| Title | Post Boost | Reach | Like | Comments | Shares | Clicks | Hide | Hideall | Cost | Topic |
| A quid pro quo with Taliban? | 2021-10-10 | 7 | - | 2 | afghanistan | |||||
| Neither GOP nor Democrats want to publicize their mistakes | 2021-09-18 | 14 | - | afghanistan | ||||||
| Positive feedback loops in Afghan tribal politics. | 2021-08-20 | 9 | - | 1 | 1 | afghanistan |
The table above has these entries. Post entries with just one line for Reach were not boosted. Boosted posts have two lines for Reach and several other items. The upper line reflects all interactions, the bottom line just those resulting from paid ads.
========== A quid pro quo with Taliban? https://apnews.com/article/afghanistan-business-taliban-islamic-state-group-united-states-0f386a9d22bafa86601c8a6251b02bc6 The Taliban is not going to be recognized as legitimate by the democratic west until it has free contested elections - and their position is that democracy is incompatible with Islam. So recognition is incompatible with western democracy. Humanitarian aid has to be carefully managed to make sure it supports the people rather than the Taliban. #PS1afghanistan ===== impact 13 impactrate 0 negative 0 posted 2021-10-10 ratio 3 react 2 reactrate 0 shares 2 sharesrate 0 title A quid pro quo with Taliban? topic afghanistan wordrate 0 words 63 engaged 2 epoch Lifetime ID 1515629175448263 impress 9 pageid 534332363577954 pagename "Political scrapbook" posted "10/10/2021 16:10" reach 7 sharesimpress 2 title "Taliban says US will provide humanitarian aid to Afghanistan" type Link URL https://www.facebook.com/politicalscrapbooknet/posts/1515629175448263 ========== Neither GOP nor Democrats want to publicize their mistakes about Afghanistan. An independent commission will be required to obtain a credible analysis. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/afghanistan-general-austin-miller-testimony/2021/09/17/cb14c90e-1711-11ec-a5e5-ceecb895922f_story.html It would probably find that Trump and Biden were right to leave as soon as possible, and Obama should have left no later than the death of bin Laden. But any exit would have a chaotic finale - that part was unavoidable - since there was no way to begin a mass evacuation without provoking that chaotic finale as the Taliban saw victory at hand. So to avoid getting dirty, Obama left the dirty work to Trump, and Trump left it to Biden. https://www.facebook.com/politicalscrapbooknet/posts/1480548662289648 But it's doubtful any lessons will be retained. It seems that collectively, nobody learned a thing from Vietnam - figuring out in advance what's the goal, what's the definition of success, what's the definition of failure, what's the exit strategy. There's always a new generation of leaders who think they are smarter than their predecessors. The funniest response comes from Trump, who thought Robert E Lee would have led the US to victory in Afghanistan. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-general-lee-statue-afghanistan-civil-war-1222487/ Of course the modern Robert E Lees would, as he did, take the side of repelling a foreign invasion aimed at destroying a traditional culture, and thus are leading the Taliban in their defense of minority rule. One difference is that the Taliban don't seem to have slaves, unlike the Islamic State. The Taliban goal of defending minority rule, and restoring a golden age that never really existed, isn't really that much different from Trump and his GOP enablers. The Taliban kept part of their deal - they didn't attack retreating Americans. America kept the corresponding part - and left by Sept 1 as promised. As expected, the Taliban are not keeping any of their other promises, but it is surprising that they are not even trying to maintain a facade in order to retain foreign aid and access to currency reserves. https://apnews.com/article/business-afghanistan-kabul-taliban-e44d8521940021e4e7ab11d3898978b5 https://apnews.com/article/middle-east-afghanistan-womens-rights-kabul-taliban-eee5a8c73dd5d58acfda008582ef77bb https://apnews.com/article/afghanistan-california-immigration-taliban-18b3c63cd7724707f86ba9d883d7c27b So the United States doesn't owe them anything. Fighting is the only skill most of them have. How long will they be content with police duty? Who can offer them the thrill of jihad martyrdom? https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/09/19/afghanistan-taliban-fighters/ Since al-Qaeda and Islamic State will probably continue to thrive in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Congress needs to decide whether we will take pro-active steps against them such as drone attacks, accepting the inevitable civilian casualties. If so, then Congress should declare war against those non-state entities - a new concept for a new era. But will Congress ever take