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Afghanistan

#121 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2021-August-31, 08:31

View Postcherdano, on 2021-August-31, 08:07, said:

It's a defeat, but it's a defeat 20 years in the making, not 2 months in the making.


I upvoted your comment so this is not criticizing but questioning: if this was a defeat, what was the goal that was not accomplished?
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#122 User is offline   cherdano 

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Posted 2021-August-31, 08:43

View PostWinstonm, on 2021-August-31, 08:31, said:

I upvoted your comment so this is not criticizing but questioning: if this was a defeat, what was the goal that was not accomplished?

My guess: when Bush declined to negotiate with the Taliban (who were reportedly willing to give up Bin Laden) the goal became to defeat the Taliban.
Authoritative answer: to be given by someone criticising the decision to withdraw
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#123 User is offline   kenberg 

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Posted 2021-August-31, 08:55

View Postcherdano, on 2021-August-31, 08:07, said:

It's a defeat, but it's a defeat 20 years in the making, not 2 months in the making.


Absolutely.

I, and quite a few others who are not remotely right-wing (by US standards anyway), think that the withdrawal was not very well thought through. But this has been a 20 year disaster.

The link below is not at all political, at least that's my view. It is an impressive account.

https://www.pbs.org/...evacuation-plan
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#124 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2021-August-31, 11:39

Ross Douthat at NYT said:

Our botched withdrawal is the punctuation mark on a general catastrophe, a failure so broad that it should demand purges in the Pentagon, the shamed retirement of innumerable hawkish talking heads, the razing of various NGOs and international-studies programs and the dissolution of countless consultancies and military contractors.

Small wonder, then, that making Biden the singular scapegoat seems like a more attractive path. But if the only aspect of this catastrophe that our leaders remember is what went wrong in August 2021, then we’ll have learned nothing except to always double down on failure, and the next disaster will be worse.

https://www.nytimes....stan-biden.html

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#125 User is offline   Gilithin 

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Posted 2021-August-31, 14:11

View PostWinstonm, on 2021-August-31, 08:31, said:

I upvoted your comment so this is not criticizing but questioning: if this was a defeat, what was the goal that was not accomplished?

When Bush went in, he made a statement about learning from history and not getting bogged down in a long, drawn-out war in Afghanistan. This is the goal, very clearly stated up front, that was not accomplished.
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#126 User is offline   mycroft 

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Posted 2021-August-31, 16:51

I would answer your question, Winston, with "defining the goal".

Because as far as I can tell, besides "capture OBL", the goal was "prove PNAC's requirement for 'retain[ing] sufficient forces able to rapidly deploy and win multiple simultaneous large-scale wars and also to be able to respond to unanticipated contingencies in regions where it does not maintain forward-based forces.' " And once they did that, they chose not to define - at least not in a way they could be held accountable for - a goal. We're "winning", "doing good work", and so on, but not "here's where we would need to get to to leave having won". Oh, there was pie-in-the-sky arguments for "have a nation that can defend itself from insurgents", but no explanation of how, especially no explanation of how we change what we do as we found out what doesn't work.

Which, to my cynical eye, was entirely the point - the (unspoken) goal was to keep an occupying force forever in Afghanistan (and Iraq) while "wanting" to leave any day now. And, as always, "cui bono?" from that. And boy, did they bono for a long time.

Also, to my cynical eye, it sounded exactly like the goals for "Vietnamization" - and the parallels (corruption in politics and in the military, local military effectiveness only with western support, lack of interest in who the government was as long as they were "on our side"...) lead me to believe that we didn't learn what we needed to learn. What we did learn was "keep engagement levels low enough that it is not necessary to trigger the draft", and "keep the pesky media on our side". And it worked, at least if the goal really was "keep the money train Forever War going".

Coincidentally, I listened to the "Behind the Bastards" episode on Pat Tillman (who is not The Bastard) yesterday. Much I didn't know, both on conduct in-country and on the specific incident. Note: I would never call BtB "unbiased" (in fact, that's the understatement of the year). That doesn't mean it's not well researched.
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#127 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2021-September-03, 11:16

Adam Serwer at The Atlantic said:

Trying to think the last time I saw a position polling at 80 percent whose representation on television news was this scarce.

