Trump negotiated with the Taliban without the Afghan government involved to 1) have the Taliban give up their ties with Al Qaeda, and 2) the US leave by May 1. Oh, and the Afghans to release 5000 Taliban prisoners they held. Biden says he was bound by it. How's that working out?
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Indeed Biden was bound by the deal, he had no choice. Just like he was bound by the Keystone pipeline, the border, and the rent moratorium. He cannot undue anything the previous president did. Delta is also Trumps fault because Trump is against vaccines, in fact anything that goes badly in the Biden administration will be due to Trump.
I don't understand why everyone is blaming Biden and saying that he is hiding from the press.
The reality is that Trump made this ill-thought out deal not Biden. We have to remember that it will take years to recover from the damage Trump did the nation and world. Also Biden only goes to the press when he has something to say. Trump would tweey crazy stuff and ramble like a mad person in the press briefings. What I am shocked by most is that the intelligence agencies that rightfully hated Trump so much would now jump ship and blame Biden? What is going on? We are in a 10 times better position now than we where in the last four years. Also not to be on the case of Afghanistan but why are we in a far away country spending trillions of dollars when we have historically neglected and discriminated against large portions of own people. Why we trying to liberate people in the middle east when we literally have people being treated so badly in the US. We have our own issues to worry about. Also the FBI said domestic terror is our greatest threat not international terror. We could use all those resources to fight the growing internal threats in the US. Does anybody remember Jan 6th, that was close to our own Kabul moment. We need to get our house in order before just go off in the outside world and tell them what to do.
8/18/2021 5:35 PM
Once again my friend you have failed to understand just how LLNL, LANL and Sandia are contacted the the global world. Do you think there can be any connection between Afghanistan, Iraq, 9/11 and what happened to the labs? Think about this and what happened to much of the US military and they way we approach national security. Before 2001 LANL and LLNL where run by UC, and run very well mind you. After 9/11 we rapidly invaded Afghanistan and Iraq a a couple of years after that. These where large scale efforts and new approach to both the military and work in in these countries was to outsource this work to for profit contractors, Bechtel by the way was one along with Halliburten, but there are many others and they got huge sums of money and in the end delivered very little, but once this plan of having for profit companies run things it got applied to all sorts of things and soon LLNL and LANL become for profit operations run by Bechtel. We have seen how all this ended where Bechtel took the profit but delivered less than nothing. The same thing happened but 10^4 greater in Afghanistan where there was far less accountablity. The contractors where of low quality but paid huge sums of money. I met of few of these guys who went to Iraq and Afghanistan and made lots of money, they where also very honest about what was going on. What was odd was just how different the lives of contractors versus soldiers in these places.
If you worked at LLNL and LANL than you know exactly that the whole for-profit thing not only led to no value added and even had value taken form the lab. A few people at LANL even pointed out that looking at how ineffective the for profit model was at the labs and asked "could you imagine just how bad it was in places like Afghanistan". People go on about 2.3 trillion dollars that was spent on Afghanistan and how come the Afghanistan army was so poorly trained or poorly prepared, how come they could not train anyone fix helicopters in 20 years? It is simple a huge amount of that money never got them it was taken for profit, wasted or stolen, and what do you bet all these sleazy contractors made a whole lot money out of this? Why do think we are in these places for 20 years? Lots of people are making great money off this, lots. Plenty of Afghanis also got rich, the last president of theirs just left with 150 million, hnmm, where do you think he got that? A point of a for profit is to make money, Afghanistan was making lots of profit, there was a huge push to keep it going. If it was more efficient we could have left Afghanistan 10 years ago it might not have fallen in 2021, but that would have been 1 trillion less in profits. Oh and do not be naive, the same thing could happen in Iraq just give it a bit more time, they have all the same issues.
But you you right this is just political crap with no relation to the labs.
8/18/2021 5:35 PM
To be fair to Scooby this thread is specific to Afghanistan. If you do not want to look at it fine. The labs did do some work related to this such network analysis, IED detection and so on. I would not say that work is a wast since this work could be applied to any sort of conflict beyond Afghanistan, but a fair amount of money was spent even at the NNSA labs I wonder how the people who worked on these projects feel now.