Have you perhaps considered that, for the average Afghan, it doesn’t matter who runs the country as long as their village and tribe is safe? The Taliban simply offered them a better deal than the puppet regime was willing to.
No, I want to lay the blame on Biden, not Democrat Biden. If you want this mess attatched to the party that’s on you.
It’s not because of anything Biden did that 66,000 Afghans died in combat or that we wasted trillions of dollars trying to create a nation-state against the wishes of its citizenry. His decision was whether we would continue that waste or not.
He made the right call.
I can introduce you to a community of them in my area if you want to make to argue that point.
When you refuse to take into account all the contributions to the current catastrophic situation made by people who aren’t Biden, in order to spin it that it’s somehow all Biden’s fault and only Biden’s fault that we “lost Afghanistan”, it’s pretty clear that you’re playing for political points.
Like I said, please tell us exactly what you would have done differently had you been in charge of the US/NATO occupation that you believe would have changed the outcome of the Taliban reasserting control over Afghanistan. Specific strategic and tactical details welcome.
Why don’t you just link them to the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan site that I linked to in post #402? They’re the ones making the point I brought up about the US/NATO occupation having been a disaster for Afghanis in general, and particularly for Afghani women, as well as massively undermining their ongoing indigenous struggle for democracy, social justice, secularism, women’s rights and human rights in Afghanistan.
Nitpick: The people are Afghans. Afghani is the unit of currency.
How do they look at riots in the cities and claims that America is ‘founded on racism’ and not have serious doubts? How do they see the American military seemingly more interested in virtue signalling than fighting, and not have serious doubts? How do they look at Americans voting for a doddering 78 year old lifelong politician with a terrible track record and not have serious doubts?
True, thanks. Although “Afghani” has historically been used to refer to a person from Afghanistan, and many Afghans still use it to refer to themselves, I’m all in favor of maintaining consistent conventions in English nomenclature, and will try to be more careful about that in future. (The fact that lowercase “afghan” means a blanket can just be ignored in this context.)
Goodness, if they weren’t having “serious doubts” about American leadership due to the numerous riots of the 1960s and '70s, or the Miami and Philadelphia and NYC riots during the Reagan administration, I don’t see why they’d be suddenly afflicted by riot-engendered doubting in 2020.
I also don’t see why the hell anybody would be provoked to any doubt at all by the totally unremarkable historical observation that American society was “founded on racism”. Of course nobody is attempting to argue that the American society or nation was founded solely on racism, but FFS, our society was culturally and economically enmeshed in actual race-based chattel slavery for the first 250 years or so of its entire existence (and nearly the first 100 years of our existence as a nation).
Obviously racism played a major role in the shaping of America, and one would have to be delusional to deny that fact or to whine that nobody ought to talk about it.
Correction: The thing is that many American media outlets are seemingly more insterested in talking about military “virtue signaling” than military fighting, not that the American military itself is more interested in “virtue signaling” than fighting.
Admittedly, if I were a US ally that media phenomenon might be inspiring me to have some serious doubts too.
doddering, adj. “moving in a feeble or unsteady way, especially because of old age.”
Actually, the 77-year-old Biden for whom Americans voted doddered quite a bit less than his 74-year-old opponent, who notoriously had difficulty even walking down a ramp or independently articulating a coherent sentence.
As for the “lifelong politician” bit, most non-Trump voters tend to think political experience and knowhow are good things in a political leader. And anybody who lived through (or in your case, watched from the northern sidelines) the Trump administration has got some serious perceptual issues if he’s calling Biden’s track record “terrible”.
bullshit. He sat there and watched this happen. He owns this, not the party.
Good. He did the right thing.
A community of people who got the fuck out of Afghanistan when they could?
I don’t blame Biden.
I blame the US military for 20 years of expensive failure, and for giving Biden the wrong advice that the situation wouldn’t collapse if he pulled out.
The fact that there was such a quick collapse is 100% due to the way the US military dealt with the withdrawal, not to Biden.
Trump also deserves a fair share of the blame for the Doha agreement, where the Afghan Government set up by the US was excluded, and where Trump basically surrendered to the Taliban.
If Biden had repudiated the Doha agreement, then the truce with the Taliban would have been over, and Biden would have been forced to send in many thousands more US troops to stabilise the situation, instead of withdrawing.
That would have put him in an unacceptable position. So effectively he had no choice but to go ahead with Doha, and accept the word of the military that everything would be fine.
I don’t want to “overly blame” the Trump Administration for what I think was a systemic issue going back to the first W. Bush term, but the Doha Agreement is probably the biggest proximate cause for the last year or so of what’s gone down in Afghanistan. There’s accounts of the Taliban bribing local outposts to surrender and lay down their weapons in exchange for promises and cash pay outs going back to the mid 2010s, but all the intelligence analysis being reported on in the last 14 days says that the pace of this accelerated dramatically basically right when Doha was signed, and started to affect district and provincial level military and political leaders. The Doha Agreement was broadly seen as a confirmation that the United States did not support the “puppet” regime, that plus the innate corruption and ineffectiveness of the puppet regime made it very easy for the Taliban to start flipping people.
