After a 20 year American occupation, a majority of Aghans have no experience living under the Taliban. The median age there is 18. The U.S. couldn’t build a Western-style state, feeding corrupt local leaders instead. While the U.S. military presence wasn’t always so good for human rights the number of children attending school increased ten-fold.
It’s heartbreaking that there aren’t just thousands of Americans trapped in Afghanistan but tens of thousands who worked in some way with the West, and to see so many so desperate to get out that they would chase – and even hang onto – planes as they took off from Kabul’s international airport. The U.S. should be taking in 100,000 refugees. The international community should demand that refugees be permitted to leave as a condition of recognition of the new government-by-force.
However with the Kabul airport re-opened for military and commercial evacuation flights, there’s also fake viral video circulating, such as this one purporting to show Afghans rushing in as the terminal becomes accessible.
Surreal footage from Kabul airport as soon as it opened this morning – Afghanistan pic.twitter.com/2wg6klrlRC
— Conflict Zones (@Conflict_Zones) August 16, 2021
Except that this isn’t Kabul’s airport. It’s Dallas Cowboys Stadium being opened for a Seattle Seahawks game in 2019.
AT&T Stadium doors have opened for Cowboys vs. Seahawks pic.twitter.com/UTl68lVNwr
— Jon Machota (@jonmachota) January 5, 2019
It appears that these are Cowboys fans with ‘Standing Room Only’ tickets. I’ve only visited the stadium during the off-season.
(HT: Jacob Jarvis)
They learned from watching the ones invade the capital
Be prepared for fake videos pushing a narrative.
Hilarious! Will there be comments on how popular the Cowboys are in Afghanistan? As if people can’t pause and zoom in on videos LOL!
Saigon 1975, Kabul 2021. We never learn. At least we aren’t there for another twenty years.
This article is a total waste of space to support the ridiculous narrative regarding US Military presence and its impact on “human rights.” If there was one positive thing that came from this purely politically generated nightmare it was the freeing, at least temporality of women from the expressive savages who did and will now run the country. If there are no videos of the terminal chaos it is most likely because everyone is outside on the tarmac storming the departing aircraft. What a horrible tragedy that is the total responsibility of this clueless administration.
If half the people trying to flee from of the Taliban had been willing to participate in Afghan Armed forces, the Taliban would have never taken over. The Afghan government had never won the hearts and minds of the Afghan people. Perhaps if the army had been all women, they wouldn’t have melted away.
But it also gives me pause about the US, where both Democrats and Republicans denigrate each other in a way that likely less than a third of the country ever really supports the the administration in power, no matter who it is. If an armed faction within the US decided to take control, would the rest of the population let them, or be too apathetic to fight for the idea of a constitution? Maybe it’s never any better unless the US is at war with a foreign power that attacked it.
@ JohnH–couldn’t have said it any better myself.
Taliban is allowed a twitter account and the democratically elected ex-president of the US is not.
The Taliban have been de facto controlling the life of a huge majority of the rural Pashto and Dari-speakers in Afghanistan during the Trump Administration too, so the younger Afghans also do know what Taliban rule means. Have a dispute with the next door neighbor in Afghanistan? The local Taliban militants would pay a visit and do the brutal or extortionist thing without a care in the world for the Afghan government officials in Kabul or elsewhere.
The Afghan National Army was basically a massive jobs and reward-American-cronies program, and that was destined to fail in an environment where the countryside populations had long been subject to the whims of the Taliban regardless of the US-led military presence in the country. And of course when those country boys in the cannon fodder Afghan National Army know their relatives back home are at threat (from the local Taliban) of being tortured, executed, having their property seized at gun-point, subject to “forced marriage” (a euphemism for a life of rape and slavery) unless doing the Taliban’s business — by going AWOL, providing information, or turning over weapons and other supplies, and so on — it shouldn’t be any surprise that they appear to abandon post and even turn coat.
“the number of children attending school increased ten-fold”
Is that really a positive? We can’t even run schools successfully here (for example, Oregon high school graduates now aren’t required to be able to read), so what makes you think we were putting any effort into teaching the Afghans something useful?
Assume that intelligence reports said that Afghanistan would collapse in a matter of days as soon as the U.S. began the final withdrawal. That is something no U.S. President would publicly announce because it would be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The evacuation of American civilians and Afghanis who assisted the U.S. would have resulted in the situation we see now no matter when it began.
That looks like my flight from Miami
Have to believe this led off Newsmax or Tucker C last night
Most every person in America thinks they are wiser than every other citizen. And everyone shares their wisdom with the world. At some point, I just roll-eyes at everyone. So many experts, everyone, not agreeing on anything. Don’t you get sick of being manipulated by the news, the internet, your neighbors, your employers?
The Taliban won, the U.S lost. Let Taliban & China duke it out now. U.S. is diminished. Enjoy traveling while we still can…
This IS a travel/rewards forum, isn’t it?
Funny and creative. Glad to see the post. I do not rely on Twitter for news and have no issues with a fake video.