It was corrupt in that you had to, more than in almost any other country, bribe government officials to do their jobs. However, it was not a police state. People were not punished because of how they answered pollsters.
A few years ago a pro-Taliban journalist was killed, but more often the intimidation went the other way. If you hunt around on the .af domain, you’ll see that, media wise, this was no North Korea. People could read media pro and anti Taliban (except in areas with 24 hour Taliban control, and even there with a smart phone) and make up their own mind.
Some of the polling questions do ask about just what you suspect, and I’m not saying there was zero fear in talking to pollsters. But, there’s no reason to think that more people were lying in fear of the government than of the Taliban. All the evidence I see points to the Taliban being unpopular.
I mean that’s what you choose to believe. It just isn’t accurate. They were cutting deals with the Taliban as soon as Trump signed the Doha agreement. The idea that an army of 180,000 can’t function against an insurgent force of 60,000 without air support is insane. They gave up because the Afghan government was seen as deeply corrupt and lacking any legitimacy. The Washington Post actually interviewed some of these commanders that surrendered, most of them said they hadn’t been paid in months or even more than a year. Yet we were still sending money to the Afghan National Government to stand up that military force, where was that money going?
Joe Biden asked the Generals back when they were advocating the Obama surge–“if in a year, the Afghan Government remains corrupt and illegitimate, how does adding more troops fix that?” It’s popular to make fun of Joe as being “dumb” and “old” but that’s a damn fucking good question. Do you know what the Pentagon’s answer was? They had no fucking answer. Their answer was “send more troops.” It wasn’t working. Biden is the first President in 20 years that had the spine to exercise his constitutional authority and tell them “no.”
Also, what was the goal of our involvement in Afghanistan? Thirty years ago, Colin Powell listed certain questions that should be asked and answered before the US sends troops overseas, and one of those was “Do we have a clear attainable objective?” I’ve never heard what the objective was of the US involvement in Afghanistan.
Right and you’d think when the sitting Vice President asks that very question in a room full of generals they might come up with an answer. Instead 8 years later guys like Robert Gates and some of the retired generals cry to reporters that Biden was “disrespectful to the military leadership.”
Biden is going down in history as a spineless president who created chaos out of a stable situation. There is no safe way to get to the airport because of how it was handled. And that leaves up to 15,000 Americans still there hoping a strongly worded plea to the taliban allows them passage through all the roadblocks set up in the country.
He has completely lost control of the situation and his earlier statement that this wasn’t going to be another Saigon makes him look foolish in the extreme.
Also I don’t really understand the comparisons to the Fall of Saigon. The Fall of Saigon wasn’t any kind of particular disaster from a U.S. evacuation perspective. We had moved all U.S. personnel out of country other than an amount that could be removed in a single wave of helicopter airlift weeks prior. We had ceased combat in Vietnam two years prior and had no significant military deployment there.
The North Vietnamese did not make any attempts to harm or attack American personnel, and in fact some Americans chose to stay in Saigon after it fell and nothing bad happened to them.
It goes back to perception and reality, there were upsetting pictures after we had abandoned our embassy of us airlifting people out while some South Vietnamese refugees desperately begged to come with, and that is tragic, but largely a natural and expected part of the process.
FWIW we ended up taking like 4000 or something Vietnamese out via airlift, and hundreds of thousands of more eventually resettled to the United States. The whole “fall of Saigon” shit goes back to “upsetting images” giving a mistaken idea about a situation. The “upsetting images” from Saigon were desperate Vietnamese scaling the Embassy gates begging to be brought with, and while tragic, it was the expected outcome two years prior when we signed the Paris Peace Accords. The evacuation of Saigon went so smoothly in fact because we had the helicopter airlift staged as a contingency plan, which ended up being necessary when the airport was damaged and we lost the option to shuttle people there and use fixed-wing aircraft.
It should be noted that North Vietnamese military forces and anti-aircraft literally visually observed our helicopters leaving and never fired a shot on them. The Fall of Saigon wasn’t really that bad, and neither is this.
An actual clusterfuck would be our loss of our Embassy in Tehran and the long term hostage taking of our staff there. As an example.
What did I say that wasn’t true? What number of American lives is significant to you? How many Afghan lives who supported efforts to keep the taliban out are significant to you?
OMG. If it wasn’t a disaster then why did Biden say it wouldn’t happen just a month ago? Why would he even mention it. He looks like a fool in front of the whole world.
I mean you clearly have a political axe to grind. You call Biden spineless, I wonder what you call the three Presidents before him who, frankly lied to the American people when they said for 20 years we were leaving Afghanistan and never did. Biden campaigned on it, and he actually did it. That isn’t spinelessness.
I would say anything less than 15 or so American deaths would qualify as “not significant.” We have lost thousands of people in Afghanistan. It is a dangerous country and anything could happen, a helicopter could crash, a disgruntled Afghan could shoot people or detonate a bomb. I’m not predicting that will or won’t happen. But I don’t expect any significant loss of life. We lose more than 15 people to homicides in the United States every day.
You have answered zero questions about how you would conduct and run a permanent, open ended commitment to Afghanistan, one that would likely require moving troop levels back up to at least 40,000 and probably more. You have answered zero questions about how you would justify that to a country that was deeply opposed to continuing its deployment there.
The decision to leave was made. Intelligence estimated Kabul would be in Afghan government hands for months. That intelligence was wrong, so we have to do a rapid evacuation. All indicators are that the Taliban is allowing that to occur. Considering many of Biden’s critics are the same ones going on Fox News to say we shouldn’t be taking any Afghan refugees, I find it hilarious you’re waxing anxiety about their fate here.