Matt Ford at New Republic said:

The most eye-popping number here is that 78 percent approve of the withdrawal in general. That’s an incredible rebuke of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment.

https://www.washingt...56fe_story.html

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#128 User is offline   Lovera 

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Posted 2021-September-04, 04:01

Pontecorvo: "Taliban divided. They no longer know the country they want to lead "
by our correspondent Annalisa Cuzzocrea
Interview with the NATO representative in Afghanistan [at Forum Ambrosetti - The European House in Cernobbio]
03 SEPTEMBER 2021 3 MINUTES READING

CERNOBBIO - Ambassador Stefano Pontecorvo has many doubts that the new Afghan government can be the expression of a coalition. "The Taliban are struggling with the recomposition of some internal discontent among various groups: the southern Pashtuns, the eastern Pashtuns and the Tajiks," explains the high NATO representative for Afghanistan, guest of the Ambrosetti Forum in Cernobbio. "And they have to do with a country they no longer know."

Do you think the new president will be Baradar?
"I have no doubt that Mullah Baradar will have a post of visibility. I am not sure he will be the prominent figure, because he has already been downsized during the Doha negotiations. And I don't think a coalition government can be born because such a choice risks breaking up the movement, which Haibatullah Akhundzada must keep compact. The skeptics to include non-Taliban personalities are the strongest, the military leaders, the strategists, and he cannot afford such an internal branch. It will probably be a multi-ethnic government, but with their own people. Maybe with a couple of Shiites from outside ».

Is there a real difficulty for the Taliban to manage the country?
"They weren't prepared, they had a much longer time horizon. They did not organize themselves to manage power and the state machinery collapsed. They have to rebuild it ».

Travel to Kabul, by car with the Taliban
by our correspondent Pietro Del Re 03 September 2021

Do they also have the problem of missing foreign aid?
"They go for successive subsistences. Sustenance for the Taliban is now humanitarian aid, they know it is coming. Then there is China, the country's wealth, the countries of the region, Iran, the Saudis ".

What is the balance of power between the Taliban and Isis-K?
"There were bloody and cruel fights in Zabul two years ago. There are very strong doctrinal divergences ».

On what?
"Both the emir and the caliph have the title of guide of the faithful. And then the emirate is a nationalistic movement, while the caliphate starts from a territory and then tries to expand. Isis-K would like a part of the Aghano territory - Nangarhar and Kunar - to form the caliphate and then expand into Afghanistan and Pakistan ».

But the Taliban are much stronger.
"There is no doubt. But with Isis-K terrorism it can hurt because the Taliban do not have control of the territory, they are few ».

Do the women's demonstrations in Herat, in Kabul, show that Afghan civil society has changed in these twenty years?
"Yes, of course. We have created the conditions of security within which civil society has developed. We have not imposed democracy or our values. Now they feel abandoned, betrayed because we made them feel freedom and we are no longer able to guarantee it. But certainly the Taliban find themselves dealing with a country they do not know and with a society they do not expect ".

Is the resistance of the Panshir, under the bombing, doomed to succumb?
"The panshiris are surrounded, but historically that region is difficult to conquer. The Taliban have already had many losses ».

Are Pakistan Turkey and Qatar crucial at this stage?
"I always say that the Taliban are not great cosmopolitans, the West has little influence. It is therefore up to the neighboring countries to accompany them in the right direction, also because they are the ones who have direct interests in stopping fundamentalism, so that there is regional stability and so that infrastructure projects can go ahead ".

Di Maio said talking about a reopening of the embassy in Afghanistan is premature.
"I fully agree on a question of security and then, as the minister said, community coordination is needed to be stronger".

What do you think of the dialogue with the Taliban?
"I believe that it must be implemented bearing in mind that we have very few instruments of pressure other than the recognition of the regime, a legitimacy they care about. We will calibrate according to behaviors and not words, but we must dialogue. Also to take other people out of the country ».

Do you think that the countries of the Western alliance have done their utmost, for these people, in the withdrawal operations?
«Look with the time we have had and in the given conditions we have all done our best. I think I can say that among the 124 thousand people we have taken away there are most of those most at risk ".

