The Taliban were disappointed to find inoperable planes and helicopters left behind by American forces on the military side of the Kabul airport. pic.twitter.com/HfmlwYNjO0
— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) September 1, 2021
FOX News: Taliban fighters upset, feel betrayed that US military left non-working helicopters: report
Militants reportedly believed helicopters would be untouched following US departure
Taliban fighters are feeling angry and betrayed Wednesday after discovering that Afghan National Army helicopters abandoned at Kabul’s airport have been rendered inoperable by departing U.S. troops, according to a report.
An Al Jazeera reporter who toured a hangar on the military side of the airport said in a video that the terrorist group "expected the Americans to leave helicopters like this in one piece for their use."
"When I said to them, ‘why do you think that the Americans would have left everything operational for you’? They said because we believe it is a national asset and we are the government now and this could have come to great use for us," she continued.
Read more ....
WNU Editor: I understand the Taliban's point of view. The U.S. and their Afghans left everything else to the Taliban, so why not a few planes and helicopters.
Symbolic destruction minor in consequence. Picked up by msm as psyop for the narrative.
ReplyDeleteIt was American assets. Taliban think that everything is granted, they are wrong. That said this will not help any "negotiation" with the Taliban who will want a revenge.
ReplyDeleteFor two years, the Trump administration conducted negotiations on America's withdrawal and Afghanistan's future not with the legitimate Afghan government, which was excluded from the talks, but with the terrorist movement the Taliban. The U.S. even forced the Afghan government inter alia to release thousands of Taliban terrorists from government jails. Biden was not constrained by Trump's agreement with the Taliban. He could have discarded or adjusted it as he has done in numerous other cases across the board, even on international agreements.
ReplyDeleteWhat were the difficulties to be surmounted had the U.S. chosen to pursue its strategic interests in Afghanistan? The first difficulty was that the U.S. had to contend with a terrorist Taliban insurgency that killed and maimed numerous Americans over the past 20 years. What is most inexplicable is that in all those years that the U.S. coped with this difficulty, it never dealt with the problem at its source, namely that the Taliban were the creation of those who pretended to be an ally: the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
America's ignoring of this fact borders on insanity. It was not always like that. After 9/11, the then Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage delivered a clear warning to Lt.-Gen. Mahmud Ahmed, the then director of Pakistani ISI: "Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the stone age." The ISI chief was visiting Washington at the time, as recalled by Armitage in an interview. Pakistan did think carefully and while it did not openly interfere with the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, sub rosa it sustained the Taliban as an active, incessant insurgency. At some point in 2007-08, President Bush even suspended intelligence cooperation with the Pakistanis, but soon enough it returned. Now, the ISI is savoring its sweet payback to the U.S.: Via its Taliban proxy it expelled the U.S. from Afghanistan and via this proxy it expects to rule it.
The second problem that the U.S. needed to overcome was that strategy of keeping its presence without boots on the ground required a national Afghan political force backed by a decisive majority that would constitute an effective nucleus for a durable U.S.-Afghan alliance. But, Afghanistan is not a country or a people or even an area bound by a common language. It is an artificial construct of the 19th century British-Russian rivalry. It is an ad hoc coalition of diverse ethnic groups comprising a Pashtun majority, and Shi'ite Hazara and other ethnic minorities. This problem, however difficult, could have also been overcome had the U.S. better understood the ethnic components of the regime, and predicated its policy on that foundation.
The U.S. could have built Afghanistan on the Pashtun majority and Pashtun nationalism to successfully compete with the Taliban that is also Pashtun and combines Pashtun nationalism with the Islamic option. Ashraf Ghani, the elected president, was a Pashtun and a modern Pashtun state could have been built with his cooperation in contrast to the Islamic alternative, the Taliban. This would have required different actions on the local and village level by the Americans, coopting Pashtun traditional Islam instead of heavy-handed democracy building overseen by USAID contractors. However, the U.S. chose two vacuous, contradictory, and self-destructive paths. On the one hand, it treated Afghanistan as a modern state that only required a helping of Western-style democracy to make it sustainable and not as an ad hoc coalition of tribes and ethnic groups. On the other hand, it preferred to throw Ghani under the bus and encourage the Taliban Islamic option. What were they thinking – that the Taliban would become an ally? Could they really hope to domesticate the Taliban and ally with this Islamist-jihadi movement?
If the Taliban are primitive cave men no more they should ba able to build their own aircraft from now on.
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteSupport for the American military withdrawal from Afghanistan dropped 20 percentage points from April to August as the Taliban takeover of the country accelerated, according to a Morning Consult/POLITICO poll https://t.co/u4emuL4u8c
— POLITICO (@politico) August 16, 2021
“Support for withdrawal remained at a partisan divide in the poll, with 69 percent of Democrats and 31 percent of Republicans supporting it.
I hope wnu was being sarcastic
ReplyDelete1:49 looks like the handiwork of the yellow belly sap sucker.
ReplyDeleteYellow Belly sap sucker struck again at 4:09
ReplyDeletehttps://www.politico.com/news/2021/08/16/poll-afghanistan-withdrawal-taliban-505165