He can’t compel them to fly into Afghanistan. It’s essentially a war zone.
they would be used for perimeter flights from neighboring bases. Basically they’d free up military planes used to move people from base to base.
You think the world wants the US to play at being world policeman, and considers the US reliable?
The Pew survey of opinions about the US in countries that are close US allies, taken in June this year, doesn’t back that up.
Reliability:
Across the 16 publics polled, a median of 55% say the U.S. is somewhat reliable, while just 11% describe America as very reliable.
US democracy:
A median of just 17% say democracy in the U.S. is a good example for others to follow, while 57% say it used to be a good example but has not been in recent years. Another 23% do not believe it has ever been a good example.
In general, younger people tend to have a more negative opinion of the US than older people.
US as ‘world policeman’:
Overall, 67% think the US acts ‘not much’ or ‘not at all’ in their country’s interests.
We can assume that opinions in countries that are not close US allies are even less favourable.
I’d be rather relieved if they didn’t, actually.
I saw on the news the planes are making combat landings. Trying to reduce the chance of getting hit by a missile.
That’s like saying the KKK are Americans just as much as their opponents are.
In this case the taliban represents a breeding ground for terrorists and an extension of similar groups. We’re now seeing ISIS threatening Kabul airport.
IMO supporting those who oppose them is in the interest of the United States and it’s allies.
Yes, news videos show non-military planes landing there. But to my knowledge the companies operating them were not compelled to do so. Frankly, a commercial airliner isn’t designed for steep approach landings. Planes like the C-17 are. They have massive blown flaps and they can deploy thrust reversers in flight for this express purpose. They can descend 20,000 feet per minute doing this.
The Taliban and ISIS are not particularly on friendly terms; in fact the problem the Taliban faces is that while they have military control over most of the country, that control is fragile. They have even less political control right now – politically, Afghanistan is not that far from anarchy, and it’s anarchy more than anything that allows safe havens for terrorism. As much as we all justifiably condemn and remain skeptical of the Taliban, there is a case for allowing them to gain greater control over the security of the country, considering that the United States is gone and the Afhgan security forces have folded.
If groups rise up and challenge the Taliban, then the Taliban are very likely going to respond by intensifying their viciousness. There’s no such thing as a good Taliban - agreed. But I see it being within the realm of the possible that the Taliban could actually become a slightly better behaved version of itself under the right circumstances. And those circumstances involve the world reluctantly recognizing the Taliban as the one group most likely to provide some degree of governance and security. In exchange, they allow dissidents to leave the country and they agree not to attack remaining US/allied citizens. And they agree to crack down on known terrorist activities within the country. Perhaps there could be some room for the Taliban to negotiate with some local tribes/resistance to allow semi-autonomy.
Per the statement from the Defense Department, the commercial airliners aren’t flying into Kabul but instead US bases in other countries. And this is under the Civil Reserve Air Fleet arrangement.
While that may be possible their behavior suggests the opposite to be true. They’ve sent women packing from the work force and attacked those who supported the previous government.
I predict they will try to fund their existence with kidnappings and other criminal enterprises while brutily repressing the democratic process.
All of that is possible - I won’t disagree. But a few points:
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We, and the rest of the world, have recognized the legitimacy of many, many regimes that are repulsive, from North Korea to the Saudis. I think we have to be careful about having an obsession with Afghanistan and the Taliban. For us, the war is over. We defeated Bin Laden’s Al Qaida, but we ultimately lost Afghanistan. We must accept that.
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I think the Taliban could become a slightly better behaved regime, but that will also depend on a multitude of factors, some of which we have absolutely no control over, such as the durability of the current group’s cohesion. But the Taliban may see some strategic value in working with the US and other countries outside of Asia. For starters, they live in a dangerous political neighborhood. The US could be a possible counterweight to China and Russia. Also, the Taliban will also likely need more money to have a shot at governing effectively. The US has plenty of money. And of course, the Taliban may find itself dealing with extreme factions that either split away from their own larger group or already exist in the form of insurgents such as ISIS. They also would rather avoid an ongoing civil war if they can avoid it.
As I mentioned, they are in effect a de facto power, but they have far from established governance and legitimacy. I think the US needs to redefine what ‘leverage’ it is. We don’t have any leverage at all in terms of regaining control for the Afghan government that we established, but there may be some leverage in determining what kind of Taliban this current iteration becomes, and we should consider using it.
Unfortunately at least based on comments not only this last couple weeks, but during the wars in Libya and Syria, the U.S. was “called out” by several large European countries both times for not being involved enough. I’ve long said that there are a number of countries, and EU countries are the most obvious ones, who need to seriously rethink their national stance on developing force-projection military forces. These countries and their political leadership demand U.S. action regularly, but are not willing to devote resources to their own independent action capacity, which is shocking and strange. Some of the countries involved like France and Germany easily could do so–they have more money and resources than say, Russia, but simply chose not to use them in this way. Which is fine, but they should probably come to recognize the days of the U.S. intervening at their behest is rapidly ending.
Yeah, this is something I alluded to a long time ago when I talked about the mostly fictitious pre-9/11 maps that showed the Taliban had control of “90%” of the country. The word control, at least as it is commonly understood, should not be expressed that way in Afghanistan. Rural Afghanistan (which is 70% of the country’s population) has lots of communities that are relatively geographically isolated, and who have histories going back thousands of years, during that time they have mostly been left alone by outsiders and they do not like people coming in and telling them what to do or how to live their lives.
