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You are here: Home / Foreign Affairs / War / Not Our Problem Anymore

Not Our Problem Anymore

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Why we are better off getting out of Afghanistan:

Four Russian military planes evacuated Russian and other nationals from Kabul on Wednesday on the orders of President Vladimir Putin, as Moscow held military exercises involving its tank forces in neighbouring Tajikistan.

The flights mark a shift in Russia’s stance on Afghanistan. Its ambassador to Kabul had previously praised the Taliban’s conduct and said the group, still officially designated a terrorist organisation in Russia, had made Kabul safer in the first 24 hours than it had been under the previous authorities. read more

But the Kremlin said on Wednesday that the situation was very tense and, citing the presence of Islamic State in Afghanistan as well as the Taliban, said that the terrorist threat was “very high.”

It’s literally not our problem anymore. Let Putin and the Chinese deal with their own increasing security problems. less time for them to engage in industrial espionage and fuck with elections.

Reader Interactions

69Comments

  2. 2.

    Baud

    Technically speaking, Joe Biden is now solely responsible for any bad thing that happens in Afghanistan for the next 1000 years.

  3. 3.

    Mallard Filmore

    Let Putin and the Chinese deal with their own increasing security problems.

    Those two cultures don’t have the “sensitivities” that we in the west embrace. I see a lot of pain if the Taliban cannot keep their wingnuts within their own borders.

  7. 7.

    Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)

    It’s their headache. And it couldn’t get dumped in the laps of any more deserving authoritarian assholes.

    As an aside, it hardly shocks me, but it does sadden me to see how openly wingnuts here are drooling over the prospect of some awful disaster happening in Afghanistan in the next few weeks, one that would get loads of people killed, just so they can point to Biden and blame him for it. These people have no souls.

  8. 8.

    Ohio Mom

    Who are these Americans who didn’t/aren’t listening to State Department’s pleas to leave? “Contractors” NGO staff? They’ve had months and months of warnings, I read somewhere they were offered money to pack up and leave.

    Ironic since so many Afghans clearly want to leave that there are Americans dwaddling. I wonder how many there are all together.

    Just another thing I guess to add to the list of “Biden’s fault.”

  9. 9.

    FlyingToaster

    @Baud: Greek isn’t any of my languages, but I think it’s just a direct translation from Μέγας Ἀλέξανδρος.

  13. 13.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    On the Pod Save The World podcast today, Ben Rhodes told the story of getting this email from Clarissa Ward of CNN, whose reporting has been much discussed on twitter recently

    “Near the end of 2016, as Russian bombs were raining down on Aleppo and the eastern part of the city was about to fall to the regime, I felt a familiar flash of rage and despair. I wrote an email to Ben Rhodes, now Obama’s point man on the Syrian conflict… ‘Dear Ben, Hope you are sleeping well as Aleppo burns. Thank goodness we have the Russians to sort it all out!…’ He never replied.”

    I admire his restraint, and I find her email to be incredibly unprofessional
    as the hosts pointed out, no other reporters talk about their beat this way. Health care, Haiti, Puerto Rico.. Do reports not know people who have suffered from lack of health care? Puerto Rican friends? Do they know about Haiti? Do they send enraged emails to sources and gov’t officials whose email addresses they have?

    And it reminded me of this mini-thread

    David Roberts @drvolts
    For years, climate types have struggled to articulate the failure of the media on their subject. Too often that just reduces to counting the number of times “climate” is mentioned, which doesn’t really capture it. This last week or two is clarifying, though. We’ve now seen …
    … what it looks like when the US media genuinely *cares* about something: it looks like Afghanistan coverage.
    That’s all climate folks have ever wanted, is for pundits & editors to really care about climate, the way the facts warrant. They haven’t & they still don’t.

  14. 14.

    sab

    Back under Carter we literally funded the Taliban to fight Russians. Now we are surprised when Russians leave as the Taliban takes over. I have goldfish with a longer attention span and historical memory than US reporters. I could say stupider, but we all know it’s griftier. When a reporter gets to high up DC levels it’s mostly about the salary and the book deals.

  19. 19.

    germy

    WASHINGTON—Reluctantly acknowledging a faint stir of pride at the success of their tutelage, the CIA admitted Tuesday to being begrudgingly impressed by how well they trained future Taliban members throughout the 1980s. “Damn, we really have to give ourselves a little bit of a pat on the back for showing these sons of bitches the ropes,” said CIA director William Burns, admitting that the intelligence agency deserved some credit for providing Mujahideen militants with all the tools they needed to rapidly rise through the ranks of the Taliban. “This was a classic ‘teach a man to fish and he’ll fish for life’ situation, and our hard work back then obviously really paid dividends. Of course, these scenes from Afghanistan have been horrifying, but you can’t help but be a little wowed by how these bastards took our idea and just completely ran with it.” Burns added that this situation had made a nice change of pace after dealing with the disappointment of those goddamn Contra pushovers.

    (The Onion)

  27. 27.

    Kay

    Although… Biden can, perhaps, if major media personalties will allow it, chart a new course on U.S. foreign policy.

