There is no other way to spin this but to say his lack of support created this. We didn’t fail the Afghani people the last 20 years, Biden failed them in the last 20 days.
Good grief, Magiver, try responding to some of Martin_Hyde’s points instead of just repeating the same meaningless statements over and over.
Yeah we did. Whatever we may think of the competence or otherwise of Biden’s strategy for final withdrawal, there is no question that the previous 20 years of invasion and occupation completely failed to establish a robust and secure democratic state in Afghanistan or to provide a sustainable alternative to Taliban rule.
Maybe it was a hopeless cause from the get-go (and I’m not sorry that I opposed it from the get-go), but for twenty years there were a lot of bullshitters of both political parties telling us that our presence in Afghanistan was accomplishing something substantive for democracy, and they were wrong.
and yet they rolled on Biden’s watch. Couldn’t have been when Bagram Airfield was abandoned in the dead of night in early July.
It was just a coincidence that the taliban hoisted their flag on the Pakistan border and then marched across Afghanistan.
Abandoning the Afghanis was the failure. Nobody said it was an easy mission to reverse centuries of oppression. I don’t know where you get off thinking 20 years was a specific goal post. We’re still in Japan and Germany with no hint of leaving.
But they kinda did, though. They encouraged us to believe that we had an achieveable mission in a much shorter term than twenty years. If we had been frankly told on going into Afghanistan that we’d have to maintain tens of thousands of troops there for several decades with no clear path to establishing an independent sustainable democracy even after twenty years, there would have been a HELL of a lot more popular resistance to the invasion than there was.
As has already been pointed out multiple times in several of these threads, we’re not currently in Japan or Germany to prop up a government incapable of sustaining itself. We’re there because they are strategic and high-functioning locations for the exercise of American military power and influence in the world, and they provide support from stable and cooperative allies.
If Afghanistan were in a condition anything like where Japan and Germany had got to by 1965, twenty years after WWII, and were offering to provide us with a similarly stable environment for major US military bases, then there would be a much stronger argument for not leaving Afghanistan. (Disregarding for the moment the larger question of whether the US ought to be having all these foreign military bases to facilitate the exercise of its unilateral power.) But as things are, any comparison between the Afghanistan situation and the ongoing US presence in Japan and Germany is just a sick joke.
We’re there to further our interests and protect Japan and Germany from outside threats in a common goal.
Whereas we were the outside threat to Afghanistan, and their goals were never aligned with ours.
But we never stressed the importance of, nor really had a public discussion about, any nation building in Afghanistan.
I was for the going into that country for 9/11 reasons militarily. My understanding was we were going after the terrorists that attacked us and anyone that would house them. That was Afghanistan (allegedley).
This outcome with the fractious nature of the tribes that rule this country, along with the terrain, has ALWAYS been why empires go there to die.
A central government was doomed to fail, yet we paid for one that turned tail and gave up.
I hope we are blowing up every piece of relevant equipment the Taliban may have confiscated from this epic surrender.
You cannot force a national identity on a nation that has none nor that even really exists other than lines drawn on a paper at the price of blood in the sand.
The biggest question… Why didn’t we start evacuating American and British citizens in May? When Bagram was available for aircraft and we still had a secure base?
The incompetence of this evacuation is breath taking. We pull the troops, lose control of a well established air base and then send troops back. Except now their encircled and vulnerable on a civilian airfield.
It’s inexcusable to delay a large evacuation until the very last days.
A big thank you to the posters for the civil discussion. Someone asked about the British first foray into Afghanistan. Let me suggest the series on the History Channel.
Great Game " was a political and diplomatic confrontation that existed for most of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century between the British Empire and the Russian Empire, over Afghanistan
THE GREAT GAME Part I
The issue is the people we would be evacuating had jobs to do in Afghanistan, both our people and theirs. The whole reason we’re even agreeing to take the Afghans to the United States is because they were helping our efforts there. Evacuating them in May, when our leadership still believed the Kabul government might hold out for a year, or even longer, would be highly questionable–it would be like a literal dagger in the back of that government.
I have previously questioned the decision to evacuate Bagram, that particular strategy was signed off on by CENTCOM General McKenzie–I’m not saying that to absolve the political leadership, but the idea of closing Bagram didn’t come from the White House down to the Generals, the reporting I have seen says that it came from McKenzie who was responsible for managing the draw down from a high level. I suspect he is likely to be asked this very question in a congressional inquiry, and he should. Bagram seems on par with the embassy in that it should be one of the last things we had shut down.
I do think a comparison to the Fall of Saigon is somewhat helpful. We basically knew that South Vietnam was not going to persist, but it did make it two years. We had a plan in place to reduce our Embassy staff to a number that could be helicoptered out in one wave of airlifts if need be, which I think was like 1500 or something. The plan to reduce to that number was formulated long before it was obvious that Saigon would fall, and it was not executed until the last months. So by the time the fall of Saigon was imminent, our total Embassy staff were of a number we did not even need to be able to get to the Saigon airport to remove them, we could lift them out via helicopter. This ended up being fortuitous, because the Saigon airport was damaged and unusable when the time came.
Unfortunately it seems like our assessment of when Afghanistan would fall was much less accurate than in Saigon. We were apparently thinking it would take a year or more after we fully withdrew, and even when we got updated assessments that it was much worse than that (which apparently happened this month), it seemed like the consensus was still “several months.” We basically had a far smaller window of planning and action versus the evacuation of Saigon.
Safe! To the great relief of all Afghani citizens:
can you cite General McKenzie’s input on this for general background knowledge?
Well F-18’s from US carriers are patrolling over Kabul.
I’d feel better knowing which troops were sent last week? Some units are more combat trained and equipped than others.
Getting US citizens out is becoming a major shit show.
Bidens interview with George Stephanopoulos was painful to watch. Kamela is noticeably absent. I’m not sure who’s running the store.
Miller and Gen. Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, who heads U.S. Central Command, recommended closing Bagram and keeping open a military presence at the airport, Milley said. The risk of leaving from the airport or Bagram was “about the same,” allowing the military to get down to about 600 to 700 troops, he added.
I don’t get the Vietnam trip for VP Kamela. Seems like a trip down memory lane that was poorly thought out.
Maybe it’s because Vietnam is one of our major Asian trading partners and a growing American ally that has a natural opposition to China, our biggest rival in Asia? You’ve said a lot of things in this thread that suggest you should do a lot more research on these topics before weighing in, frankly.
Also, it seems that Harris’s Vietnam/Singapore travel has been in the works since at least last month. I doubt that the trip planners foresaw a lot of media attention to comparisons between Vietnam and Afghanistan in the same time period.