Is there a scene that has stuck with you?
"Multiple. The departing families, the post-attack when the wounded were passing by, the great work that the Norwegian doctors at the hospital did when the elderly, dehydrated children arrived ".

Do we need a European defense force?
"When a single actor has 90% of the assets and influence he makes 90% of the decisions."

If we want to count more than the United States, do we need to go in that direction?
"If we want to count more, General Graziano is right, speaking of the need for a rapid European action force."

Subjects
afghanistan

Read also

Afghanistan, US rocket stops a new attack. The Taliban: "Departures possible even after 31 August"

Afghanistan, that clash over the withdrawal that split NATO: Italy and the GB against the USA

Biden's defense of Afghanistan: "I decided but the allies were warned". And in the evening he calls Draghi

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#129 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2021-September-04, 07:51

From a discussion of “The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War." by former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker, Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute (Ret.) and author Craig Whitlock:

Quote

David Ignatius: Ambassador Lute, you're a former 3-star general. You know the military as well as anybody. I want to ask you a couple of questions about military command and how it worked. You've made an interesting comment that perhaps that shorter tours of duty -- a year, typically, sometimes more, but a year was often the tour that ISAF commanders had in Kabul -- they had been part of the problem, that you have new people coming in having to reinvent the wheel, announce a new strategy, et cetera, et cetera. I want to ask you about that. And then I'd also ask you for your assessment of the military advice that our military leadership has given in this last period after President Biden decided he wanted out. There's been some criticism of the military that they shouldn't have ceded to pulling out of Bagram, that that's a mistake that's really on them. I'd be interested in your judgment about both aspects of this.

Douglas Lute: Well, David, the second part of that is easier, because I simply don't know. I don't know what the inside advice was as they sat at the big table in the largest conference room in the Situation Room. It's hard for me to imagine, however, knowing Mark Milley and Lloyd Austin -- Lloyd Austin's a West Point classmate of mine, I've known him for 50 years -- that they didn't give unvarnished, candid advice in the course of the policy deliberation. And I think I'll just leave that there. With regard to the short-term tour lengths and its contribution to the outcome, look, it seemed to me, having watched this consistently for more than 10 years, that even at that point, in my own personal education about Afghanistan, I was constantly learning things that were new and illuminating and should have been important to the policy debate. But I only learned them late in the game. So as I reflect on short tour lengths, we were often fighting this war with sort of a 101-level understanding of the problem, when what we needed were graduate degrees in the problem. And it's that sort of absence of deep understanding that I think is one of the things that we should take away from this Lessons Learned project.

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#130 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2021-September-04, 08:43

View Posty66, on 2021-September-04, 07:51, said:

From a discussion of “The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War." by former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker, Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute (Ret.) and author Craig Whitlock:


Must have been a reason the 1-year and rotate out wasn’t in play for WWII.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Black Lives Matter. / "I need ammunition, not a ride." Zelensky
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#131 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2021-September-05, 20:10

Matt Yglesias said:

Honestly, I’ve got to say hats off to the Blob on this whole Afghanistan thing.

They couldn’t achieve any of their stated war aims, but they’ve proven they can absolutely wreck you politically if you f*ck with them.

It’s ruthless & impressive.

Ryan Grim at The Intercept said:

The media never once raised this criticism before Biden ended a 20 year war that everyone outside of the media and northern Virginia wanted ended.

https://twitter.com/...542704101404686

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#132 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2021-September-13, 11:34

Mattathias Schwartz at Business Insider said:

https://www.business...eferrer=twitter

One autumn afternoon a few years ago, I took the subway from my Brooklyn apartment to a mansion on the Upper East Side. I was nervous. I had never met President Obama before, and it wasn't clear to me why I'd been selected to meet with his National Security Council and brief him on the situation unfolding in Iraq. I had no special knowledge of the country. All I knew was what I had been given in my prepared materials. ISIS forces, represented by a bright-red arrow, were making a push toward Baghdad, sending in suicide bombers and threatening the US Embassy. Iraq's prime minister was asking Obama to reinsert American troops into an active ground war.

