What is to consider? It is almost a necessity at this point.

[Clipper]

www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/biden-administration-considering-airstrikes-in-afghanistan-targeting-american-made-equipment-report/ar-AANxBTc?ocid=msedgntp

Just an opinion, but it seems that we are playing catch-up when a sensible and proactive thing to do would have been to blow all those assets up as soon as the Afghan army walked away from them. With today' s technology it would have even made sense to install remote systems to destroy or disable the assets from afar via remote signal of some sort. Our aircraft carry some top secret systems that are able to be destroyed in case of a crash in enemy territory or capture of the pilot, so it IS technically possible.

There is no doubt in my mind that those weapons and vehicles need to be destroyed and kept from being used against us or the innocent Afghan citizens. The other thing I think is a priority that was not planned for in Biden's hurry to meet his strictly politically driven deadline is the fact that we need to send troops outside the wire to locate and escort out citizens and Afghans who helped us. Other nations are successfully doing so.

The president said yesterday that we will not pull out until all the American citizens and Afghans that helped us and WANT to leave are evacuated. WANT to leave? How do they get evacuated? They simply have to make their way through enemy territory to the airport, unescorted and unarmed. How do ya think THAT will work out.

These people should have been evacuated or moved to safety BEFORE we pulled the Taliban was able to take control of Kabul.

He made a statement the other day that I almost KNEW was coming at some point. Biden is trying to place BLAME ON TRUMP in an attempt to cover his own incompetent handling of the situation. He said the "deadline" was set by Trump and he is simply trying to carry out the "Trump plan" that was in place before he even took office.. Lets get real. The Trump plan might have proposed the deadline of September first, BUT I am relatively sure that things would have been better handled and we certainly would not be stranding our citizens and allies in Taliban territory with no way out other than to move through the present chaos by themselves in an effort to reach safety at the airport.

.

[Atticus Pizzaballa]

Looks like some serious problem just appeared:


ISIS threat forces US changes to evacuations at Kabul airport


KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Potential Islamic State threats against Americans in Afghanistan are forcing the U.S. military to develop new ways to get evacuees to the airport in Kabul, a senior U.S. official said Saturday, adding a new complication to the already chaotic efforts to get people out of the country after its swift fall to the Taliban.



The official said that small groups of Americans and possibly other civilians will be given specific instructions on what to do, including movement to transit points where they can be gathered up by the military. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss military operations.



The changes come as the U.S. Embassy issued a new security warning Saturday telling citizens not to travel to the Kabul airport without individual instruction from a U.S. government representative. Officials declined to provide more specifics about the IS threat but described it as significant, and said there have been no confirmed attacks as yet.



Time is running out ahead of Biden’s Aug. 31 deadline to withdraw most remaining U.S. troops, and the president on Friday night did not commit to extending it. He faces growing criticism as videos depict pandemonium and occasional violence outside the airport, and as vulnerable Afghans who fear the Taliban's retaliation send desperate pleas not to be left behind.



Crowds remain outside the Kabul airport's concrete barriers, clutching documents and sometimes stunned-looking children, blocked from flight by coils of razor wire.



Tens of thousands of translators and other Afghan wartime helpers, along with their close family members, are seeking evacuation after the Taliban’s shockingly swift takeover of Afghanistan in a little over a week’s time. The fall of Kabul marked the final chapter of America’s longest war, which began after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.



Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who negotiated the religious movement’s 2020 peace deal with the U.S., was in Kabul for meetings with the group's leadership, a Taliban official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the news media. Baradar's presence is significant because he has often held talks with former Afghan leaders such as ex-President Hamid Karzai.



Afghan officials familiar with talks held in the capital say the Taliban have said they will not make announcements on their government until the Aug. 31 deadline for the troop withdrawal passes.



Abdullah Abdullah, a senior official in the ousted government, tweeted that he and Karzai met Saturday with Taliban’s acting governor for Kabul, who “assured us that he would do everything possible for the security of the people” of the city.



Evacuations continued, though some outgoing flights were far from full because of the airport chaos, Taliban checkpoints and bureaucratic challenges. A German flight on Friday night carried 172 evacuees, but two subsequent flights carried out just seven and eight people, respectively.



On Friday, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said around 1,000 people a day were being evacuated amid a “stabilization” at the airport. But on Saturday, a former Royal Marine-turned charity director in Afghanistan said the situation was getting worse, not better.



“We can’t leave the country because we can’t get into the airport without putting our lives at risk,” Paul Farthing told BBC radio. “You’ve all seen the scenes — it is not different today to any other time.”



Farthing said he has been told by British authorities that a flight back to the U.K. has a seat for him, but not for the 25 staff from his animal welfare charity Nowzad and their families.



