Not sure how this is going to work.
Forget all the mistakes of the past - the fallacy of sunk costs. The way to look at the situation today should simply be whether the U.S. should maintain a presence in Afghanistan to prevent the humanitarian disaster that will ensue if the Taliban rule the country without opposition.
The U.S. kept tens of thousands of soldiers in Germany, Japan, and South Korea - soldiers who are still there 74 years later. Clearly, this could be done if there was the will.
Forget about turning Afghanistan into a pluralistic state - that’s not going to happen. It was never going to happen. But it’s not inconceivable to have a permanent peacekeeping force, hopefully international, to stop the Taliban from the worst of their atrocities. We have done that in many places around the world since WWII.
Estimates I’ve seen say about 8500 soldiers minimum woild be required for force protection and embassy protection, and to provide close air support (but no ground troops) to the Afghan army… That’s not an unreasonable number, and brings lots of benefits. For example, constant training and exercises with the Afghan military would help to moderate them and make them more pro-western - this was one of the reasons for providing military aid to Egypt and others. It pulls them closer to your sphere of influence and culture.
Precipitously pulling out the way Biden is doing it seems the worst of all worlds, and seems likely to end in another fall-of-Saigon moment with the last embassy personnel fleeing on helicopters as the Taliban march into Kabul.
And prepare for scenes of women being shot in the head in soccer stadiums and all those women whose education we celebrated over the last 20 years being put back in burkas and sold off to warlords as concubines. Because that’s what happens to ‘uppity’ women when the Taliban run things.
It seems worth a little blood and treasure from the world to prevent that. Biden should at least have tried to build an international peacekeeping force before abandoning the women of the country to a bunch of monsters.
Keeping thousands of troops in Europe, Japan, and South Korea made sense in that it helped to create the global economy from which the US benefits. It essentially created American hegemony, which meant that the maintenance costs associated with our expansion of power were worth it.
In Afghanistan, like Iraq, the benefits of a prolonged occupation were less direct for American forces there. It’s worth pointing out that Western Europe, Japan, and South Korea, more or less, accepted the US as a necessary, even if not always welcome, presence. Not so much in Afghanistan, and surely not the case with regard to Afghanistan’s neighbors. Culturally incompatible with the kinds of designs the US had, it was never a good fit.
This outcome was inevitable - something we all seem to agree on. It’s just that we might wanted to have considered if there might not have been better ways to accept defeat, even if it meant working with adversaries like China, Russia, Pakistan, and Iran. And Pakistan’s involvement would have inevitably made India a factor as well.
WOW. .
If I drive a car for 20 years without a checkup or a tune-up or an oil change, and suddenly the engine falls out, can I say it wasn’t the same car it was yesterday? Afghanistan hasn’t changed - we’re just seeing it now for what it really is. A hollow shell.
Please stop.
And I’d say, that’s at least a proposal. But try and sell that to the policymakers in DC and the other World Capitals. Something like that should have been pushed way back right after ObL got perforated, except that in '08 the Dems had run on a platform that Iraq is the Wrong War that must end and Afghanistan is the Good War that can go on, so they were stuck with it (and also because they already knew, “damn, leave and be accused of endangering the women”). But by 2020 it had been branded as an “endless war” that even Trump wanted to walk away from.
Had Biden said “sorry, we can’t leave, we have to stick here for as long as it takes for the Taliban to go extinct” he’d have been raked over the coals by the Right as an example of a Weak Dem wasting resources on nationbuilding some s-hole country with no end, and by the Left as an example of an Establishment Pol protecting the Mil/IndComp’s profits and spending American blood with no end.
(Also, may I point out, our divisions in NATO and South Korea have stood on alert but have not been in constant counterinsurgency action. I have to wonder what the political tolerance would have been if that were so.)
Sorry but I gotta go with Alessan on that part. What we are seeing today strongly suggests that whatever we thought we were seeing back in June was nothing but a Potemkin façade.
Should we have been building a real solid edifice instead? Sure. But we did not. Three Presidents had 5 terms and 20 years to do something that would stand and stick, but never got themselves to figure out what, and wound up with something that disintegrates the moment there’s not a Western army (or Western-paid PMCs) to prop it up.
You are correct. We could.
It would break a Biden campaign promise.
And it would break the Trump administration’s February 2020 agreement with the Taliban for us to leave Afghanistan this year.
But if Biden’s word, and an international agreement, means nothing, we could.
This was surely explored in discussions within the Biden administration, Maybe they asked around and found lack of support on grounds that the Taliban would likely kill lots of the peacekeepers.
The difference being that those soldiers weren’t and aren’t there to keep the Third Reich or the Emperor from returning to power - they were there as a defense against Russian expansionism. Nor is there any vast guerilla movement seeking to oust US forces or the current government, let alone one that has the tacit support of much of the population.
Consider your own words.
