Oh no (totally worthless grifter) allies of GAE were not all settled in red and purple states so they could rape and vote reliably democrat!1!!! 😭😭😭
We must go back to afghanistan to save them!1!1! USA USA
You seem to have tagged the wrong person, that's my quote. But yes, I know this might come as a shock to certain Americans who think they can do whatever the fuck they want and the rest of the world will just take it (all over the political spectrum - clearly the West Wing LARPers staffing the Biden admin thought this exact same way until the Taliban taught them that arbitrarily breaking a signed peace agreement has consequences), but actively backstabbing your allies and letting them get killed by people who were your enemies until literally two weeks before this ramshackle 'evacuation' so you can make room for a war trophy is something people in general frown upon no matter the time & place.
That is the level we're at after all, not 'simply' abandonment (which I believe is entirely justified).
As my posts in this thread indicate I'm hardly the kind of guy who thinks the US should've stayed in Afghanistan for another 100 years and break its back bending over for the Afghans, but I do believe that when you invade some place and sit on it for 20 years, you do bear some responsibility for the locals who directly, consistently provided actual help to you both in victory and defeat. This isn't just coming out of whatever vestige of a bleeding heart I might still have from my teenage years, mind: pragmatically speaking, how you treat your allies & local auxiliaries is the kind of thing that can make or break your reputation in front of everyone else who's either already allied with you (as Britain is, for example) or considering teaming up with you down the line (East & Southeast Asian countries). It also makes way more sense to take people who directly worked for you in instead of hordes of unvetted random criminals, but as I was saying to the other poster, that's a policy you need to blame on the POTATUS and his buddies.
'But the ANA/ANP were worthless and actively backstabbed
us many times!' One might say. Yes, that's not in dispute. But the ~50 people Donahue reportedly kicked off this flight were described as 'key HUMINT assets' and 'bonafide personnel', which gives me the impression that they were directly working for the US. Interpreters and such - people who took a genuine personal risk to help out US forces directly, not the ANA/ANP goons who were in it to collect a paycheck and could've just walked off duty once the going got tough (as many did) or were straight up Taliban moles. Now of course I might be wrong, because that description is quite vague and Redstate's sources are anonymous (not that I can blame them given what's happening to Stuart Scheller) - if these were ANA/ANP cowards or corrupt politicians who stole from US funds then by all means, let the Taliban string them up. But given how rapidly everything the Biden administration and its uniformed puppets said about Afghanistan has been proven catastrophically wrong this year, until I see hard evidence of the opposite I'm going to assume they're closer to the truth than the latter.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: if this & the speed with which Biden offered financial aid to the Taliban while they were still fighting the last scraps of the ANA who were worth a damn are any indicator of the future reliability of the US as an ally, you can kiss victory against China in the next 10-20 years goodbye. Nobody's going to suicidally fight China if they think the US will sell them out, or even actively help China finish them off, the second the going gets tough. (Perhaps you're an isolationist, and such an outcome would suit you just fine. If that is the case, then fair enough. I disagree, being someone who has family living directly in the way of Red Chinese expansionism, but that seems a subject better suited to one of the China threads anyway)
fivethirtyeight.com