After a backlog at a transit facility in Qatar forced flights from the Kabul international airport to stop for several hours on Friday, the Gulf nation of Bahrain on Saturday announced it was allowing flights to use its transit facilities for the evacuation. The United Arab Emirates, meanwhile, said it would host up to 5,000 Afghans “prior to their departure to other countries.”



On Friday, a defense official said about 5,700 people, including about 250 Americans, were flown out of Kabul aboard 16 C-17 transport planes, guarded by a temporary U.S. military deployment that’s building to 6,000 troops. On each of the previous two days, about 2,000 people were airlifted.



Officials also confirmed that U.S. military helicopters flew beyond the Kabul airport to scoop up 169 Americans seeking to evacuate. No one knows how many U.S. citizens remain in Afghanistan, but estimates have ranged as high as 15,000.



So far, 13 countries have agreed to host at-risk Afghans at least temporarily, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said. Another 12 have agreed to serve as transit points for evacuees, including Americans and others. About 300 evacuees arrived Friday night from Qatar at the U.S. Ramstein Air Base in Germany, one transit point for people being taken to the U.S., the American military said.



“We are tired. We are happy. We are now in a safe country,” one Afghan man said upon arrival in Italy with 79 fellow citizens, speaking in a video distributed by that country's defense ministry.



But the growing question for many other Afghans is, where will they finally call home? Already, European leaders who fear a repeat of the 2015 migration crisis are signaling that fleeing Afghans who didn’t help Western forces during the war should stay in neighboring countries instead. The desperate scenes of people clinging to aircraft taking off from Kabul’s airport have only deepened Europe’s anxiety.



Remaining in Afghanistan means adapting to life under the Taliban, who say they seek an “inclusive, Islamic” government, will offer full amnesty to those who worked for the U.S. and the Western-backed government and have become more moderate since they last held power from 1996 to 2001. They also have said — without elaborating — that they will honor women’s rights within the norms of Islamic law.



But many Afghans fear a return to the Taliban’s harsh rule in the late 1990s, when the group barred women from attending school or working outside the home, banned television and music, chopped off the hands of suspected thieves and held public executions.



“Today, some of my friends went to work at the court and the Taliban didn't let them into their offices. They showed their guns and said, ‘You’re not eligible to work in this government if you worked in the past one,'” one women's activist in Kabul told The Associated Press on Saturday. She spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.



With a Turkish visa but no way to safely reach the airport, the activist described the gap between the Taliban's words and actions “very alarming.” She said she was holed up in the city with a colleague, eating food delivered by a friend.



The Taliban now operate in a very different Afghanistan, facing far closer scrutiny this time around as citizens are able to share developments on social media. Some fear retaliation, however, and are hurriedly wiping out their online presence.



___



Faiez reported from Istanbul, Gannon from Islamabad, and Baldor from Washington. Associated Press writer Jon Gambrell in Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Colleen Barry in Milan, Italy; Matt Lee in Washington; and Geir Moulson in Berlin contributed to this report.



___



Afghanistan coverage: apnews.com/hub/afghanistan



www.aol.com/news/kabul-fearful-wait-us-deliver-062409327-171105066.html

I feel sorry for Biden what a headache this turned out to be.

[BHU]

I wonder if Pompeo regrets meeting with Taliban leaders last year & even had a photo op with that crew. Speaking of ISIS. Trump claimed that the Taliban were going to denounce ISIS which they never did, & never will. Trump also claimed that the Taliban wanted an end to the violence which is total bs. Trump also wanted us out of there before November so he could look good to voters, or so he figured. The military told him no way.

Trump & his goons like Herr Steven Miller should keep their mouths shut instead of trying to undermine the POTUS in a time of crisis.

[Clipper]

Sadly our "POTUS needs no undermining. His withdrawal is a total disaster and is going to cost lives. I know that you don't like Trump or anyone that follows him or sticks up for him, but at this point he is a civilian and has the same rights to freedom of speech that we all have. Trump really doesn't play into this situation. There are plenty of people in Washington, including many Democrats that are backing away from Biden and his mishandling of this evacuation.This is but one of many failures. He has failed at every turn of the road. The border crisis is a disaster, and it conflicts with any claim he may make that the is working to end the pandemic, while importing untested and unvetted, illegal immigrants who are being disbursed all over the country to spread the virus. His abrupt shutdown of pipelines and domestic oil production has been a total disaster that is resulting in a country that was energy independent a year ago is back to being held hostage by OPEC and now we pay outrageous prices for gasoline. Sadly Trumps opinion and take on the present situation is spot on.