When I arrived at the mansion, of course, I didn't brief the real Obama. Playing the role of the president that day was Max Boot, a seasoned think-tank veteran who, like almost every other self-appointed member of America's foreign-policy elite, had championed the invasions of both Iraq and Afghanistan. The scenario was an exercise, part of a conference I attended as a newly appointed associate at a leading think tank. As the word "exercise" implies, it was a game, but a serious one, part of a larger campaign by the foreign-policy leaders of the reigning generation to indoctrinate their successors. Over the next several years, I would attend events hosted by the Aspen Institute, the New America Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the Atlantic Council, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Brookings Institution, among others. I had a formal luncheon with a Middle Eastern ambassador, a buffet breakfast with Thomas Friedman, and a guided tour of an Ohio-class nuclear submarine. At a conference table inside the headquarters of SEAL Team 6, I was told that SEAL Team 6 did not exist. I flew over the White Sands Missile Range in a Black Hawk helicopter, where I did my part for civilian-military relations by vomiting all over the seats and floor.

What I didn't do was actually go to Iraq or Afghanistan. Instead, I ate free buffet lunches, collected business cards, and mainlined off-the-record propaganda that both of America's long-running wars were worthy undertakings, steered by capable hands. Much of what we did included participation by the military, but that didn't strike any of us as odd. In fact, the uniforms and armaments are what made the whole thing seem real, something more than a bunch of kids in suits and ties playing Model United Nations. We weren't just drafting foreign-policy resolutions; we were helping guide our country to a better understanding of whom to kill, and how to kill them.

I didn't know it at the time, but I was being absorbed into what Ben Rhodes, Obama's speechwriter and longtime policy advisor, called the "Blob," the amorphous pro-war Washington establishment that Obama was supposed to oppose. In the Blob's view, it's the role of the Blob, not the voters or even the White House, to decide when America goes to war. The internal mechanics of those decisions are a black box, but we do know something about the inputs and outputs. Into one end of the Blob goes the money — gifts from corporations, wealthy individuals, and, in some cases, foreign governments. Out the other end comes white papers, books, op-ed articles, salaries, fellowships, and panel discussions. The content of the output varies widely, and contains occasional notes of disagreement, which is what makes it so much more slippery and effective than the classical authoritarian propaganda of the 20th century, which was intended to awe and manipulate crowds by playing to their basest emotions. Call it blobaganda, a process through which intelligent people are gently led to a preordained conclusion, brought to you by Raytheon and General Dynamics.

"Propaganda" is a loaded word, but I think it's appropriate to apply it here. The foreign-policy think tanks that hosted the military-adjacent events I attended take great pains to present themselves as neutral organizations, where diverse groups of officials and scholars and opinion writers can exchange views without fear of being quoted in The Times or shouted down by Code Pink protesters. But as I learned from the five years I spent inside the bubble of the foreign-policy establishment — all the off-the-record gatherings and the cozy meet-and-greets I attended — the neutral deliberations that take place behind closed doors occur within carefully managed boundaries. You can't work in Washington and not cross paths with smart, influential people who have been paid substantial amounts of money from a foreign-policy think tank, or the powerful dons who sit on one of their boards. If you have control over who's in the room, and who gets to sit onstage, there's no need to script the action. The ideologically correct opinion will organically percolate through the network. This is known as social contagion, and it goes a long way to explaining why America's leading foreign-policy experts keep producing disasters like Afghanistan.

In 2017, for example, the Aspen Institute invited a small group of ambassadors and cabinet-level officials to "a private breakfast conversation" with "representatives from Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company." According to an internal list of invitees, John Brennan, Michael Chertoff, Avril Haines, and Antony Blinken all RSVP'd that they would be there. I was not in the room, but I do have a copy of the outline for the discussion. It expresses worry about things like "the capacity surge of rising powers" and the maintenance of "critical security pacts." These are reasonable concerns. But it's worth asking why Lockheed Martin spent money for access to that particular group of people, and what it got in return. At that same conference, Gen. Joseph Dunford, then the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave a public talk to a large gathering. In 2019, when he retired, he joined Lockheed Martin's board.

