The Economist comes down pretty hard on Biden, which, as you say is easy to do but one can only do so much with a sh*t sandwich.
We only have 2500 troops in Iraq and that country has been quiet since major combat operations against ISIS ended. Not really comparable to Afghanistan. You have the Kurds in northern Iraq and their area is very stable, and after ISIS was reduced by like 90% of its members and 100% of its territorial holding, there isn’t any active current military threat even challenging the Iraqi government. Iraqi soldiers fought and defeated ISIS. Iraq has some challenges, particularly its challenges between Sunni and Shia Arabs, and the prominence of irregular militias in both communities, as well as Iranian meddling. But we aren’t having to worry about actively propping up the Iraqi government at this time. The issue with Afghanistan is our small caretaker force could really serve no viable purpose. It wasn’t enough to keep the Afghan government viable, and it was too small to be effective if the Taliban started to come at us hard, in essence they were vulnerable.
Iraq is in a lot different situation, things are stable enough there that our troops are basically in pure training mode and “available” for counterterror operations in the Middle East, but they aren’t really babysitting Iraq at the moment.
Iraq is also easily an order of magnitude more important to U.S. strategic interests than Afghanistan.
Like all of the WaPo it is paywalled (I suggest subscribing!) but there’s a good op-end by a disabled U.S. Army Lieutenant, who lost many of his men and both of his legs in an IED attack in Afghanistan in 2009, and he thinks Biden was right to leave and brave to take the political hits.
The most interesting portion of the article quoted briefly to avoid copyright issues:
The article quotes Joe Biden, and I think it’s worth me quoting Biden too:
Interesting article in the NYT:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/opinion/china-afghanistan-taliban.html
Beijing has few qualms about fostering a closer relationship with the Taliban and is ready to assert itself as the most influential outside player in an Afghanistan now all but abandoned by the United States.
Unlike the United States, China brings no baggage to the table in Afghanistan. China has kept a low profile in the country since the U.S. invasion, not wishing to play second fiddle to the United States in any power politics. Beijing watched as Washington’s foray in Afghanistan became a messy and costly morass. In the meantime, China provided Afghanistan millions of dollars in aid for medical assistance, hospitals, a solar power station and more. All the while, Beijing was fostering stronger trade relations, eventually becoming one of Afghanistan’s largest trading partners.
Even before its takeover of Kabul, the Taliban had promised to protect Chinese investments in Afghanistan.
With the U.S. withdrawal, Beijing can offer what Kabul needs most: political impartiality and economic investment. Afghanistan in turn has what China most prizes: opportunities in infrastructure and industry building — areas in which China’s capabilities are arguably unmatched — and access to $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits, including critical industrial metals such as lithium, iron, copper and cobalt.
Chinese companies have a reputation for investing in less stable countries if it means they can reap the rewards. That doesn’t always happen so smoothly, but China has patience.
I wish China good fortune in the wars to come.
Yeah, part of the issue with investing in Afghanistan is infrastructure projects require locals you can work with that will reliably take outside money and spend it appropriately, and contractors etc who can do the work. Afghanistan doesn’t have a lot of that, a lot of the “Belt & Road initiative” involved Chinese laborers going in. If they go into Afghanistan and god forbid something happens to some of them, I see things going in a BAD direction fast. Xi has been hyping up hardcore Chinese nationalism for years.
I don’t think it’s dumb for countries–particularly its neighbors like China, to look towards making some infrastructure investments in Afghanistan, I just think it’s a little more fraught with peril than are many of the African countries China has been doing business with (which tend to be very poor but are physically safe and have stable governments.)
China also borders Afghanistan, I frankly think it’s natural that if any great power is going to be concerned with that country it be China.
China will do well in Afghanistan, far better than the US, because whatever conflicts there may be, all sides are well-disposed towards China, and all sides want Chinese investment.
China is not going to send troops into the country, or do anything heavy-handed. They’re simply going to negotiate with whoever happens to be in charge. And whichever group is in charge will benefit from Chinese investment.
US News is focused on the evacuation in Kabul.
I am seeing a few articles on the emerging resistance. I hope the US or Britain quietly sends some funding and supplies.
The Taliban never held complete control of Afghanistan in the 90s. Their current forces have to be way over extended. Taking ground can be easy compared to holding it.
Anyway, I know the US has backpedaled out. It’s up to the Afghans to decide their futures. Some provinces may revert back to the warlords. The civil war is just restarting.
We weren’t trying to win a war at this point. we were trying to support the Afghanis. They were the ones dying to maintain their sovereignty
I don’t think I’m MM QBing the idea of supporting the Afghanis. That’s my opinion on what should be US policy backed by what may now be our former allies.
As for the MM QB side of the current situation, I don’t think this was vastly unpredictable. It’s unlikely military advice was to withdraw before evacuating 15,000 Americans and untold Allies and the Afghanis who supported the effort. The total number is probable 50 to 100 thousand people.
There’s certainly no hindsight in allowing the taliban to storm across the country. We could have intervened after it started.