responsibility for anything ever again? So much easier to let the president take his chances and make his mistakes, particularly if you're not of his party, so you can take pot shots at how much better you would have run things, without ever having to risk being held responsible for any actual consequences. That's what a do-nothing Congress gets you, an overreaching executive and judicial legislation. There's nothing a do-nothing Congress likes to do more than passively criticize an overreaching executive and judicial legislation. https://www.political-scrapbook.net/2020-congress.html #PS1afghanistan https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/afghanistan-general-austin-miller-testimony/2021/09/17/cb14c90e-1711-11ec-a5e5-ceecb895922f_story.html ===== impact 0 impactrate 0 negative 0 posted 2021-09-18 reactrate 0 sharesrate 0 title Neither GOP nor Democrats want to publicize their mistakes topic afghanistan wordrate 0 words 501 epoch Lifetime ID 1500775853600262 impress 17 pageid 534332363577954 pagename "Political scrapbook" posted "09/18/2021 22:09" reach 14 title "General’s classified testimony underscores political split over Afghanistan exit" type Link URL https://www.facebook.com/politicalscrapbooknet/posts/1500775853600262 ========== Positive feedback loops in Afghan tribal politics. A catastrophic endgame might have been more or less inevitable in Afghanistan. In its bitter internal feuds, losing is often fatal. https://apnews.com/article/europe-race-and-ethnicity-taliban-e51255ff3d954e8f95bea4dc1c209b32 So everybody keeps a close eye on who the likely winner will be, and switching to the winning side is accepted practice, and it can seem like it happens almost overnight. It was no different in Kipling's time - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Would_Be_King_(film) and perhaps for thousands of years. A westerner walked alone and unarmed across Afghanistan at a very dangerous time in 2002 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Places_in_Between The interesting point here is that no Afghan could have done the same thing - he would have encountered some of his traditional enemies who would have killed him. So once the tide turns, it's a Bay of Fundy sweeping up everybody in its path. That is why no orderly long-term withdrawal of thousands of civilians could happen - it would not be lost on the combatants that the west was really leaving for good. Once the Taliban took a couple of vulnerable provincial capitals with no effective response from the west or the central government, the others fell like dominoes, and what was supposed to be slow and orderly became a maelstrom. At huge cost, the US could have taken over the defense of the entire city of Kabul to facilitate the evacuation there, but the problem of Taliban checkpoints and killings would just move further out, and our friends in the rest of the country would still be in grave jeopardy. Like other Afghan alignments, the Taliban is a patchwork of diverse interests, all ethnic, some theological, some political, some economic. The most recent converts are the least ideological and most opportunistic. What leadership there is seems to have no collective plan for how they are going to solve Afghanistan's problems, except for killing anybody that opposes them. So some talk of amnesty and forgiveness, while others are killing for revenge in the traditional way. The internal contradictions of this patchwork might eventually fray, and if they do, there might well be a sudden switch of sentiment to the next big thing, whatever it might be. https://apnews.com/article/business-health-coronavirus-pandemic-kabul-taliban-d036db0b190acba68087f3d46ffae146 The evacuation could have been done better, no doubt, but it was not going to be clean or pretty. But the collapse of Saigon in 1975, while doing no credit to Gerald Ford or the GOP, was not his biggest problem in 1976 with Reagan or Carter - it was the economy. Of course, Trump and Pompeo have NOTHING to do with the disaster - at least nothing they remember now. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/19/trump-afghanistan-withdrawal-criticism/ What, exactly, would they have done differently to obtain a better outcome at an acceptable cost? #PS1afghanistan ===== impact 89 impactrate 0 negative 0 posted 2021-08-20 ratio 4 react 2 reactrate 0 shares 1 sharesrate 0 sumclicks 1 title Positive feedback loops in Afghan tribal politics. topic afghanistan wordrate 0 words 445 audclicks 1 engaged 1 epoch Lifetime ID 1480548662289648 impress 13 matchedlinkclicks 1 pageid 534332363577954 pagename "Political scrapbook" posted "08/20/2021 07:08" reach 9 sharesimpress 1 title "Biden vows to evacuate all Americans — and Afghan helpers" type Link URL https://www.facebook.com/politicalscrapbooknet/posts/1480548662289648