Reddit r/PoliticalDiscussion supportive of Biden/Afghanistan

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US Commitment and Afghanistan

This sub is intended to be a non-partisan, heavily moderated place to discuss politics rather than promote agendas.

I was amazed at how little criticism Biden is getting here for his decision to withdraw US military support from Afghanistan as quickly as he has done. Even some people who identify as conservatives and say they basically don't like him seem to agree with this policy.

Note this discussion is by no means limited to Americans.

EDIT forgot to insert the link.

There aren’t many parts of Reddit where military intervention - even the obviously good kind - is popular. Basically /r/neoconNWO and adjacent subs and that is all.

Their aren't many parts of Reddit where Joe Biden is popular.

I'll give Biden credit for a good decision. We should have been out of there over a decade ago.

Why bash him if he's doing something you agree with, even if you hate him?

Perhaps you haven’t been following the news, but over a thousand Afghans have been killed and hundreds of thousands displaced by the Taliban.

How would you feel if Joe Biden did nothing to stop an armed gang kicking you out of your home and chasing you to Canada?

There is no way to defend this as a good decision if you value Afghan lives. It is a profoundly evil decision.

I'll give him credit for actually going ahead with the pull out, but I'll blame the hell out of him for the shoddy execution.

No argument there. The bottom line is those in power don't care about the people in Afghanistan any more than the care about the people in Syria. But we do need to get out of these countries one way or another. In the longterm, the consequences will be far more catastrophic if we continue this pattern of perpetual war.

What do you think could possibly be worse than what we’re seeing right now?

At some point this goes past ignorance and into outright evil, frankly. You certainly can’t claim that you care about Afghans or Syrians given how you cheer on their deaths and attack anyone who says we should protect them.

You have very little context about the past nearly seven decades of military escapades in the ME, nor do you understand the continued ramifications of the perpetuation of these policies. I understand these all too well because I have actually studied them for nearly 15 years. Getting out of these conflicts is paramount to U.S. survival. It's not a model that can be sustained for much longer.

I've tried to educate you, but to no avail. You have nothing to offer but the propaganda you've been fed and your apparent naivete and gullibility.

This stuff is really hard for me on a personal level, because I have a very strong instinct to fight evil where ever I see it (I was thrilled at the start of the Afghan war because I'd been reading about the Taliban for years and wanted to murder them), but bitter experience has taught me that we usually make things worse in the long run through these interventions. Same with Iraq, Saddam and his regime needed killing, but man did we f*ck up the nation building and occupation afterwards.

My current conundrum is China, every time I read about whatever their latest repressive measure against their own populace is, my instinct is "how could we annihilate the CCP without starting WWIII?", even though I know full well that's not really an option. My half joking sci-fi idea years ago was that if we ever got the whole space based missile defense lasers working, it shouldn't be too hard to aim them at the ground and vaporize troublesome world leaders without having to go through their armies, but I really wouldn't trust any government on earth with a weapon like that.

US Public Supports Withdrawal From Afghanistan

Disclaimer: I don't know anything about the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

I haven't been paying too much attention, but I've mostly been seeing negative responses towards the decision. People on the inside think that Biden must've gotten some bad military advice and decided to follow it.

People who are against Biden seem to be ignorant of the fact that Trump wanted to do the same thing, only faster.

There's an argument to be made that if Trump had gone through with the withdrawal, it might have gone differently because he was so belligerent that the Taliban would have taken him more seriously as a threat, as opposed to Biden who they see as harmless. I don't think that's completely baseless, I could see him ordering air strikes as we were evacuating just for the visuals, honestly.

It seems the problem isn't the withdrawal from Afganistan (at least according to the majority), but rather the apparent lack of planning\preparation for the exit, and the failure of intelligence\management regarding the exit process.

The lack of any word from leadership (either government or military) certainly doesn't improve the perception of those responsible for this.

Biden taking off for a week at Camp David while this is going in is just unfathomable to me, on the optics if nothing else.