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The Arab Spring and "the War on Terror"


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34 minutes ago, Panto_Villan said:

Yeah - Bush, Blair, Obama, Biden, Cameron etc were all competent politicians. You can disagree with the decisions they made and the ideologies they held, but the distinction being drawn is between Trump (who simply wasn't capable of understanding the foreign policy issues, and was actively working to undermine his own national security apparatus) and them. They're clearly worlds apart.

Yeah. He’s the absolute worst by a mile, and his surrender to the Taliban, in the deal last year demonstrated that. The worry is that the Talibans might not be entirely upstanding people and keep their side of the deal, not that there was much for them to keep to, but so far they’ve not done so anyway.

It basically went like this: “the US will leave, completely and the Taliban must promise not to do any attacks on the US or it’s allies, or to harbour any bad people and the US must promise not to attack or interfere with the Taliban” and there was some stuff about doing a ceasefire, which the Taliban basically scammed - Stop for a bit, gather loads of troops and arms and then capture all the cities and land at the earliest opportunity.

 Biden has just kind of gone with that, too, even though the Talibans have been naughty. God knows what they’ll do next.

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5 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

Bush's foreign policy was leagues worse than all the others, including Trump's. It's not even a contest.

That’s fair. It all started with him. Trump’s is/was appalling, too, but to date the consequences haven’t been as ruinous.

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1 hour ago, blandy said:

There's a number of things.

The recent events are (IMO) a consequence of recent political pygmies and their incompetence and so on.

But if we go back further, as a number of people have said, politicians 20 years ago didn't just go in, get Osama and leave, there was this (mistaken) mission creep and exporting democracy stuff. To be fair to Biden, he was even back then dead against that wider engagement, so he's been consistent in that. He's just messed up with timing and how he's dealt with it as president. I mean the film on the News yesterday and the day before of civilians falling from aircraft to their deaths - that's gonna be his legacy. He claimed when he won "America is back" and then there's the pictures of the USA running away with civilians clinging to planes - that's not very "back" is it?

Like was said earlier, there are/were no good outcomes possible. The one that we're already seeing is a really bad outcome. But it's been done entirely for short-termist US domestic reasons, abrogating their responsibility having gone in there 20 years ago.

If the stalemate had endured, instead, well, 5 more years of whatever of education, freedoms for Women, further improvements in people's lives there. Over the 20 odd years, the country has had mains electricity brought to most of the population (it was a small percentage when the US went in). They've had girls education where there was none. They've had better infrastructure - water, hospitals, roads, health outcomes ...there have been improvements.

But even if the decision to leave was still to be kept to, the problem is that the Taliban would always be waiting to come back, however long it would take. Pakistan and other neighbouring counties were tacitly supporting the Talibans, if not at Gov't level, parts of their forces, or via the supply of weapons and money and supplies and sanctuary. @Awol posted about it I think.

Anyway, my observations, or thoughts are not that "they should have stayed"  - more that it's been horribly mishandled, particularly by Biden, but also by (an admittedly dumped upon) UK government. Maybe you see it differently, what's happened the past few months, I dunno? 

Well, I share the view that Afghanistan was going to collapse as soon as the West pulled out. Given that, I can see why the plug was pulled now - no point prolonging things, really.

I don't put any of this on the UK government really. Johnson had absolutely no say in the matter and I don't think Britain would have been consulted no matter who we had in charge.

On the face of it, it does certainly look like Boden mishandled things. I'm surprised that he didn't cancel the pullout or delay it another 6/12 months given there was no peace deal imminent. Seems mad to let two decades of work go up in smoke just like that.

I see two possible explanations for it. One is that he just wants the US out if Afghanistan, and damn the consequences. If so, I understand his reasons for doing so but then he has indeed badly mishandled matters.

The second explanation is that the Taliban and the Afghan government weren't going to be able to negotiate an agreement. In that case delaying the pullout wouldn't have achieved anything. I've heard suggestions that there's at least some truth in this - and in which case I'm not sure there's that much that could have been done differently.

I need to read a bit more to get a better idea of what the considerations were once the dust has settled a bit.

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3 hours ago, Panto_Villan said:

Yeah - Bush, Blair, Obama, Biden, Cameron etc were all competent politicians. You can disagree with the decisions they made and the ideologies they held, but the distinction being drawn is between Trump (who simply wasn't capable of understanding the foreign policy issues, and was actively working to undermine his own national security apparatus) and them. They're clearly worlds apart.