To understand how blobaganda works, you have to look for what isn't there. Not much airtime is given to dissent from what's often called "the rules-based order" or "the liberal international order." These terms sound technical and boring and unobjectionable; perhaps that is by design. In plain English, "rules-based order" has effectively come to mean "war is good." The foreign-policy establishment is ideologically committed to the faith-based proposition that America can use force against a country thousands of miles away and, if not remake it in our own image, then at least leave it better than we found it. "Liberal" and "rules" are strange words to apply to campaigns that rely so heavily on drone strikes and covert CIA operations. At one event hosted by the Blobosphere, I remember one of my peers raising his hand to ask how we could convince the American public that it was worth going to war to defend Montenegro, as we are obliged to under Article 5 of the NATO treaty. The room turned and looked at him as if he'd gone insane.

To understand how the Blob gave us Afghanistan — and why it wanted thousands of American troops to remain there indefinitely — we need to unpack the terms foreign policy and national security. They're euphemisms. What we're really talking about here is war and peace. It was much easier to argue for the moral value of aggressive militarism during the years after World War II, when US firepower underwrote sustainable democracies in Germany, Japan, and South Korea. Interventionism remained a guiding light during the Cold War, and it somehow survived the US defeat in Vietnam. But today, for someone of my generation, it sounds crazy, even as it continues to walk the earth, a zombie worldview that is endlessly promoted by the legacy media and establishment stalwarts.

Article I of the US Constitution states, "Congress shall have power … to declare War." That sounds like a political process. The Blob's raison d'être is to control the conversation around war by putting it on a plane above politics, in the domain of experts who supposedly know something about the world that voters and elected officials do not. Some politicians, especially august senators like John Kerry and John McCain, have traditionally played a role in these high-level conversations. But the most important parts happen between the military, the White House's national security apparatus, and the array of private interests whose livelihoods depend on the conversation's outcome.

After 9/11, the Blob united behind the invasion of Iraq, working to manufacture false justifications and secure endorsements from The New Yorker and The New York Times. When the invasion went south, and the promised weapons of mass destruction failed to appear, the Blob threw a few scapegoats overboard (Judith Miller, George Tenet) and disavowed the worst excesses (Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib). Then, with freshly soaped hands, the Blob turned its attention to preserving the "good war" in Afghanistan.

Trump was a problem. He was the first president since Jimmy Carter who didn't care about the Blob. He wanted to leave Afghanistan, but he couldn't find a secretary of defense or a national security advisor who would help him to do it. So he wound up settling for a deal with the Taliban that passed the question of withdrawal on to his successor. The Blob, meanwhile, claimed that Trump was an illegitimate exception and that the normal transatlantic warmongering under a Blob-aligned president would resume as soon as he was out of office. As long as the war in Afghanistan continued, even in an extremely limited form, the national security elite could go on pretending that foreign policy wasn't beholden to politics, that it was still their private domain.

The Blob's seductive power was clearest to me on the evening of June 20, 2019. I was at a reception at a prominent think tank a couple of blocks away from the White House, as Trump was considering how to respond to Iran shooting down a US drone. One of my fellow Blobsters passed on a well-sourced tidbit. Trump had ordered a series of missile strikes as reprisal, which meant that war with Iran — a long-standing dream of the Blob — might finally be underway.

Trump wound up calling off the strikes at the last minute. But the fact that the attacks never took place didn't matter. As we stood around munching on roast-beef crostinis, it was the real deal, and what should have been a moment of fear or solemnity was instead charged with excitement. We knew, a couple of hours in advance, what was going to happen. It was easy to confuse that feeling with participation, or even control.

The Blob was optimistic that Biden, like Trump, could be deterred from following through on his campaign promise to exit Afghanistan. Like Trump, Biden could not find a secretary of defense who shared his vision. He chose Lloyd Austin, a retired general who had made as much as $1.7 million from serving on the board of Raytheon, one of the biggest contractors in Afghanistan. Not surprisingly, Austin wanted Biden to extend the deadline for withdrawal past September 11. In April, according to the Times, Biden had to personally tell Austin that he expected the military to carry out his decision.