The only way to have fixed that would’ve been a major combat deployment (probably back to the pre-Obama draw down levels of 40,000 or more soldiers) and major combat operations against the Taliban. Basically it’d be round three of heavy, active warfare for the United States in Taliban, and it would last many years.
I do however strongly question Biden apparently not demanding, and the current security/military team apparently not providing, a contingency for fast collapse, including accelerated refuge of at-risk civilians. If Donald did not leave them one, then come up with one, evenif unsolicited, what are all those Masters’ degrees for? They even delayed the exit by 3 months and still could not catch up.
Team Trump, yes, is wholly to blame for setting the stage for this, having negotiated a “just stop shooting at us and we’ll GTFO and then it’s not our problem any more” exit and making NO plan to execute it other than “they will not dare do anything until we leave because we’re so scary, and if the election goes wrong, then it blows up in the next guy’s face”. (Just like domestically they were fine with signing off on trillions of added appropriations and right after he left then suddenly one extra cent or one extra day is too much.)
But while we’re at it let me also ding Team Obama, first for having chained themselves all the way back in 2008 to the “Iraq is the Wrong War, Afghanistan is the Right War” rhetoric (note on that later in the W section) just to refute the RW line that Dems are all weak troops-dishonoring quitters by saying there was A war they were OK with; and then for, after knocking off OBL in 2011 – who, mind you had not been in Afghanistan for 9 years and neither were Al-Q’s main operations happening out of Afghanistan any more – being unwilling to say OK that was the job, let’s start wrapping up but instead remaining chained to the nation-building mission so they could not be accused of quitting in both places.
And of course all the way back to W and his NeoCon posse, who decided that to really sell a continued presence to the American voter they needed to cast it in a light of that we are not just doing a punitive expedition to make them cry uncle and promise I’ll never do it again please stop hurting me, but rather that we were there to endow Afghanistan with the Bleffings Of Liberty in the Purfuit of Happiness, but that we’re gonna have to keep fighting the T’s and Q’s anywhere and everywhere until they stop existing because They Hate Freedom; and who by going into Iraq on specious grounds distracted themselves from Afghanistan and provided the opposition with the “Right War/Wrong War” theme.
And for that matter, to the people in the 1990s security apparatus who were so giddy at the fall of the Soviets and their clients, that they decided to not care about what filled the power vaccuum.
Here’s an excellent article that sheds some light on what went wrong.
It’s by a junior officer who served in Afghanistan. He criticizes the Afghans, but most of his criticism is reserved for the system in the US forces, which incentivized ‘middle managers’ in the military to create a fake appearance of success, and sign off on a ‘Potemkin’ Afghan army that never really existed.
He sketches a pattern of officers being asked to quantify their successes through the number of missions and number of engagements carried out meeting Afghans. As officers wanted promotions, they were incentivized to put in big numbers, but not necessarily accomplish anything real on the ground.
While the US Army sought to get good “stats” on what was happening to pass up the chain of command, the Afghan army and police were largely an army only on paper.
“In the summer of 2011 at the height of the fighting season, the Afghan police I was advising had two magazines per man, and the entire district had one RPG round, one round for their one RPG tube, and they had no gas for their Ford Rangers we had bought them.”
This dismal state of affairs was exacerbated by their paychecks and cash for basic things being stolen by higher-level Afghan commanders. He also says the police would put people in jail to get ransom from local families to raise money.
“They did that because they weren’t getting paid.”
He says that there was an incentive to inflate costs because everyone was making money: development projects would choose the most expensive bid so that those in charge could make it seem they were spending more money. It didn’t matter if anything got built, from wells to roads to schools.
…
“How do you show you were better than everyone else and make colonel or general and move up the chain of command?” Platner asks rhetorically. You spend more money than your peers.
And all that money went to corrupt Afghan senior commanders.
The military had become entangled in a culture of corporate middle management, but with no incentives to actually get things right. Unlike in a business, “the money is not going to shut off. The US military isn’t going to go out of business if they get it wrong.”
“No one wanted to say anything… Everyone was a coward, from executive leadership down to the company level where the cowardice stopped. Everyone above that was a coward. They believed it because they had to, they couldn’t bring themselves to admit that this might not be real.”
I was a little confused, too. A woman I know married an Afghan man years ago, and she was told “afghans are blankets. Afghanis are people.” So, I guess now it’s both?
A lot of those issues with how the military reports on things to decision makers is basically endemic at this point, some of the exact same behaviors can be traced all the way back to Vietnam.