We have control of the Kabul airport and thousands of people are being evacuated every day. I just guess I don’t see where the evacuation is a “disaster.” The disaster is that the Afghan national government collapsed in an 11 day span. And that has zero to do with Joe Biden, and everything to do with the fact that in 20 years of nation building we had failed to build a viable nation. If anything I see the 11 day complete collapse of their government as the biggest and most significant vindication possible that Joe was right all along, we needed out of there, and were not doing any good there whatsoever. Joe recognized it was a massive waste of blood and treasure, and he was proven right by how feckless and incompetent the Afghan government proved itself to be.
I have to agree with this. Inasmuch as I find it hard to award Biden much higher than a “D” letter grade for his conduct of the War in Afghanistan so far, that should be contrasted against “F-minuses all around” for his predecessors, particularly in light of how quickly the nation’s political leaders folded to the Taliban (laying bare the deficiency of earlier efforts at nation building).
When it comes down to it, if the Afghan government didn’t have the pluck or the will fight the Taliban and win, then it’s just as well they folded without a fight. Because while holding out for a couple more years (or even another six months–a “decent interval” as it were) in a bloody civil war might make it easier/more palatable for the US viewing audience to shrug and wash its hands of the war, I hardly see how that ends up better for the people of Afghanistan. The end result is still life under the Taliban. It’s just that more people die along the way there. More devastation, not less.
So I award Biden a “D” for not anticipating just how fast the Taliban would collapse or properly arranging for the humanitarian/refugee crisis. But that’s still a passing grade in my mind, and thus far the highest marks in the course of any US President on the subject Afghanistan.
Once again, I wish to thank Martin_Hyde for his cogent posts. The evacuation perhaps could have been handled more cautiously and without misleading comments. However, he inherited three terms worth of malfeasance and mismanagement. It is hard to see a great option apart from one Zugzwang or another, perhaps prolonging a stalemate to allow more humanitarian efforts?
the taliban has control of the airport perimeter as well as every city and town in Afghanistan. Any movement is at their discretion. We HAD a military base but it was abandoned. the taliban has it now.
It has everything to do with Biden. per his own words “the buck stops here”.
The fall of Saigon (which was frankly executed much more cleanly), actually went down with a lot of planning on our evacuation precisely because we knew that South Vietnam was going to collapse, two years prior. While I have noted that it’s almost impossible for me to imagine our intelligence was totally blind to all the local commanders signing deals with the Taliban after the Doha Agreement, it’s starting to look like they may have indeed been that blind.
I have said all along, there are tactical things about the withdrawal Biden has probably bungled. It should be investigated. One major thing I’m seeing is that we evacuated Bagram a couple months ago, and Bagram has two major air strips and is 35 miles from Kabul. Bagram is also extremely defensible, I can’t help but feel we probably should have held onto that base until all of our people were out of country. But I’m not a General and not a planner of this evacuation, apparently Gen McKenzie who is the commander of CENTCOM is the one who approved us leaving Bagram. The military and the President are accountable to the people, and I’m perfectly fine with an investigation.
But I also want an investigation into the Trump administration, who signed a deal with terrorists at Doha for the first time maybe in U.S. history, and made Ghani release 5000 of them from prison for ostensibly nothing in return. I also want an investigation into the intelligence reports prepared for decision makers from Bush to Biden to understand why even when senior political leadership asked about the political competency of the Afghan government it seems like our expensive military intelligence apparatus gave no compelling answers.
Biden doesn’t get absolved for any mistakes he’s made with this withdrawal, but the core argument that we needed to leave seems entirely vindicated to me, by the 11 day collapse. And any proper understanding of the withdrawal also needs to address why we signed a one sided deal with a terrorist group under Trump that had us release 5000 terrorists from jail. And addresses the fact that Biden came into office with less than 3000 troops in office, one of the few executive actions Trump continued to even perform during his final months in office when he spent most of his time throwing a temper tantrum over his electoral defeat, was continuing to press for troop draw downs in Afghanistan.
Biden did not make the Afghan government collapse. The whole point is we have failed for twenty years at making the Afghan government viable.
Biden is responsible for this current evacuation (which is going fine), he is not responsible for 20 years of failed Afghan policy. In fact he should get credit for being the only President with sufficient spine to end our misadventure there, and additional credit for questioning its wisdom 11 years ago while he was Vice President.
Also the Taliban do not control the airport perimeter, as per recent reporting the nearest Taliban forces to the airport are staying about 2 miles away.
Yep, as badly as Biden botched the execution (and I do think it’s fair to blame him rather than “The Blob”) his mistakes in the past week are nothing compared to doing what his predecessors did in continuing to indefinitely throw lives at a lost cause.
From an American troop involvement there were no loses for over a year. compare that to a weekend in Chicago. Nothing good is going to come of the taliban expanding back into the region.
There were no losses because the Taliban were waiting for us to leave. If the prospect of us leaving was off the table, we would go back to taking losses and Afghans would face significantly more losses.
The reason there are a bunch of Afghans who collaborated with us and are now trying to desperately leave the country is that we lied to them and told them we were trying to win this war. “No new lies” was the correct policy.
That’s because Trump withdrew all the troops aside from a small caretaker force that he forbade participating in any actual combat. So it’s not particularly surprising none of them were killed.
The issue is the Taliban was literally waiting us out to leave, so they had no reason to start going crazy waging war. If we told them we were never leaving they would go back to heavy armed resistance like they were doing back before 2016-2017 or so, and to actively combat that, we’d need more than the 2500 forces Trump left in country. We averaged over 40,000 troops in Afghanistan for like our first 14 years in country, before the “final draw down” under Obama took us to the low 10,000s. The idea that 2500 gets the job done just isn’t realistic. That 2500 wasn’t facing sustained Taliban attack like we were seeing years before because the Taliban knew they just had to wait us out.