It's not really a great slogan because it implies
Destroy
Then
Build it back, bigger and stronger
But Biden IS off to a pretty good start.
Handed Afghanistan and a Taliban that had been very diminished..
And Bah GAWD he built THEM back,, much better.

Stunning Suck Sess

Joe said it would NOT happen for a while..
But he was wrong.

"Joe said it would NOT happen for a while..
But he was wrong."


 This is true.

 I believe Trump was intending to bypass this event by just handing control directly over to the Taliban.  This would have placed them in even better shape as well, most likely better than what we have now at least along the diplomacy spectrum.  I see the reasoning behind this as I never expected the Afghan Government to maintain things for long.  Not just due to corruption but also the high casualty rates.

You win!

Dumbest thing ever said in this forum.


 Can you breakdown what you think the Doha Agreement resulted in?

 "Ongoing talks" or we would do what exactly?  Not go back.  Prisoner exchange and then what happened?  Not fewer Taliban attacks that's for sure.  The people you LISTEN to have what to say about Kunduz and Helmand?

 You think that agreement was actually designed to hand over control to anyone other than the Taliban?

But not before we got people out and I don't believe for a second we would have left them with the weapons Biden did.


 What weapons do you think we left behind that were US owned.  Owned not made?  

 Oh that's right, you don't believe arms agreements with Afghanistan exist.  20 years of lies about that one, even Trump sat around lying about it.  If we maintain the stance that the US never sold or gave weapons to Afghanistan we can pretend Biden left behind US owned weapons.   Let's not let truth and logic get in the way now.

https://www.openthebooks.com/assets/1/6/GAO_Report_-_Afghanistan_Equipment1.pdf


 Maybe Trump had it right:

 "They’ve left $83 billion worth of equipment behind, including brand new Apache helicopters, thousands of Humvee vehicles with armor guard, equipment that nobody has ever even seen before, it was so sophisticated,"

 This is false.  The US has brought 82.9 billion total since 2001.  We did not leave all of that there, it's just lies.  It is obvious they are using the report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction that represents the total appropriated funding for the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund since 2001. As of June 30, about $75 billion was actually disbursed.
 
 When you LISTEN to people that were in Afghanistan what do they have to say about leaving US owned weapons behind?  Are any of them actually telling you they were ordered to leave behind US owned and operational equipment?  Are you even familiar at all with how that stuff is managed in the field?  

 Of course, in all large-scale military operations, there will be items left behind, but this 83million in working US owned equipment is ridiculous.  A sitting US President can't order that.

 "Brand new" Apache helicopters, give me a break.

"Once it was obvious that the Afghan Army would not stand, leaving equipment for the enemy was wrong. Who OWNS it stops being relevant. I know, nuance,,"

 This is incorrect.  Since you deny any arms agreements exist you can maintain this logic so your observed reality will stay in place with your opinions, but the real world isn't fooled.  Destroying equipment because you "think" it might get into the wrong hands is against a number of treaty obligations whether think those exist or not.

 This is why politics and war are so sh!tty, you can't "win" by bombs alone.  You can't just declare nuance and change the rules and the surrounding implications in the real world.


"America AND Afghanistan would be better off today had it all been destroyed.
By leaving it for the Taliban we did Afghanistan a disservice."

 I agree leaving for the Taliban was not an ideal situation, but no negotiation addressed this, including the Trump initiated ones.

 Imagine Biden ordered US equipment destroyed and we spent another number of months blowing sh!t up, then left.  You think you would not be sitting here right now saying we did Afghanistan a disservice by leaving them helpless without any of the equipment we obviously didn't need - since we blew it up?    

 
"Thankfully some grunts saw what was going on and sabotaged some equipment."

 It's not like a few guys just grabbed some grenades and took care of it on behalf of the US military.  There is a procedure for this as a lot of that equipment has to be dismantled for the blasts to be efficient.  Looking at the damage on the aircraft alone one can see the damage would not have addressed all sensitive components under demilitarization standards.  