This isn't about Trump. It is about the obvious and sad and ongoing failures and the growing lack of confidence in the President and in the Democrat's in general.

I doubt that anyone is worried about what Pompeo did a year ago, nor are we Republicans listening to Stephen Miller or any of the has been circle of presidential friends from the Trump administration. There are actually some of us that are focused more on the mess we are in than in the politics. Red State, Blue State, right wing or left, Dem or Republican, many of us wouldn't care of the president was a member of the Mickey Mouse Party, we are simply very concerned with, and sick of, a party and an administration that is still more focused on undoing anything Trump related than in addressing the issues important to the citizens of the United States.

[BHU]

Maybe Trump could just once come up with some constructive critisism instead of bashing whover is the target of the day.

I have friends & family members who support Trump but that doesn't mean that I dislike them & vice versa. I think Trump is insane, they don't. We just don't agree politically & we discuss that without any ill feelings at the end of the day.

[Atticus Pizzaballa]

I like this one. 

[Clipper]

You really expect after the way he was treated for 4 yrs that he would even think of offering
constructive criticism to those that have made his life a living hell for the last four years? Biden isn't listening to his OWN advisors so it is very unlikely he would listen to Donald Trump. Biden OWNS this mess and it is BIDEN that needs to straighten it out. Unfortunately he is probably going to eventually have to admit his plan is sadly lacking and will have to put troops back in there to insure safe passage for those needing to get to Kandahar to be evacuated. Bidens' presidency so far has been a catastrophic disaster and I don't see it turning around any time soon.

[Atticus Pizzaballa]

Aug 22, 2021 11:44:56 GMT -5 BHU said:

Maybe Trump could just once come up with some constructive critisism instead of bashing whover is the target of the day.

I have friends & family members who support Trump but that doesn't mean that I dislike them & vice versa. I think Trump is insane, they don't. We just don't agree politically & we discuss that without any ill feelings at the end of the day.

I do not think Trump is capable of constructive criticism. He really never even used that form of communication that I heard from him publicly anyway. He enjoys bashing others plain and simple. He is a reactionary. I do not understand how the GOP is so anti mask and anti vaccine because it comes down to government interference in the lives of Americans. Right now that is seriously needed if we are going defeat COVID. 


Donald Trump Booed at Alabama Rally After Encouraging Crowd to Get COVID-19 Vaccine


ormer President Donald Trump was booed by his own supporters during a rally in Cullman, Alabama Saturday night after he encouraged the crowd to get vaccinated against COVID-19.



"I believe totally in your freedoms, I do, you gotta do what you gotta do, but I recommend take the vaccines. I did it. It's good," he said, drawing boos from the crowd of supporters.



"That's okay, that's alright," Trump continued, brushing off the disapproval. "But I happen to take the vaccine. If it doesn't work, you'll be the first to know. But it is working. You do have your freedoms, you have to maintain that."



A growing number of Republican leaders


www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-booed-alabama-rally-after-encouraging-crowd-get-covid-19-vaccine-1621811

That I don't understand coming from him. He aligns the vaccine with being anti freedom ie. anti American. That is what I hear. He is better off saying nothing.

[Atticus Pizzaballa]

Now this is interesting



Trump and Biden agree on this

Richard Galant-Profile-Image

Opinion by Richard Galant, CNN



Updated 4:30 PM ET, Sun August 22, 2021


(CNN)Almost every US president of the last 70 years has been haunted by the aftereffects of two watershed events: the notorious 1938 "peace in our time" agreement struck at Munich between British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler and the 1949 Communist victory in China's civil war.



For decades, no occupant of the White House wanted to strike a "peace" deal that a dictator would instantly violate -- or to sit on the losing side of a debate over who allowed an American ally to get vanquished.

Until Donald Trump -- and Joe Biden.

The past week's events showed that the two bitter rivals had something in common: They were willing to "lose" Afghanistan to end America's longest war.

Trump's administration signed a peace agreement with the Taliban last year that proved to be worthless. And Biden ordered the last US troops to leave by the end of this month, braving withering criticism as thousands of Afghans who had supported the US presence scrambled to get out before the Taliban could fully assume power -- and possibly mete out vengeance.

As Frida Ghitis pointed out, Trump sought to blame Biden for the outcome. And, in her view, Biden deserves much of it: "He made the final decision to withdraw. He chose to abide by a disastrous agreement crafted under the previous administration; moved the troops out with obviously poor planning for contingencies, and is the President under whose watch the two-decade old war ended in a humiliating rush for the exits by the US and NATO..."


But what of his predecessor? "Since Trump is so vocal about Biden's failing, we must look at his role in this tragedy," she wrote. "And it's a doozy."

