President Trump says we should get every penny out of the equipment he left behind or blow them up

bendog · Aug 31, 2021

Trump: US should get 'every penny' of abandoned equipment or 'bomb the hell' out of it

Former President Donald Trump called on the present Biden administration to get "every penny" of U.S. equipment out of the region or "bomb the hell" out of the country.

www.yahoo.com

I kid you not

Mikeoxenormous · Aug 31, 2021

He left behind? If i remember correctly when Joe Biden stole the election, it became his equipment that HE left behind, typical of a cowardly piece of shit...

deannalw · Aug 31, 2021

Biden has well armed one of the most hostile and dangerous groups on the planet.

What's your solution?

Uncensored2008 · Aug 31, 2021

Trump didn't leave an equipment behind, Herr Himmler. You Nazis rigged the election and put Quid Pro in office, remember?

Calypso Jones · Aug 31, 2021

HELL...the taliban didn't even capture it. BIDEN GAVE IT TO THEM...and it appears in the months leading up to this epic failure he was stocking more equipment in there FOR THEM. This butthole had this thing planned months before.

Claudette · Aug 31, 2021

bendog
He's right.

If he were still CIC our people would have been out of their months ago.

And you can bet he would have blown up Bagram and destroyed all that equipment. The Afghan leaders all fled and what was supposed to be theirs is now the Taliban's. Trump would have destroyed it all.

Calypso Jones · Aug 31, 2021

iceberg · Aug 31, 2021

same as most of the left.

"no we didn't"

Calypso Jones · Aug 31, 2021

President Trump is not the president. Y'all elected through stolen election a man seriously unfit for office...now we're all reaping the consequences of that. OWN IT. Stop blaming other people for your own stupidity and this man's fecklessness.

Synthaholic · Aug 31, 2021

There is no president trump

Hellokitty · Aug 31, 2021

Interesting yahoo news has TRUMP's full quote but proceeds to misrepresent it by implying he suggested to bomb the hell out of the country.

Either way people need to pay attention because the military equipment was indeed left behind, and don't be surprised if a CYA bomb drop does happen, problem is much of the equipment will have been removed and relocated by that point.

debbiedowner · Aug 31, 2021

Trump must mean the equipment every goddamn U.S.President gifted to the Afghan security forces over the years to fend off the Taliban. Right?

Built and trained at a two-decade cost of $83 billion, Afghan security forces collapsed so quickly and completely — in some cases without a shot fired — that the ultimate beneficiary of the American investment turned out to be the Taliban. They grabbed not only political power but also U.S.-supplied firepower — guns, ammunition, helicopters and more.

The Taliban captured an array of modern military equipment when they overran Afghan forces who failed to defend district centers. Bigger gains followed, including combat aircraft, when the Taliban rolled up provincial capitals and military bases with stunning speed, topped by capturing the biggest prize, Kabul, over the weekend.

A U.S. defense official on Monday confirmed the Taliban’s sudden accumulation of U.S.-supplied Afghan equipment is enormous. The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and so spoke on condition of anonymity. The reversal is an embarrassing consequence of misjudging the viability of Afghan government forces — by the U.S. military as well as intelligence agencies — which in some cases chose to surrender their vehicles and weapons rather than fight.

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The U.S. failure to produce a sustainable Afghan army and police force, and the reasons for their collapse, will be studied for years by military analysts. The basic dimensions, however, are clear and are not unlike what happened in Iraq. The forces turned out to be hollow, equipped with superior arms but largely missing the crucial ingredient of combat motivation.

“Money can’t buy will. You cannot purchase leadership,” John Kirby, chief spokesman for Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, said Monday.

Doug Lute, a retired Army lieutenant general who help direct Afghan war strategy during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, said that what the Afghans received in tangible resources they lacked in the more important intangibles.

“The principle of war stands — moral factors dominate material factors,” he said. “Morale, discipline, leadership, unit cohesion are more decisive than numbers of forces and equipment. As outsiders in Afghanistan, we can provide materiel, but only Afghans can provide the intangible moral factors.”

By contrast, Afghanistan’s Taliban insurgents, with smaller numbers, less sophisticated weaponry and no air power, proved a superior force. U.S. intelligence agencies largely underestimated the scope of that superiority, and even after President Joe Biden announced in April he was withdrawing all U.S. troops, the intelligence agencies did not foresee a Taliban final offensive that would succeed so spectacularly.

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“If we wouldn’t have used hope as a course of action, ... we would have realized the rapid drawdown of U.S. forces sent a signal to the Afghan national forces that they were being abandoned,” said Chris Miller, who saw combat in Afghanistan in 2001 and was acting secretary of defense at the end of President Donald Trump’s term.

