Pentagon spokesman confirms explosion outside Kabul airport, no word on casualties

Already answered. Trump, as usual, uncritically grabbed onto someone else's falsehood -- and he couldn't even get that right.

 

Is it right for generals to lead armies into warfare when there is no strategy for achieving victory?
Or do generals have a duty to resign rather than lead an army to defeat?

 

Whose falsehood? And how do you know it is false?

 

The failure was higher up.

 

When political leaders make decisions that make victory impossible should generals lead our soldiers to defeat or resign and then denounce the 'higher ups' who are responsible?

 

From the link:

". . . The $83 billion figure — technically, $82.9 billion — comes from an estimate in the July 30 quarterly report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) for all spending on the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund since the U.S. invasion in 2001.

In recent years, the spending has decreased. For fiscal 2021, about $3 billion was spent on security forces, which was similar to 2020.

Separately, the U.S. government spent about $36 billion on shoring up the Afghan government. The total bill for the Afghan project added up to more than $144 billion.

In any case, the $83 billion spent on the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) goes back two decades, including almost $19 billion spent between 2002 and 2009.

A 2017 Government Accountability Office report estimated that about 29 percent of the funds spent on the Afghan security forces between 2005 and 2016 went to equipment and transportation. (The transportation costs related to transporting equipment and for contracted pilots and airplanes for transporting officials to meetings. There appears to be no way to segregate transportation spending.)

Using that same percentage, that would mean the equipment provided to Afghan forces amounted to $24 billion over 20 years. The GAO said approximately 70 percent of the equipment went to the Afghan military and the rest went to the national police (part of the Interior Ministry). . . . "

 

The decisions that led to defeat were decisions to withdraw, not decisions to fight.

 

I don't care about the damn number what we see is Taliban in humvee's, Taliban parading the city with a man hanging from our blackhawk helicopter, Taliban with our M16's, and Taliban wearing our uniforms complete with helmets and night vision. I can't blame this on Biden specifically it's a culmination of Bush, 8 years of Obama/Biden, Trump and Biden again.

I do think we should have bombed the **** out of our aircraft once the taliban seized the city or shot that damn blackhawk down with a man hanging.

 

IOW, Americans will spend over $6Trillion for $82.9B worth of equipment - $144B "the Afghan project".

“United States has debt-financed as of 2020: $2 trillion.
Estimated interest payments on that $2 trillion so far (based on a higher-end estimate of interest rates): $925 billion.
Estimated interest costs by 2030: $2 trillion.
Estimated interest costs by 2050: $6.5 trillion.
THE WARS END. THE COSTS DON'T:
Amount Bilmes estimates the United States has committed to pay in health care, disability, burial and other costs for roughly 4 million Afghanistan and Iraq veterans: $1.6 to $1.8 trillion.
Period those costs will peak: after 2048.”
ABC NEWS, The cost of the Afghanistan war, in lives and dollars, The nearly 20-year American combat mission in Afghanistan was the United States’ longest war, By ELLEN KNICKMEYER Associated Press, July 12, 2021.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/cost-afghanistan-war-lives-dollars-78802965

Our war strategy, our mission must be to transfer wealth from ordinary Americans into the pockets of the war profiteers.
No wonder we can't defeat our enemies - that is clearly not the mission.

 

Have you read Sun Tzu?

"In war, then, let your great object be victory, not lengthy campaigns." Sun Tzu's The Art of War: Bilingual Edition Complete Chinese and English Text (ed. Tuttle Publishing, 2012) - ISBN: 9781462905126

Good book.

 

Nope.
Person hanging from helicopter in Afghanistan appears to be ...
https://www.politifact.com › factchecks › aug › tweets

Claim: A video shows the “Taliban hanging someone from a helicopter.”
Claimed by: Tweets
Fact check by PolitiFact: False

 

We GWBush won in Iraq. Obama threw the victory away.
GWBush and Obama won in Afghanistan. Trump and Biden threw the victory away.

 

The Iraq wars were a victories for Iran, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
America gained nothing.

 

PolitiFact is not a very credible source.

"Perhaps the biggest lie of all is that fact-checking can act as some sort of short-cut to the truth. For news consumers, there’s really no getting around the time-intensive work of paying attention to multiple sources of information and making their own judgments.

And I’ll bestow my own “Pants on Fire” award to anyone who claims otherwise."
HUFFINGTON POST, PolitiFact and the Limits of Fact-Checking, By Dan Kennedy, Associate professor of journalism at Northeastern University, 12/13/2011 11:26 am ET Updated Feb 12, 2012.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/politifact-and-the-limits_b_1144876

 

We had achieved victory by the time GWBush left office. Obama threw that away.

 

They are correct in this instance.

 

Stopped clocks are occasionally correct.

 

I have limited patience for uninformed, unreasonable posters. Good luck in your future endeavors.

 

How did saving the Saudi and Kuwaiti regimes benefit the US or Americans?

 

Both are very useful and helpful allies.

 

None of us are fully informed. I try very hard to rely on reason alone. Any failure to do so is unintentional.

I note that you do not dispute the fact that PolitiFact is not a very credible source.
Just as I have not said that their conclusion was wrong in this instance.

 

Specifically how did the Iraq Wars benefit America and Americans?

 

Politifact is accurate within reasonable limits.

 

PolitiFact is a politically biased source. IOW, it is inherently unreliable.

"As for Hemingway’s bill of particulars in the Weekly Standard, well, he’s not wrong, either. He seems particularly exercised by the AP. But since I’m writing about PolitiFact, let me cite one of Hemingway’s examples: the site’s judgment that Rand Paul, shortly after his election to the Senate, falsely claimed that federal employees earn an average of $120,000 a year compared to $60,000 in the private sector. Paul was essentially right. But PolitiFact labeled his statement a lie because he didn’t explain that he was talking about total compensation, including benefits, rather than just salary."
HUFFINGTON POST, PolitiFact and the Limits of Fact-Checking, By Dan Kennedy, 12/13/2011 11:26 am ET Updated Feb 12, 2012.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/politifact-and-the-limits_b_1144876

 

1. The world is a better place without Saddam Hussein.
2. The victory opened new possibilities for Middle East peace, but as I said, Obama threw that away.
3. The victory strengthened the US position in the Middle East, but Obama threw that away.