We also rebuilt a war-torn continent and used said countries to create a global American-led trade market that was a win-win for all countries involved. The seeds of global trade and liberal democracy were already kinda, sorta there in Western Europe and Japan, maybe less so in South Korea but they ended up fighting for it and demanding it on their own in due time. Afghanistan is just different in so many ways. Bringing Afghanistan under the umbrella of American influence is, to be blunt, less reward for us compared to the other examples, and the Afghanis (not even a united people) apparently are skeptical if there’s much in it for them as well.
I know that for many Afghans - I’ve personally known two since 2001 - they dreamt of something better, and it sickens me to know that this is what the end result is. But Afghan is a graveyard for empires, and it’s beginning to look like our tombstone might be added to the list.
I found the discussion on tribal loyalty interesting. If one were to draw a map of tribes in Africa, it often would not correspond to geographical boundaries either. Tribal loyalty is not necessarily a national loyalty. (And things like Italian or German city-states had local loyalties before, and after unification).
Many countries have a dominant tribe or group, and other groups resentful of this status. This has caused tension and quite often war or atrocities. I’m not sure I really understand what is so different about tribes in Afghanistan that seemingly make it more historically intransigent and “the graveyard of empires”? What is different?
The only hitch with this is the war in Afghanistan basically ceased being a political issue after mid-2002 or so, massively overshadowed by Iraq. The initial American invasion and the fall out (which included some very powerful warlords settling some old scores against Taliban 1.0) crippled the Taliban for like 6 years. By 2003 Iraq was invaded and quickly passed the body count in Iraq (for American troops–remember peace advocates actually ran tracking websites back then tracking U.S. casualty numbers, and these featured prominently in the political debate), the perception was that Afghanistan had cooled off. Most people just weren’t thinking that much about it, it may have been a perfect time to decide if we were staying there long term and if so, why, but we kind of just didn’t think about it. Nation building basically filled the purpose of “hey we have a purpose”, because it’s hard to justify a military occupation as a country like the United States (politically) without at least some veneer of purpose. Since Iraq’s body count and $ invested quickly eclipsed Afghanistan, most people just didn’t really care.
By the time the Bush Admin sent some guys who actually were willing to take a serious look at it (2006 or so), that entire administration had moved on from any willingness to meaningfully shift course. So you had two pretty high quality assessments come out late in the Bush Administration that actually predicted exactly what we’ve seen this month. Evidence of them was suppressed and military officials continued to give detail-sparse briefings to Congress suggesting things were doing well. Eventually under Obama we actually classified information that was previously in the status reports which gave us, the public, even less information on the state of things in Afghanistan.
The one positive I can honestly say, is there was nothing in our interests to stay in Afghanistan, and no one is voting one way or the other based off of Afghanistan. I think previous Presidents have wanted to avoid a “loss” on their watch, and kept kicking the can. Biden is going to take the blame for the loss, but it’s 2021, he’s not up for reelection until 2024. The United States body politic spent the lion’s share of the last 20 years not caring at all about Afghanistan, I am pretty certain that whatever the Republican rhetoric, no one is choosing which candidate to vote for in 2024 based on a country most Americans simply don’t care about.
Now where he could eat some real political damage is if we bungle our Embassy evacuation and have any Americans captured/killed etc.
Nothing you say here really makes sense to be frank. The objective for our invasion of Afghanistan was absolutely not to stabilize the region. Virtually no one would have thought by kicking the barely calmed down hornets nest of Afghanistan that was on the tail end of a 30 year civil war, was going to be a stabilizing action.
The idea that the Taliban is now a threat to nuclear armed Pakistan speaks of a general ignorance of like everything going on here. The Taliban has largely been supported by Pakistan since the 1990s, and this is done in part as an effort at keeping Pakistan’s own Pashtun population relatively peaceful. Pakistan would absolutely erase the Taliban if they actually tried to “take territory” from them. Pakistan isn’t bound by the sort of things we are and is a huge country compared to the population of religious extremist Pashtuns.
I have never “defended the Taliban”, but I’ve simple spoken about the reality of the situation. There’s lots of bad groups all over the world, it isn’t our mission to dethrone all of them at unlimited cost.
A lot of the best tribal maps are also 25 years out of date, and even then, the tribal areas didn’t form logically contiguous areas all the time, either. Lots of Balkanization type stuff going on.