I guess competent would be one way of describing Blair, I mean he certainly amassed an impressive London property portfolio on a £150,000 salary. He also managed to get us in to an illegal war based on fake data when a million people marched to say it was a bad idea.

So yeah, perhaps when I first thought of my definition I presumed it had to include being a basically decent person, but actually, you don’t have to be decent to be competent. You can get perfectly competent mass murderers with blood on their hands.

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2 hours ago, chrisp65 said:

I guess competent would be one way of describing Blair, I mean he certainly amassed an impressive London property portfolio on a £150,000 salary.

This has always struck me as an odd thing to throw at him.

Isn't it far more accurate to say that between him and his wife, his family has amassed an impressive London property portfolio on a £150,000 salary for a decade, followed by 15 years of lucrative speaking appointments and 40 years of earning hundreds of thousands of pounds per year as one of the country's most successful barristers?

I'd be more surprised if they hadn't built up a pretty impressive nest-egg with all that to help them.

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6 hours ago, ml1dch said:

This has always struck me as an odd thing to throw at him.

Isn't it far more accurate to say that between him and his wife, his family has amassed an impressive London property portfolio on a £150,000 salary for a decade, followed by 15 years of lucrative speaking appointments and 40 years of earning hundreds of thousands of pounds per year as one of the country's most successful barristers?

I'd be more surprised if they hadn't built up a pretty impressive nest-egg with all that to help them.

 

I think we agree on all the notes in this tune, just not the order they were played in. 

But let’s not drag this topic too off track. I was just trying to suggest Trump was not the first person with any blame in this piece.

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Long form article on Politico up here, which was quite interesting: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/08/20/biden-afghanistan-kabul-chaos-taliban-evacuation-505600

Quote

This account of five chaotic days in the middle of August is based on interviews with 33 U.S. officials and lawmakers, many of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to describe sensitive internal discussions.

By Wednesday morning — dusk in Central Asia — the Afghan government’s already brittle control of the war-torn country was quickly unraveling in the face of a swift Taliban offensive coinciding with the nearly complete withdrawal of U.S. troops that Biden ordered in April.

A few days earlier, the militant group had seized the provincial capital of Zaranj, the first of many to fall in a blitzkrieg that stunned American officials with its speed and ferocity.

Most of America’s top diplomats and generals were still operating under the assumption that they had ample time to prepare for a Taliban takeover of the country — it might even be a couple of years until the group was in position to regain power, many thought. Though some military officials and intelligence agencies had stepped up their warnings about the possibility of a government collapse, officials felt confident in the Afghan security forces’ strategy of consolidating in the cities to defend the urban population centers.

And just hours earlier, Biden publicly expressed hope that the Taliban would be held at bay by the Afghan army. “I think there’s still a possibility,” he told reporters at the White House on Tuesday. (A month earlier, Biden said a complete Taliban takeover was “highly unlikely.”)

The Economist put out a long article on the pullout today as well that was also interesting. None of it reflected well on Biden; it basically said that while his decision to pull out made sense there seems to have been very little proper contingency planning done.

So yeah, I think I'll be jumping on board the "Biden screwed this up royally" bandwagon!

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25 minutes ago, Panto_Villan said:

So yeah, I think I'll be jumping on board the "Biden screwed this up royally" bandwagon!

I was very much of the 'withdrawing was absolutely right but it should have been much better organised' mindset, but to be honest I've gone away from the second part of that.

I'm sure there were lots of decisions that were wrong or could have gone better, but like, a complete government failure and opposition takeover of the country is never going to go smoothly is it. I mean, looking back at history, what are your top 5 most effective complete government collapses?

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2 minutes ago, maqroll said:

Biden looking decidedly callous in all of this. Deserves every shred of scorn coming his way, too. Total fiasco.

I concur. I have some friends who are diehard Democrats and diehard Biden apologists and even they have made some comments regarding him that I never thought they would.  He is just coming off really bad in all this as he should.

This whole situation is a cock up from top to bottom.

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7 hours ago, HanoiVillan said:

 I mean, looking back at history, what are your top 5 most effective complete government collapses?

I’d have to go with:

1.0 East Germany 1990

2.0 Romania

3.0 Irish Independence

4.0 ANC take over of the nuclear armed white apartheid South Africa

5.0 Germany 1945

 

 

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1 hour ago, chrisp65 said:

I’d have to go with:

1.0 East Germany 1990

2.0 Romania

3.0 Irish Independence

4.0 ANC take over of the nuclear armed white apartheid South Africa

5.0 Germany 1945

 

 

With Poland bubbling under

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