Three years ago today...
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@taiwan_girl said in Three years ago today...:
Its sad that 13 families in 2021 had to bear the death of a military son or daughter during military action.
it is also sad that 19 families in 2019 had to bear the death of a military son or daughter action..
That's correct, but very misleading. You like graphs...Graph out the months when those deaths occurred.
Always remember, Operation Valkyrie was an act of sedition.
Warning: I post things that interest me. Read and comment at your own discretion. -
https://dcas.dmdc.osd.mil/dcas/app/summaryData/deaths/byYearManner
Says 2019 had 21 deaths due to hostile action.
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@Jolly said in Three years ago today...:
@taiwan_girl said in Three years ago today...:
Its sad that 13 families in 2021 had to bear the death of a military son or daughter during military action.
it is also sad that 19 families in 2019 had to bear the death of a military son or daughter action..
That's correct, but very misleading. You like graphs...Graph out the months when those deaths occurred.
You're right - joking is not the right word, but my response was probably misleading, but there is still a semi valid point.
I have not study each of the combat deaths in 2019, but I am guessing that more than one of them was somehow the result of bad planning, poor support, lack of XXX, etc. As Commander in Chief, does the ultimate responsibilty fall to the president for their (possibly preventable) death?
Murder is probably not the correct word either from the mom.
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@taiwan_girl said in Three years ago today...:
@Jolly said in Three years ago today...:
@taiwan_girl said in Three years ago today...:
Its sad that 13 families in 2021 had to bear the death of a military son or daughter during military action.
it is also sad that 19 families in 2019 had to bear the death of a military son or daughter action..
That's correct, but very misleading. You like graphs...Graph out the months when those deaths occurred.
You're right - joking is not the right word, but my response was probably misleading, but there is still a semi valid point.
I have not study each of the combat deaths in 2019, but I am guessing that more than one of them was somehow the result of bad planning, poor support, lack of XXX, etc. As Commander in Chief, does the ultimate responsibilty fall to the president for their (possibly preventable) death?
Murder is probably not the correct word either from the mom.
I think her term was pretty close to the mark. That entire mess was a clusterfuck turned up to 11.
A combat death is one thing. An IED, a lone sniper, a suicide bomber...One can try to mitigate casualties, but you can't escape them. Or, as Johnny Jones says about when his legs got blown off and his two battle buddies were killed...If I stepped right instead of left, they'd be alive and I would have legs.
Biden made multiple mistakes, horrible mistakes during the Afghanistan withdrawal. It in no way compares with typical combat deaths in a war zone
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How many of those combat deaths in 2019 were followed up with Afghani Civilian Contractors, allies of our forces, falling from airliners they were trying to hold onto to get away from what our troops abandoned them to?
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In 2020, 2 US service men were killed and 6 injured when a (fake?) Afghan soldier got into a US base and started shooting.
How come this happened? Who did the vetting and background checks? Was President Trump responsible?
(Yes, the Afghan withdraw was a fiasco. How did the suicide bomber get so close? Who was responsible for the planning and logistics? Biden? And regardless, the President has to take ultimate responsibility. For what happened in 2021 and what happened in 2020. The Buck Stops Here. All too often, Presidents forget that.)
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FFS, you see no difference? None?
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Always remember, Operation Valkyrie was an act of sedition.
Warning: I post things that interest me. Read and comment at your own discretion. -
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"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@George-K said in Three years ago today...:
Dana Bash's CNN interview with Harris/Walz aired 18 minutes.
Her talking to Gabbard about the Arlington visit lasts about one-third of that time.
But realistically, that makes sense who is going to get the longer news.
One side is running for President of the US.
The other person is someone who was a congressmen but is no longer in Congress and is not running for any office.
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/09/the-biden-administrations-afghanistan-revisionism-exposed/
Paywall so...
The Biden Administration’s Afghanistan Revisionism Exposed
Noah Rothman
September 9, 2024 12:07 PMIn the months leading up to Joe Biden’s catastrophically botched withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, the president and his subordinates insisted that their hands were tied. It was Donald Trump, after all, who negotiated an agreement with the Taliban that simply had to culminate in an American pullout from Central Asia. That line became even more central to the Democratic Party’s talking points after the withdrawal devolved into a bloody national humiliation. Somehow, it was all Trump’s fault.
“It is perhaps not what I would have negotiated myself, but it was an agreement made by the United States government, and that means something,” Biden said on April 14, 2021, in defense of his stubborn devotion to the terms scratched out by his predecessor. As the American position in Afghanistan imploded, Biden leaned hard into the notion that he had been shackled to a bad deal. “I had only one alternative,” Biden said in the immediate aftermath of the Abbey Gate massacre: “to send thousands more troops back into Afghanistan to fight a war that we had already won, relative to the reason why we went in the first place.” Biden’s allies wielded the deal the Trump administration produced with the Taliban in Doha like a “get out of jail free” card whenever their wisdom came into question. And by the third year of Biden’s term, Trump’s responsibility for the mess the administration engineered in Afghanistan had become an inviolable tenet of the faith. “President Biden’s choices for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor,” a 2023 Biden administration summary of the withdrawal read.
