Why are we there?
This particular two minute segment is quite startlingly idiotic and hence frightening.
There seems to be a frozen silence in the room while he blurts out all this uncomprehending shit.
Following a bizarre rant about the Soviet Union, Trump says this about Afghanistan: "Why isn't Russia there? Why isn't India there? Why isn't Pakistan there? Why are we there? We're 6,000 miles away? But I don't mind… I think I would have been a good general." pic.twitter.com/bQ36x1RSZH
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 2, 2019
To be fair (eww)… Why are we there? Surely we’ve got our 9/11 vengeance in by now…
Sunk costs, maybe? The goal, as I understand it, was to get rid of the Taliban and make Afghanistan a less welcoming place for a future Taliban (which would have a side effect of making Afghanistan a less shitty place, especially for women), but (surprise!) that’s not easy to do.
Yeah he was being characteristically rambling, but asking why are we there is a reasonable question, for which nobody can give a straight answer. In Bob Woodward’s book about the Trump administration, he recounts several times where Trump demanded an explanation from his generals and advisers for why they’re in Afghanistan. The book recounts the generals and advisers feeling frustrated over Trump’s obstinacy, but I noticed they conspicuously didn’t give Trump a clear answer. Sunk costs, and perhaps being a bulwark against China, are about the only plausible explanations I’ve seen.
Yeah, smashing up ObamaCare is “repeal and replace”, if replacing it with nothing counts.
How is he going to lower premiums and deductibles without spending more money? Call his bluff. Invite him to have his team set the parameters for a new plan with vastly improved premiums and deductibles. The he can figure out how to fund it.
I was just typing a rant about that very thing.
Well we have this problem where we get into things and they don’t go well and then we refuse to leave because then we will have lost and that doesn’t look Mighty Power enough. We may be just stuck.
However, at least the Taliban really does suck. We’re not napalming peasants for no good reason this time.
We’re there because Dubya wanted us there, and the hawks wanted us there, and I’m told everybody wanted us there, everybody was in favor (I am, as usual, relegated to nobody, but I don’t mind so much if being one of everybody makes me so damned wrong all the time as “everybody” seems to be in Trump World, in media world, and in Bizarro World).
The Taliban does suck, however I’m dubious that the likely alternatives are much better from a human rights perspective (Malalai Joya, a former Afghan politician, has written about how groups whom the US supports in Afghanistan have views on women that are indistinguishable from those of the Taliban and she basically wants Western troops out entirely).
Napalming MSF is better?
What I get from that second clip is that sometime in the last few days, Trump has wondered out loud “what happened to the Soviet Union? They used to be involved in Afghanistan, right? And now they’re gone, and Russia has started getting involved” and some poor bastard has had to try and explain.