 I think part of our delay earlier in the year was the dismantling of equipment.  

"Look,,
Months
Not required."

 Based off of what?  All your time in Afghanistan addressing logistics issues?  I am getting this information from people who were there doing the work, and who I worked alongside.  Of course you say I am lying about that which is a convenient way of reducing credibility.

 The acquisition and kinetic destruction of previously owned US equipment from the past 7 years of appropriated funds dispersal that you say doesn't exist, would take about 8 months based off the assessments of people in-field tasked with the distribution.  But they must be wrong because people doing the job can't know more than those watching YouTube and surfing the internet.


"You can pretend to know what I would say if
Biden had destroyed arms.
No.
You pretend I'm some petulant jerk. No."

 I asked you a question.  Is this really any different that you calling Biden my "Illustrious leader" with no knowledge of who I voted for and not one single reference of me saying anything positive or negative comparatively to Trump?



"Destroying arms should have been done
Who OWNED them means nothing."

 Incorrect.  Those of us that do not deny 20 years of arms negotiations exist can accept that this is not a reality we can just get away with.  It's like saying we can just dump anything we don't want in the ocean like we did in WWII.  We can't.  This is a violation of multiple treaties across multiple nations, the world changed since 1945 - ocean dumping is an international incident now.

 Blowing up stuff we gave to another country because we think they might lose it is not as easy as typing down on a keyboard.  I imagine a reason you deny arms agreements ever existed with Afghanistan, or that aircraft went to Uzbekistan, or that contractors worked on older US made helicopters, is because you might actually know how ridiculous kinetic destruction of an allies' equipment really is.


"Who has them

NOW?????"

 The Taliban.  They would have gotten them after the Trump Doha negotiations anyway but you can deny that by refusing to acknowledge it exists.  We can't just pre-emptively blow up anything we think the Taliban might get.  The real world doesn't work that way, this would have come across as a direct violation of our own agreements and an intentional weakening of the Afghanistan forces based off of a "maybe" that the Taliban would get those items.


 You want Reality, stop denying 2 decades of arms deals exist.  

I know arms deals existed.

http://suzukisavage.com/cgi-bin/YaBB.pl?num=1629980331/7#7


"Blah blah blah,, I don't buy it."

 So which is it?  You know or you don't buy it?

"And I Really don't care about who owned it.
What would the fallout be?
Our allies lose faith in us?"

 I understand you don't care, but that changes a whole lot of nothing about how US wartime conventions work.  There's a number of things that could happen if we sell equipment to a country then blow it up once we decide we want to leave and say "maybe" the "enemy" (That we literally negotiated with, without our allies) might get ahold of that equipment - that isn't ours.

 There's an issue with killing an "enemy" that is part of a negotiated truce when they aren't engaging.  

 You may not care but a lot of nations we have treaties with will.  We negotiated with the Taliban less than a year ago , we can't just call them "the enemy" all the sudden because we decided we want to leave now without a degree of impact among our international relations.  

 No matter what you think or Trump says, we didn't leave "brand new" Apache helicopters, we left old UH-60's with tech we stopped using in the 90's.  We were going to leave them even with the previous Administration, Biden didn't change that, it was going to happen.

 That doesn't mean the evacuation process wasn't a complete sh!tshow.  I am just saying the same thing I always do: We don't need to make up lies to make a bad decision seem worse.  Just let it be a bad decision.

 We don't need to violate every international agreement because we decided on a poor exit strategy, just let it be a poor exit strategy.

 We don't need to pretend "the enemy" wasn't diplomatically recognized and that any exit strategy involved US dispersed, not owned, equipment was never going to end up in Taliban hands.  It was and that's a large part of what people were complaining about back when Trump started the negotiations.

 There's no easy solution to getting out of Afghanistan.  People sitting safe at home reading the internet aren't exactly experts.  I've seen what goes on there and I couldn't begin to tell you what the best processes are.