This exercise in blame-shifting was crudely constructed from the outset. Even before 13 American soldiers were killed in a preventable disaster outside Kabul’s civilian airport, the Biden administration’s excuses for its failures strained credulity.
The Doha Agreement was conditional, defenders of Trump’s role in negotiations with the Taliban rightly insist. Biden inherited no plan to withdraw U.S. forces prior to the exfiltration of American civilians and U.S. allies, no proposal compelling America to surrender Bagram Airbase before withdrawal was complete, and no requirement compelling the State Department to abruptly shutter diplomatic facilities in the country despite assurances that they would remain open. The president routinely cited warnings related to him by, among others, America’s lead negotiator, Zalmay Khalilzad, who insisted that blowing past a tentative May 1, 2021, withdrawal deadline would result in renewed Taliban attacks on U.S. outposts. But blow through it Biden did, settling first on 9/11 as his preferred withdrawal date before retreating to August 31. As the American position in Afghanistan deteriorated, the U.S. did resume airstrikes on Taliban forces in late July of that year and Biden did order the deployment of more American troops to Afghanistan to cover the U.S. withdrawal.
Biden had so amended the Doha deal’s terms that casual observers could reasonably conclude he owned the tragedy in Afghanistan regardless of the framework he inherited from Trump. Today, following a years-long investigation led by Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, a report itemizing the failures that produced the Afghan debacle reveals just how little regard the Biden administration had for the Doha Agreement they so often cite.
“The president decided we’re gonna leave, and he’s not listening to anybody,” said Colonel Seth Krummrich, chief of staff for Special Operations Command Central, in the midst of the withdrawal. That assessment is consistent with the president’s behavior in advance of retrograde operations. The report paints a portrait of a White House that was so invested in leaving Afghanistan come what may that the president’s exposure to contrary opinions was severely limited.
The report suggests the administration’s interagency review of the Doha Agreement was a cursory exercise, and key figures such as Biden’s Afghan ambassador and General Scott Miller, the commander of NATO’s Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan, were barely consulted. Administration figures who did warn Biden of the threats posed to U.S. national security and ordinary Afghans by a Taliban restoration were blown off. Withdrawal was the course of action on which this administration was set, regardless of the terms of the Doha Agreement.
“Notably, former Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Afghanistan throughout 2021, Mr. Mark Evans, explained to the committee President Biden’s decision to unconditionally withdraw all U.S. troops was in fact not contingent on compliance to the Doha Agreement’s conditions,” committee chairman Mike McCaul’s account read, “asserting there was no ‘checklist approach’ where the U.S. would refuse to uphold its end of the deal until the Taliban held up theirs.” Indeed, the acting assistant secretary for the region, Dean Thompson, “could not recall if his bureau ever offered an assessment of whether the Taliban was meeting their commitments under the Doha Agreement.”
The document even alleges that the “Biden-Harris administration withheld material information from the American people” about the Taliban’s failure to meet the conditions established in the Doha framework. In the lead-up to departure, State Department spokesman Ned Price promised to conduct a review of the Taliban’s adherence to its commitments. But that was a mere box-checking exercise. “In his testimony before the committee, contrary to his public statement, Mr. Price asserted the Taliban’s adherence to the Doha Agreement was in fact ‘immaterial’ to the Biden-Harris administration’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan,” the report read.
Don’t expect this information to deter Democrats from broadcasting the notion that Trump was the true author of America’s national humiliation in Afghanistan. As Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee insist in their response to the McCaul report, Trump committed “the United States to a full, date-specific withdrawal in a deal he negotiated with the Taliban” and “initiated a withdrawal that was irreversible without sending significantly more American troops to Afghanistan to face renewed combat with the Taliban.” Disaster was inevitable, Democrats maintain; the only open question was which president would preside over it.
But the Republican investigation has concluded that Biden entered office hell-bent on taking the U.S. out of the fight in Central Asia, whatever the cost to its allies or America’s strategic position in the region. This administration’s commitment to retreat was unconditional. Democrats can blame Trump all they like for staking out an Afghan policy that put America on the path to a bloody national embarrassment, but it was Biden who presided over that embarrassment. The result was an indelible stain on his legacy.
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https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/22/politics/judge-orders-army-release-trump-arlington-visit/index.html
The US Army has been ordered by a federal judge to release records related to former President Donald Trump’s controversial August visit to Arlington National Cemetery by Friday at the latest.
The US Army issued a stark rebuke following the visit, stating that an employee of the cemetery was “abruptly pushed aside” after attempting to enforce rules that prohibit political activities taking place at the cemetery. The incident was reported to police and the employee ultimately decided not to press charges. The Army “considers this matter closed,” an Army spokesperson said in August.
