Chaos As Kabul Falls

Discussion in 'Taylor's Tittle-Tattle - General Banter' started by Moose, Aug 16, 2021.

  1. Moose

    Moose First Team Captain

    I’m getting positive noises from Film 4 and Richard Curtis is in!

    Shooting starts next spring as Gwyneth Paltrow (playing Carrie Symonds) has a window.
     
  2. Watch Boris, Wallace and Raab spin this next week as some kind of Dunkirk II victory

    *******
     
    Robert Peel and Moose like this.
  3. UEA_Hornet

    UEA_Hornet First Team Captain

  4. UEA_Hornet

    UEA_Hornet First Team Captain

  5. Maninblack

    Maninblack Reservist

    If it's Carrie Symonds' window it will need curtains costing at least ten grand.
     
    CYHSYF, UEA_Hornet and Moose like this.
  6. davisp2

    davisp2 Reservist

    It didn’t seem possible that sleepy Joe could be a worse president than Trump, but it looks like he has pulled it off.
     
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  7. Obama knew he wasn't fit for the office, that's why he pushed the wicked witch of the west as his successor

    He walks like he's **** his pants, he forgets his lines, I imagine he dribbles his soup...
     
    iamofwfc and Lloyd like this.
  8. AndrewH63

    AndrewH63 Reservist

    Maybe a valid view - but 7 million of US citizens who voted preferred Biden to Donald Trump the architect of the current policy who signed the deal with the Taliban to remove US forces.

    Biden’s son served two full tours of Afghanistan. He was always very vocal opposing the military mission once al Qaeda had lost its bases and the Taliban government had been defeated. Famously saying US soldiers should not die to defend women’s rights in Afghanistan.

    Now the 2,500 US troops will soon be gone, it’s the way the west uses aid to Afghanistan that will be critical. Western aid represented 40% of Afghan GDP.

    The geo politics of Afghanistan is going to get more not less complex. The big players in the region are India and China. Pakistan teeters between democracy and collapse into a military dictatorship. Russia is reasonably geographically close to Afghanistan but their relationship with China is not as rosey as their United front against the west would indicate, so doubt they want to dip their toes in too much. Culturally Russia, Europe and US have more in common than India and China.

    I can see Afghanistan becoming a proxy battleground over control and influence in the Himalayas. The Taliban may find it hard to establish a traditional Islamist state. Things have moved on a lot in the last twenty years.
     
  9. Having lived and worked there, and never intending to go back, I can happily say I found most Americans I met were as thick as pig ****
     
  10. Moose

    Moose First Team Captain

    It’s an horrific position to be in. Holding an airbase with everyone hostile around you, trying to help people at the same time.

    I expect they will, but it will also mark an upturn in hostilities against IS and we go again.
     
  11. Davy Crockett

    Davy Crockett Reservist

    It's a lesson in the art of procrastination .
     
  12. UEA_Hornet

    UEA_Hornet First Team Captain

    It’s up to 11 US Marines and 1 US Navy medic killed now.

    They really should have withdrawn sooner.
     
  13. Lloyd

    Lloyd Squad Player

    And so it begins...
     
  14. "We'll hunt you down" says the senile old fruit whilst running away
     
    Lloyd likes this.
  15. UEA_Hornet

    UEA_Hornet First Team Captain

    When lethal warfare can be conducted with an games console controller from a pimped out trailer on an AFB somewhere at home, I'm not sure hanging around at Kabul now would be as much of a show of strength as providing handy targets for terrorists to aim at.
     
  16. Range of a reaper is c1100 miles. US have no bases there anymore, reapers can't a2a refuel, how's it going to get there flying from the middle east, skirting Iran etc?

    If it could get there, how is the operator going to know who is ISIS, who is TB, and who is civilian? They are all dressed alike

    These things always required intelligence on the ground and the US has just given that up, and given the TB lists of everyone who previously worked with them or is likely to work with them, so there is no chance of getting any new intelligence network set up
     
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  17. Moose

    Moose First Team Captain

    Our new Taliban buddies will call it in.
     
  18. StuBoy

    StuBoy Forum Cad and Bounder

    Haven't read this thread I must confess, but what seeing it here has done is made me start reading the Flashman novels again. At the moment I am at the point in the first one where he is part of the shambolic and disastrous retreat from Kabul in the first Afghan war. Amazing how history repeats itself in similar ways over and over.

    What a cad and bounder that Flashman is! Maybe it's time to change my avatar picture of 10+ years....
     