The Taliban had the agreement by a lot of these disparate peoples to not resist the Taliban, but the flipside was the Taliban had almost no authority over them. This played out just this last week in Bamyan province. People living in one of Afghanistan’s many isolated valleys agreed to acknowledge the Taliban’s rule but on the condition that the Taliban stay out–no house to house searches, no patrolling their villages and streets. Apparently the local Taliban didn’t get the memo, and started violating the agreement. A local prison commander who had since abandoned his job, got a bunch of the villagers together and they massacred a bunch of the Taliban, killed like 30+, and apparently captured 20 or more. The Taliban has vowed retribution, but this shows the kind of trouble involved in actually regulating the rural areas of Afghanistan, and why it was all but impossible to dislodge the Taliban from the rural areas in which it was embedded. These people simply don’t accept outsiders telling them what to do. You can come through and say “we’re in charge now, don’t make trouble” and many will agree, but the flipside is they won’t let you “govern” them, and that’s fine if you’re the sort of leadership that can accept that (the Afghan monarchy for example only attempted to govern these people a few times, and it always resulted in widespread violence and a return to the status quo of leaving them alone.)
I’m not American born. I grew up in Canada. I have worked and lived in the US for a number of years and that has been precisely because of the NAFTA agreement between Canada and the US. I remember very well how much hand-wringing there was in Canada when negotiating NAFTA with respect to making sure that it was fair to America. Hint: NONE. Every country/government negotiates in it’s own best interest. As it bloody well should. What was Brexit about if not for Britain and it’s citizens wanting a new deal that was in their own best interest. If you took that survey in Europe with respect to Britain, what do you think it would show? Would it show that Britain is a reliable trade partner that is largely considerate of the interest of other European nations? Honestly, what an utterly meaningless poll.
Was it in fact at their behest that the US intervened in Libya, or Syria, or anywhere else? Would the US not have intervened otherwise?
At the end of the day it was Obama’s decision, the President has a lot of sole authority there. I do think the intense pressure and lobbying from close allies like the French President and British PM were absolutely a factor. He likely was getting fed a diet heavy on advocacy for interventionism from the national security bureaucracy too—lot of those guys basically only advocate for military interventions.
A big part of those allies concern was ties to the refugee crises, and Obama was probably getting a lot of pressure from State on that side of it.
If I represented a NATO country I think I’d be most worried about the organization’s biggest partner’s continuing slide down the ranks of functioning democracies.
And FWIW I was fine with those interventions by Obama, both were non-entangling, advanced genuine American policy, and didn’t result in any undue loss of life etc.
But I do think we’re entering an era where the U.S. is going to be much more narrowly defining its interests. Biden certainly doesn’t use the term, but there is absolutely some of the same mindset of Trump’s “America First” foreign policy and the foreign policy statements that Biden has put out. I think it’s bigger than Trump/Biden, of all the potential near term, Presidential-tier politicians from both parties very few would imo break in a more interventionist direction. Maybe Buttigieg on the Dem side. On the GOP side most of the guys pro-interventionism aren’t making a lot of waves in the national sense. Your Lindsey Grahams and whatnot.
That’s probably a valid concern but NATO is basically an anti-Russian alliance. It was never strictly predicated on Democracy. I also am one who thinks the fears of democratic “backsliding” in the United States are fairly hyperbolic. The U.S. system is actually not that democratic to begin with at the Federal level, at least compared to more modern democracies.
I think the democratic backsliding in the US is demonstrably real; it just doesn’t seem as dangerous to some because it it’s occurring at a time when there is simultaneously an increase in democratic enthusiasm. But what we’re observing in the US is that illiberal democracy is competing against liberal democracy. And those who propose the illiberal brand are hyper-active in using a variety of mechanisms to subvert liberal democracy, both at the state and federal level. The threat to democracy is very clear and present.
And to @Red_Wiggler’s point, if the illiberal democrats win, I see that as a win for Russia. Consider Russia’s influence on the 2016 US election, but more than that, consider the aftermath. The years from 2017 to 2020 were a period in which Russia influenced the US to intervene in ways that benefited Russia and were detrimental to US interests. As we saw during the impeachment of Trump in 2020, the entire Republican party was willing to give Vladimir Putin’s Russia unfettered discretion to behave as it pleased with regard to Ukraine. I have no doubt that they would do the same with regard to Russia if Trump were to become a factor in 2024, but even if he were not, the Republican party has effectively rebranded itself as an isolationist party, which is now what their voters have come to expect.
I see our withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq as largely a concession an acknowledgment that the US is increasingly losing the political will to assert itself on the world stage. Worse, the recent debacles in both Afghanistan and also our dumping the Kurds in Iraq under Trump were executed erratically, giving our partners the impression that not only do we lack the political desire to support international alliances but we also lack the competence to enable these alliances to function.
Going back to the insurrection on Capitol Hill, this is actually relevant to foreign policy not because our partners believed that we were the world’s best-functioning liberal democratic nation, but that they now have serious doubts about political stability within the United States itself. To our NATO allies, the idea that one of the world’s oldest and historically stable democracies is now seriously in the throes of a growing political crisis is shocking, unsettling, and foreign to them.
Just like withdrawing from Vietnam?