But the Blob wasn't done with Biden. Towards the end of Trump's presidency, Congress had established the Afghanistan Study Group, a private body of retired generals, senators, and business executives. The quasi-official nature and neutrality of such groups make them indispensable in public-relations campaigns. And yet the Study Group was anything but independent. Its 15 members held seats on the boards of major contractors and think tanks, including Caterpillar, Raytheon, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, the Atlantic Council, and the Council on Foreign Relations. In an 88-page report published two months into Biden's presidency, they recommended that the US postpone its departure without giving a concrete timeline for withdrawal. The report was rolled out in a congressional hearing and in a Washington Post op-ed article coauthored by a Study Group member, Meghan O'Sullivan, who also sits on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations. "It's wrong to pull US troops out of Afghanistan," the headline declared. The Post neglected to mention that O'Sullivan held a seat on the board of Raytheon. It also neglected to mention that it had accepted money from Raytheon for a customized ad campaign, as well as a series of "Post Live" discussions with national security luminaries.

Joe Biden and Richard Haass appear on a panel at the Council on Foreign Relations.
President Joe Biden speaks with Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, about Russia, in 2018. Haass has since become a vocal critic of Biden's decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. Alex Brandon/Associated Press
Despite its concerted effort to keep Biden in Afghanistan, the Blob lost. It had issued a public veto, and the president had gone ahead and overridden it. Control of the White House national security apparatus is the Blob's core product. This was like Apple losing the rights to the iPhone.

Even in defeat, though, the Blob has refused to surrender. Richard Haass, who receives $1.7 million in annual compensation as president of the Council on Foreign Relations, remains a leading critic of the Afghanistan withdrawal. "The foreign policy establishment has gotten a lot right," he told the Times. "History suggests there's just as much risk in under-reaching as overreaching." The war in Afghanistan, as his oddly revisionist take made clear, was no longer about Afghanistan. It was about maintaining the reputations and interests of the people who wanted us there.

In retrospect, it's astonishing that the Blob was able to keep the war in Afghanistan going for so long. A decade ago, Obama vowed that the final withdrawal would begin in July 2011. The following year, during a vice-presidential debate, Biden declared, "We are leaving in 2014, period." Two years later, Obama promised to "turn the page" and exit by the end of his second term in 2016. The Pentagon claimed it was using the repeated extensions to build up the Afghan military, investing billions in something that was exposed, in the moment of withdrawal, to be nothing but a fantasy. The Blob wasn't learning what it needed to learn about Afghanistan, but it was perfecting its mastery of the US political process. What may have started as an earnest bid for victory evolved into a domestic opinion-managing campaign to perpetuate an expensive war that voters did not want, without much to show in the way of progress or results. We're seeing the tail end of that campaign now, as the Blob insists that Biden should have kept a small force in place, in perpetuity. If victory was not an option, at least no one had to know that we had already been defeated.

The Blob's pro-war tilt was evident in the Iraq simulation I took part in. The prepared materials we were given laid out five options: maintain the status quo, deploy one of three "force packages" — sized small, medium, or large, like french fries — or withdraw. I instinctively pushed for withdrawal. It was, after all, one of the official "options for POTUS," and I remained unclear about the purpose of our being in Iraq in the first place.

But when it came time for us to debate the options, the Army colonel who was guiding our deliberations quickly relegated my view to the margins. I don't recall precisely what he said, but the gist was that this was a crisis. Conditions on the ground were rapidly deteriorating and would continue to do so until we did something or ISIS came crashing through our front door.

We wound up recommending the small-force package. Today, that colonel is a two-star general.

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#133 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2021-September-13, 11:48

Quote

To understand how blobaganda works, you have to look for what isn't there. Not much airtime is given to dissent from what's often called "the rules-based order" or "the liberal international order." These terms sound technical and boring and unobjectionable; perhaps that is by design. In plain English, "rules-based order" has effectively come to mean "war is good." The foreign-policy establishment is ideologically committed to the faith-based proposition that America can use force against a country thousands of miles away and, if not remake it in our own image, then at least leave it better than we found it. "Liberal" and "rules" are strange words to apply to campaigns that rely so heavily on drone strikes and covert CIA operations. At one event hosted by the Blobosphere, I remember one of my peers raising his hand to ask how we could convince the American public that it was worth going to war to defend Montenegro, as we are obliged to under Article 5 of the NATO treaty. The room turned and looked at him as if he'd gone insane.

You can now add CNN to the blobagandists.

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Black Lives Matter. / "I need ammunition, not a ride." Zelensky
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