Stephen Biddle, a professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University and a former adviser to U.S. commanders in Afghanistan, said Biden’s announcement set the final collapse in motion.

“The problem of the U.S. withdrawal is that it sent a nationwide signal that the jig is up — a sudden, nationwide signal that everyone read the same way,” Biddle said. Before April, the Afghan government troops were slowly but steadily losing the war, he said. When they learned that their American partners were going home, an impulse to give up without a fight “spread like wildfire.”

The failures, however, go back much further and run much deeper. The United States tried to develop a credible Afghan defense establishment on the fly, even as it was fighting the Taliban, attempting to widen the political foundations of the government in Kabul and seeking to establish democracy in a country rife with corruption and cronyism.

Year after year, U.S. military leaders downplayed the problems and insisted success was coming. Others saw the handwriting on the wall. In 2015 a professor at the Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute wrote about the military’s failure to learn lessons from past wars; he subtitled his book, “Why the Afghan National Security Forces Will Not Hold.”

“Regarding the future of Afghanistan, in blunt terms, the United States has been down this road at the strategic level twice before, in Vietnam and Iraq, and there is no viable rationale for why the results will be any different in Afghanistan,” Chris Mason wrote. He added, presciently: “Slow decay is inevitable, and state failure is a matter of time.”

Some elements of the Afghan army did fight hard, including commandos whose heroic efforts are yet to be fully documented. But as a whole the security forces created by the United States and its NATO allies amounted to a “house of cards” whose collapse was driven as much by failures of U.S. civilian leaders as their military partners, according to Anthony Cordesman, a longtime Afghanistan war analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The Afghan force-building exercise was so completely dependent on American largesse that the Pentagon even paid the Afghan troops’ salaries. Too often that money, and untold amounts of fuel, were siphoned off by corrupt officers and government overseers who cooked the books, creating “ghost soldiers” to keep the misspent dollars coming.

Of the approximately $145 billion the U.S. government spent trying to rebuild Afghanistan, about $83 billion went to developing and sustaining its army and police forces, according to the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, a congressionally created watchdog that has tracked the war since 2008. The $145 billion is in addition to $837 billion the United States spent fighting the war, which began with an invasion in October 2001.

The $83 billion invested in Afghan forces over 20 years is nearly double last year’s budget for the entire U.S. Marine Corps and is slightly more than what Washington budgeted last year for food stamp assistance for about 40 million Americans.

In his book, “The Afghanistan Papers,” journalist Craig Whitlock wrote that U.S. trainers tried to force Western ways on Afghan recruits and gave scant thought to whether U.S. taxpayers dollars were investing in a truly viable army.

“Given that the U.S. war strategy depended on the Afghan army’s performance, however, the Pentagon paid surprisingly little attention to the question of whether Afghans were willing to die for their government,” he wrote.

Billions spent on Afghan army ultimately benefited Taliban

Built and trained at a two-decade cost of $83 billion, Afghan security forces collapsed so quickly and completely — in some cases without a shot fired — that the ultimate beneficiary of the American investment turns out to be the Taliban.

apnews.com

In the end it was the Afghans to defend which they did not.

Calypso Jones · Aug 31, 2021

There will ALWAYS be a PRESIDENT TRUMP. and he'll always occupy space in your head.

Calypso Jones · Aug 31, 2021

Occam's razor. This administration armed these terrorists by intentionally leaving weapons and equipment.

Stann · Aug 31, 2021

Stann · Aug 31, 2021

He is totally insane.

Stann · Aug 31, 2021

Actually Trump plan the whole thing. Knowing he was going to lose the election, who plays the pull out date early on Biden's term in office, Trump excluded the Afghan government from the negotiations, all of these things giving the taliban everything so they wouldn't renegotiate no matter what, let up to go to the current crisis. Given all that, but Biden handled that very well.

toobfreak · Aug 31, 2021

You are kidding? You mean you think it was a good idea for Joe to arm the Taliban with 28 billion dollars worth of free hi-tech gear from the USA? And should let it get sold to Iran and China rather than destroy it? You kid us not?

Stann · Aug 31, 2021

That equipment was for the Afghan army to defend itself, we are no longer in Afghanistan. This whole discussion is useless. And if you want to look at fault, Trump put Biden in a no-win situation. You can't renegotiate a deal with someone who was given everything, They'd never do it.

marvin martian · Aug 31, 2021

Exactly, this is 100% Biden's disaster.

President Trump says we should get every penny out of the equipment he left behind or blow them up

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