I don’t know that I can agree with it. While the Taliban were our visible enemy in Afghanistan, these tribal people with zero loyalty to country who are only loyal to the valley they grew up in, are a big part of why our nation building failed in Afghanistan. I don’t see it as beneficial to subsidize them simply because we dislike the Taliban, it advances no U.S. interest and arguably just helps contribute to keeping Afghanistan backwards and ungovernable.
I disagree with your wording. China is absolutely going to do something heavy-handed. they’re going to support the taliban. It’s Uyghur 2.0 checkbook imperialism.
The article linked about is about remote areas of Afghanis fighting the taliban. So your opinon of how these people think doesn’t square with what is taking place.
The United States, and by extension her allies, have lost a military base on the border of China. Replace the word “military base” with “intel operations” and you’ll understand what was given up. It was a quiet little strategic location in the region that we pissed away.
Chinese leaders are laughing their ass off. Taiwan leaders are not. We just showed the world that the US cannot be relied on and China will continue to bankroll tyrants.
Apparently you still haven’t understood the basic point that the Taliban are Afghans, just as much as their opponents are.
And the word for the people is ‘Afghan’ - the ‘Afghani’ is the name of the currency of the country. 
We need to maintain some influence in the area. Quietly supporting groups opposed to the Taliban could yield useful Intel. It always helps to have friends. There’s no reason that every warlord in Afghanistan has to despise the US. It will take many years to gain any respect in that region again.
China is the biggest threat. They’ve substantially increased their Navy and even countries like New Zealand and Australia are feeling the pressure.
I actually question that we need to maintain influence in Afghanistan. I can’t get over thinking a lot of America’s post-Cold War thinking is influenced by…Cold War thinking. Meanwhile we know from history that Empires get overextended and that often leads to their collapse. We’re the third largest country by population in the world and the 3rd/4th largest by area (depending on how you count it.) We are always going to be a significant, powerful country. China is basically the same size geographically and has 21% of the world’s population. It too, is always going to be a significant, powerful country.
This isn’t the era of the European Great powers–relatively small but advanced countries vying with each other for imperialist control of the world. The era of the great imperialist Empires is over. What has replaced it are economic unions and looser ties, which will likely be ever-shifting. The world isn’t a pie to carve up, and shouldn’t be viewed that way.
We should more carefully analyze opportunity costs and decide what relationships make the most sense for our country. Something no one ever talks about is before we invaded Afghanistan, we actually had a military base in Uzbekistan, but we basically ignored that country afterward and they’ve fallen deep into Russia’s orbit. We would’ve likely been building far more strategic gains if we had worked to funnel lots of money into that relationship economically to put pressure right on Russia’s doorsteps, versus waste almost 2 trillion dollars and 20 years in Afghanistan.
Earlier a poster criticized Kamala Harris for being in Vietnam, but we’d likewise be far better off working on strengthening economic and political ties with Vietnam than worrying about Afghanistan–I assure you this will be more of an impact on China than anything in Central Asia. We also need to continue to build our relationship with India, which was long strained by a questionable association with Pakistan that has since ended. India’s soon to be the largest country in the world by population, and has slowly been developing into a genuine military and economic power–they have the third largest GDP and 3rd largest defense budget. Helpfully for us India and China have so many border issues and historic political problems there is virtually no chance they’re ever good friends, and are likely to always be natural rivals–a good opportunity for us to help counter China.
Afghanistan is a relatively unimportant backwater, never worth the investment of money we put in from a purely strategic perspective.
I’ll absolutely agree that we could have begun withdrawing US and Afghan asylum seeking personnel sooner. The exit is a clusterfuck, no doubt. Biden owns a lot of that - the vast majority of it if we’re talking strictly about the decision to adhere to the timeline and the other logistical decisions that were made based on the assessment of Afghanistan’s strength.
But I push back on the idea that supporting Afghans would have done anything other than piss away money and expose US personnel to danger. Some people in the military, the State Dept, and elsewhere were drinking their own piss and confusing it with wine, it seems. They were deluded to think that anything other than what happened last weekend would be years away. None of the previous four presidents did shit to help the situation either.
Part of the issue with evacuating the Afghan personnel before the Afghan government actually collapsed, or showed obvious signs of collapse, is it sends a message to literally every Afghan who isn’t on that special visa list “your leaders don’t care about you, and are abandoning you.” Now obviously if we had actually known that the country was literally weeks away from a complete collapse anyway, we’d have made different decisions. I think it’s hard unless you know that, to pull them out early. That’s why I have repeatedly said it needs to be looked into as to why our military / intelligence reports were so terrible. The only people that seemed to actually predict this happening was a State Department “dissent channel” cable, that was signed by 25 higher ranking State Department officials who were stationed in, or had been stationed in, Afghanistan. The dissent channel is a mechanism for getting minority opinions up to the top of the chain of command, and we know that SecState Blinken read the dissent cable before all this went down. We don’t know what he chose to do with that information or how or if he conveyed it to Biden–and those are questions that need to be asked.
Good. It’s high time we stopped playing World Police and the rest of the world stopped relying on us.
I’m seeing reports that Biden may compel civilian airlines to help with evacuees.
Never lasts long. Our image took a hit in the wake of Vietnam, not to mention during, and five or ten years later it was like no one in the world even remembered. It’ll be the same this time too.