I don’t really understand the “Graveyard of Empires” comment about Afghanistan. Persia/Iran, Germany, Northern Italy, Poland, most of the Levant, large sections of India, much of China, have changed hands many times over hundreds of years, at least as frequently as Afghanistan has. Are those places also “Graveyard of Empires.” Afghanistan had not faced a significant foreign invasion in over 200 years when the Soviets invaded. They Soviets did lose there, but at least in part because of massive Pakistani, Saudi, and American aid funneled to the Afghan Mujahadeen. Before that, the British waged a “vassalization” war on the Durrani Empire remnant in the 1870s, won, and made the Afghan King accept British domination of Afghan foreign affairs–he retained local rule. After WWI the then-King declared Afghanistan independent of that arrangement, and the British did not resist militarily. The British did not actively occupy Afghanistan during the time. In 1838 the British, on behest of their near ally/quasi-client state the Sikh Empire in the Punjab, invaded and deposed an Afghan ruler the Sikh Emperor did not like. About four years later the small garrison forces the British and Punjabi had left behind was forced out and the British agreed to let the previously usurped ruler back on the throne. While certainly a loss for the outsiders, it wasn’t any kind of large scale occupation to begin with.
Before that Afghanistan (or at least large portions of it) had been a constituent part of the Persian Safavid Empire for 200-250 years.
Afghanistan is not materially that different from Pakistan or even parts of India where tribal custom still dominates. It’s just not attached to a big or powerful enough country to keep it peaceful. As an example, Pakistan is dominated by Punjabi and has a pretty powerful military by standards of the region. But they have a large Pashtun area that borders Afghanistan. What they have found keeps things stable there is for the central government to not attempt to govern those areas. Where that leads to trouble, is sometimes these tribal groups conduct themselves in ways that are seen as “reprehensible” to the broader world. For example there was an infamous case in which a rural tribal council in Pakistan, due to a crime committed by a young boy (he held hands or something with a girl), the boy’s older sister was sentenced to be gang raped by the tribe’s elders as punishment. This is the sort of thing that Pakistan has to be willing to overlook, lest it start to interfere in tribal affairs. In that particular case, the international outcry was so great that Pakistan arrested the men and put them on trial, but in the vast majority of such cases it would opt to simply turn a blind eye because stirring up trouble over tribal practices is a quick way to end up with bad trouble.
Europe dramatically reduced tribal issues like this largely through the influence of Christianization and the Catholic Church, which performed many quasi-governmental functions in many areas of Christian Europe. These functions included cultural and social indoctrination of a sort (it obviously was not called that, they used Christian mysticism and supernatural claims) that helped break down tribal ties.
Tribal peoples that resisted (like the pagan Saxons) were massacred in large numbers by rulers like Charlemagne. Usually the examples of this lead to survivors agreeing to convert. Forced religious conversion is a terrible thing, but when it’s a religion with a hierarchy like Christianity that integrates perfectly with the political goals of early Christian leaders? It does things you can’t easily do today, because those things are (rightly) considered extreme acts of genocide.
I don’t see how you can make that statement. Afghanistan is in free-fall because of the taliban.
Again, I don’t see how you can make this statement. Pakistan is far closer to the taliban’s religious doctrine than you give them credit for. Women are still second class citizens living in an environment where 5% have a license and honor killings still exist. That Pakistan sponsors the taliban is not an indication of stability but just the opposite. There’s nothing stopping an election from swinging to the taliban and we have another Germany in 1936 only with nukes.
We just handed these people weapons and a military base to operate out of.
Uh, you do realize the Taliban controlled 90% of Afghanitan prior to the United States invasion in 2001? During the Afghan Civil War there were a number of tribal / ethnic militant groups and several Mujahadeen groups. Pakistan supported one for awhile, but then pulled support from them in the mid-90s around the time the Taliban emerged, and Pakistan switched its support to them. Over the next few years the Taliban consolidated gains and came to control most of the country. Now the Taliban lacked many of the “organs of a state” that you would expect, including most bureaucratic functions, local rule tended to be tribal (I suspect it devolves back to that in a few years.) But the “status quo ante” is Taliban control of Afghanistan. Afghanistan is not in free fall because of the Taliban. The Taliban is a symptom of Afghanistan being a collection of divergent ethnic groups who live in tribal communities, and who practice very conservative and fairly archaic religious and cultural practices. Afghanistan is in free fall because it’s Afghanistan. But there is little reason to think our 2001 invasion wasn’t a major destabilizer, even if the status quo ante wasn’t all that stable.
I don’t really know what you’re talking about with elections and Pakistan, you’re saying things that are nonsensical. The Taliban isn’t ISIS or al-Qaeda, it isn’t open to anyone who is a fundamentalist Muslim. It’s almost exclusively a Pashtun ethnic Mujahadeen group. There is zero chance Pakistan, where Pashtun are like 14% of the country and where all the country’s military and political capital is held by the much large Punjabi ethnicity, would “vote for the Taliban.” The Pashtun people in Pakistan are barely part of Pakistan’s political system, so there’s just a number of deeply incorrect opinions you have about this region of the world.
You do realize this is 2021?. We didn’t just piss away any progress made but we helped arm them in the process.
There is every chance that Pakistan is politically driven further into fundamentalism and that groups like the taliban will be the brown-shirts who make it happen.