  19. Ybotcoombes

    Ybotcoombes Justworkedouthowtochange

    Haven’t read the whole thread , terrible situation regardless of what politics you believe in, admitting you are leaving 1000 people “behind” can’t be acceptable can it ?

    if you like documentaries , Adam Curtis (BBC) has made some excellent documentaries covering Afghanistan and why any attempt to occupy has always failed
     
  20. zztop

    zztop Eurovision Winner 2015

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  21. Moose

    Moose First Team Captain

    Has everything become an international competition since Brexit? We would be bound to as we were most heavily involved after the US.

    In saying that, a lot was done quickly with exceptional courage from those on the ground.

    Once all efforts have finished to get the rest, Biden and Johnson can explain why so little was done earlier. It appears a miscalculation slow to be corrected. That the Taliban could take months to challenge.

    But if the intelligence assessment was that the Taliban would eventually prevail, then there was a failure to plan for what that would mean.
     
  22. zztop

    zztop Eurovision Winner 2015

    I wasn't suggesting that it was a competition as this isn't a game, it's about saving lives.

    But you are right, the 39 nations that are now withdrawing their troops did not plan for the possibility that 15/20 years of re-arming and training the local security force would fail to yield more than a week's resistance. A terrible failure.
     
    Last edited: Aug 28, 2021
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  23. Moose

    Moose First Team Captain

    Really? Thanks for clarifying.
     
  24. zztop

    zztop Eurovision Winner 2015

    Well you obviously thought it was some brexit (where did that come from?) related issue, so I just put you right.
     
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  25. Moose

    Moose First Team Captain

    It’s the desperate need of your kind to find something to claim superiority of over others. Usually amid abject failure.
     
  26. Bonkingbob

    Bonkingbob First Year Pro

    The whole thing is an absolute cluster. Biden falls asleep during his conference with the Israeli PM. I for one welcome our Chinese overlords
     
    La_tempesta_cielo_68 likes this.
  27. zztop

    zztop Eurovision Winner 2015

    Well, to be fair, you are the forum expert on abject failure.
     
  28. Moose

    Moose First Team Captain

    I’d imagine he’s been busy over the last couple of weeks. You want to worry more about decisions made when politicians are awake. This sort of light take doesn’t really amount to anything.

    A lot has become clear over the last couple of weeks. For a start, that the West inserted a highly corrupt regime in Afghanistan that few of its people would fight for, even if they were paid to do so.

    That Pakistan would never give up on its project to destabilise that regime and that the Taliban was also getting support from China.

    The West had deluded itself about the progress it had made and after 20 years had the choice of leaving or fighting a proxy war that threatened to become less and less proxy. Politicians have been unwilling or unable to sanction Pakistan and China, to call their interventions what they are.

    Trump negotiated the withdrawal deal. Biden was unwilling to rip that up and agreed with the fundamental. Without question he would have been out on a limb had he decided to continue the mission. There is no UN interest.

    But the clock was ticking. There was self-delusion about the readiness of Afghan forces, but even then, giving up without a fight was pretty extreme. The Governments can be reasonably accused of failing to prepare. However, mass evacuation in the preceding months would have accelerated the Taliban advance as it would have been clear that the US and UK expected them to win.

    This is a 20 year tragedy in the making. Caused by invading and putting crooks in charge to ensure lucrative contracts first. Nodding off is the least of it.
     
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  29. Moose

    Moose First Team Captain

    Not sleep well dear? Worried about emptying shelves and other sunlit uplands?
     
  30. Moose

    Moose First Team Captain

    You might also want to consider the utter rout of your World view. This is a mess forty years in the making from Reagan and Thatcher onwards. Endless intervention, endless capitalist colonialism and all our will to fight, our young men and women our resources and credibility have been squandered. The result, domestic terrorism, retreat and more suffering for Afghans.

    Make ‘abject failure’ your phrase of the day.
     
  31. wfcmoog

    wfcmoog Tinpot

    We should have a dedicated sub forum for this politics related debate.
     
    Arakel likes this.
  32. Moose

    Moose First Team Captain

    No thanks.
     
  33. zztop

    zztop Eurovision Winner 2015

    Socialists re-writing history? Who would have thought it?

    It was your commie Russky friends that invaded Afghanistan. They were the colonists in the scenario, not the UK or US. And it was your Labour Party (10 years after Thatcher had gone) that took our troops into Afghanistan and dropping bombs in 2001, and your Labour Party as late as 2009 that was still telling us that the continuation of the retraining and re-armament of Afghanistan would see off the Taliban.
     
    iamofwfc likes this.
  34. Keighley

    Keighley First Team

    Ha ha. Corbyn.
     

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