He "relentlessly, cluelessly sabotaged peace talks, proclaiming his determination to pull out, and unexpectedly announcing troop reductions. His tweets became a major obstacle to negotiations, as he declared he was withdrawing US forces, the only leverage of US negotiators, without obtaining any real concessions from the Taliban. In February 2020, Trump unveiled an agreement with the Taliban. The deal was an utter embarrassment, one of the worst ever negotiated by an American president."


n a Q&A with Peter Bergen, Roya Rahmani, the first woman to serve as Afghanistan's ambassador to the US, said this past week's takeover points "to an immense failure of Afghan democracy. It points to the failure of diplomacy. It points to the failure of the international aid and assistance...it puts into question all the sacrifices being made by Americans, by our allies, and multiplied by all the Afghans with so much blood, tears, and sweat that we all put into the past 20 years."

"I am afraid that the very basic rights of women are in line to be sacrificed," Rahmani said. "What the Taliban are going to offer to women is way below equal citizenship...women will be treated as a 'lower class,' deemed fit only for specific roles and nothing else."


Why the chaos

Biden is not only responsible for the decision to withdraw US troops, wrote Alice Stewart, but also for the policy's execution. "In a matter of days, the Taliban have overrun the country and assumed control of Kabul, while thousands of Afghans, afraid for their lives, attempt to flee on flights bound for Europe, the US and elsewhere."

Throughout Biden's eight years as vice president, he stood out among Obama administration figures in consistently opposing the war in Afghanistan, as David Axelrod noted.

"As Biden said in his televised remarks Monday, the fact that the Afghan security forces in which we invested so much were abjectly ill-prepared and unwilling to take up their own defense was a pretty fair sign that they never would be," wrote Axelrod.

"Yet the argument for leaving doesn't explain or justify the chaotic manner in which we did. There is shame in those images of Afghans who for years had helped support our efforts, chasing US military aircraft down runways in a desperate attempt to escape Taliban reprisals."

Did Biden "carry some of the scars of his past battles over Afghanistan into his decision-making as Commander-in Chief? Was he so determined not to be cowed by the Pentagon, as perhaps he felt Obama was, that he ignored warnings he should have heeded?" (For a former CIA official's analysis of what went wrong, read Peter Bergen's interview with Douglas London.)

The video images of the week drew comparisons to the 1975 American evacuation from Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War. But historian Julian Zelizer observed that "the collapse of Afghanistan is unlikely to be a decisive political issue." For one thing, the Saigon retreat wasn't the factor that resulted in President Gerald Ford's defeat by Jimmy Carter; he was brought down by the economy and the aftermath of Watergate. And the Afghanistan War never occupied the psychic space in America that Vietnam did, Zelizer wrote.

"The conflict over the war had literally consumed American life. There had been a massive anti-war movement that made the war an unavoidable topic in college campuses, churches, schools, civic institutions, newspapers and television, political campaigns, and more. Given that there had been a draft in place until 1973, every American family had been forced to wrestle with the possibility that their child would end up being sent into this deadly conflict -- and many were. Vietnam was woven into popular music, film, and fiction. In other words, the Vietnam War had been everywhere in American life for over a decade."

In The New York Times, Michael Kazin suggested that "as the public's attention shifts away from Afghanistan, Mr. Biden's decision may seem less like a failure and more like a sober, even necessary end to a policy that was doomed from the start." But the stakes are still huge for Biden and his party: "The president and his fellow Democrats face a political environment so daunting that even the slightest disruption could derail their domestic agenda."


www.cnn.com/2021/08/22/opinions/trump-biden-agree-opinion-column-galant/index.html


I hope America learns from this mess that we should NOT get involved in the other Nations core problems unless they actually threaten the USA like on 9/11. 

[BHU]

Biden owns this mess because because he's POTUS. Fair enough. So when is Trump going to own the 600,000 people who died from COVID in 2020 due to his lies & incompetence?

Trump's the one who surrendered to the Taliban & his own former Nat. security Advisor H.R. McMaster said he did.

[Clipper]

I find it a bit over the top to blame Trump for all 600,000 people that died of covid. Regardless of whatever he may have said, people made their own choices as to whether they would mask and distance. Just as they should be doing again now. People should be listening to science and medicine rather than politicians. As far as those that don't want to be vaccinated? Their choice and one of my business, but when they are laying in a bed on a ventilator, they can look to Webster's dictionary to find sympathy. It is found between sh** and syphilis. Their families are the ones that get my sympathy. I supported Trump in many ways, but not all, and I sure as hell didn't look to him for medical advice or follow his path when it came to covid related matters.