. Everyone knows that terrorists love Toyotas.

> You can bet that they have already removed anything deemed "high value."
 

how much do you want to wager?

They usually just blow up the stuff that isn't coming out with the troops. I guess they expected only women and children to remain there and that the Taliban just morphed into ISIS dust.

>>>>

270 Ford Ranger light trucks
141 Navistar International 7000 medium trucks
329 M1151 and cargo-bed configured M1152 Humvees. These variants feature enhanced armor protection and more powerful engines.
21 Oshkosh ATV mine-resistant armor-protected vehicles

who gives a shit?

They sure aren't going to drive those trucks to Los Angeles.

The Taliban seems pretty unlikely to invade Iran

or India

or China

or Russia.

That leaves a bunch of other stans.

all the other stans are military clients of either Russia or China.

If the Taliban wants to invade Russian clients or Chinese clients, well, I guess Afghanistan gets a new babysitter.

Mannfred gets it. 

It's entertaining to watch the liberal news outlets rip Biden.  Didn't see that coming. Haha

I agree dL

band aids been ripped off

stop these endless fucking wars

*apologies dise, turt's and all the mothafuckas who held strong on this

I'm sure this scenario was reviewed .

F Trump 

Educational history refresher    https://twitter.com/kurteichenwald/status/1428849518901071880

Pretty amazing we did not lose anyone else.

so who did Trump set the table for, in getting the oil in Afghanistan?

Is there any doubt that any remaining US citizens are either war or drug profiteers? I'm guessing that 95% of our non-military personnel in Afghanistan fell into one of those 2 categories.

Thousands killed but biden is the bad guy because a dozen died at the end...

It was always going to end like this.. Actually surprised it wasn't more of a clusterfuck.