    That’s permissible. It’s possible. We don’t have to keep making the same mistakes over and over and we don’t have to hire or listen to the same people. It’s a choice.

  28. 28.

    Cacti

    @sab: Yep.  Afghanistan had a Marxist, but secular government, where women were allowed to do radical things like wear pants and have careers.

    With the help of Carter and Reagan, the Mujahadeen “fixed” that problem.

  29. 29.

    PPCLI

    @Mallard Filmore: Indeed.

    In retrospect, it might have been wise to refrain from giving the stinger missiles to allow the Mujahideen to bring down the Soviet monster attack helicopters.

    Let the Soviets be the ones doing just well enough to be bogged down forever.

  30. 30.

    cain

    @Baud:

    Bet he would love that – he can cover himself in martyr-hood. I have no idea why he wants to interview them.

  31. 31.

    cain

    @Cacti:

    Honestly, between the Americans and English – they’ve done more to create terrorists/hostile islamic govts than any other. We can also thank them for converting Iran into a conservative Islamici republic cuz they have the gall to want to do something with their own resources on their own land. In the end, they got nothing except a pissed off new govt.

  34. 34.

    WaterGirl

    I am listening to Jen Psaki’s press briefing today.  Oh my god, it’s not just one reporter asking why they aren’t getting people out more quickly and a different reporter questioning the safety of the vetting process because it’s being rushed.

    It’s the same fucking questioner asking both questions, one after another.  It makes me want to bang my head against a wall.

  36. 36.

    sab

    @Cacti: Mika Brzezinski, big fan of women’s empowerment, totally ignoring her father’s contribution to the cause. Oh yes, he let his wife saw up trees in the garage.

    I actually like wife’s work. Doesn’t detract from my point.

  37. 37.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @WaterGirl:

    It’s the same as a Fox News clip Aaron Rupar had up a couple of days ago, about the FDA approval of Pfizer (two different reporters, but working in tandem, so to speak):

    ”How can we trust the safety of the vaccine since the approval process was so rushed?”

    [talk talk]

    “What took them so long?”

  39. 39.

    WaterGirl

    @sab:

    big fan of women’s empowerment

    I can’t believe you were able to type those words with a straight face, without air quotes and without your head exploding.  Kudos to you!

  41. 41.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @rikyrah:

    Wow. Apart from the total criminality and immorality of the scam, that guy makes a great point at the end: perhaps a not-insignificant number of people who get Covid even though they’ve “been vaccinated” haven’t really been vaccinated at all — they just have a pricey forged document that says they have.

  46. 46.

    zhena gogolia

    I just scanned Dexter Fucking Filkins’s scolding of Biden in the New Yorker. The word “Trump” appears nowhere in the text.

  52. 52.

    zhena gogolia

    @schrodingers_cat: Oh, it’s very much a homegrown nickname, although it means something more like “threatening” or “formidable.” I don’t think he had much to do with the British.

  57. 57.

    zhena gogolia

    @SiubhanDuinne: I got married to the widow next door, she’s been married seven times before, and every one was an enery, wouldn’t have a willie or a sam

  58. 58.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    The way this stupid world works I would not be surprised if Russia invaded Afghanistan again in some crazed “We can win were the Americans failed and stop the Chines” kind of group think.

  61. 61.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @schrodingers_cat: He perfected the art of land reclamation in Lebanon.  I gather it’s not “Great” as in “wonderful” more like “the most important”

  62. 62.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Charles the Simple was a complicated man

    No one understood him but his queen

  63. 63.

    VeniceRiley

    It dawns on me the Eric Prince likely has contractors staying in country post 8/31 as private security for quite large sums. I bet he’s flying contractors in and selling the empty seats on the out. What a ghoul.

  64. 64.

    Booger

    @sab: I don’t think so. We funded the Mujahedeen. The Taliban wasn’t founded until much later, per some of our local experts.

  65. 65.

    Unsympathetic

    Pashtunwali is described a few paragraphs down in this post.  That’s precisely why no empire has [or will] crack it – it’s the graveyard of empires because the instant anyone takes the foreign money, they’re out of the circle of trust and can’t get back in. Bound to fail because whoever locally was supported by the invader as figurehead/leader of the whole thing is immediately leader of nothing.  Hard for outsiders to accept/understand/comprehend an area that isn’t a nation-state..

  66. 66.

    topclimber

    Why might some Americans not leave Afghanistan? Maybe they think the Taliban will let their NGOs continue to operate as long as they are not scams.

    If George Soros wasn’t so busy commanding Jewish space lasers, maybe someone could interview on the subject.

  67. 67.

    topclimber

    @Unsympathetic: This article was so full of dishonest takes that it makes it hard to bother with whatever you think makes it relevant.

    If ONLY Afghanistan were the graveyard of empires, Britain would have been out of India a whole lot earlier, Russia would be a lot smaller, and the US would stop with the imperial delusions and get back to being the best example so far of a republic that maximizes freedom and middle class wealth.

    Afghans have the misfortune but also the advantage of being surrounded by big powers: Russia, China, Iran, India (the British Raj of yesteryear). They always find an excuse to occupy, but the Afghans always have 3 or 4 comparable powers to play against the deluded occupiers.

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