Arrogant and untrustworthy? Probably.
Cowards? Very unlikely. That’s your label and I very much doubt you’d be willing to back it up.
American leadership was cowardly for many years - refusing to face the truth and risk political consequences for admitting it and ending this pointless war.
Fair enough. They were cowards for failing to admit and to take responsibility for making a costly and prolonged mistake.
What did I say above about not understanding nationlism?
To the Afghans, the Taliban were never the enemy - they were the opposition. Instead of French vs. Nazis, think Democrats vs. Republicans, or to be more accurate, moderate Republicans vs. MAGAs. What we saw this week wasn’t a military defeat, it was an election. The Afghan army voted with its feet.
It’s not only the Afghans, the rest of the world thinks this makes America look like ineffectual moral cowards.
‘If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.’
The fall of Kabul will considerably weaken America’s hand in the world. The Iranians, the Turks, the Russians, and the Chinese will view the United States as a giant on feet of clay, incapable of strategic constancy. If I were Taiwanese, I would be very worried.
Trump and Biden have shared the same cowardice. America will pay the geopolitical consequences. They will be worse than those responsible ever imagined. Europe would do well to prepare itself.
In many people’s view, the so-called withdrawal shows that the US cannot hold on to fight in Afghanistan anymore. The US has failed, and it was forced to flee in a hurry.
US troops were facing the Taliban, which has almost no foreign aid. But at the cost of more than 1 trillion US dollars and more than 2,000 American soldiers’ lives, the US just could not handle it. The Taliban mainly relied on its own strength to achieve a similar ending like the Vietnam War. This is a portrayal of the current decline in the US’ national strength.
Russia has been struck by the speed of the unraveling of the U.S.-installed government in Kabul, said Fyodor Lukyanov, the chairman of Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defense Policy and editor in chief of the magazine Russia in Global Affairs.
…
But at least, Lukyanov noted, the government left behind by the Soviets survived for three years after the withdrawal of Red Army forces.“We believe our failure was big, but it seems the Americans achieved an even bigger failure,” he said.
“What’s happening in Afghanistan is raising alarm bells everywhere,” said Riad Kahwaji, who heads the Inegma security consultancy in the United Arab Emirates, which hosts one of the biggest American military contingents in the Middle East.
“The U.S.'s credibility as an ally has been in question for a while,” he said. “We see Russia fighting all the way to protect the Assad regime [in Syria], and now the Americans are pulling out and leaving a big chaos in Afghanistan.”
“People are bewildered that after two decades of this big, high-tech power intervening, they are withdrawing and effectively handing the country back to the people we went in to defeat,” Ellwood said. “This is the irony. How can you say America is back when we’re being defeated by an insurgency armed with no more than [rocket-propelled grenades], land mines and AK-47s?”
“Afghanistan is the biggest foreign policy disaster since Suez. … We need to think again about how we handle friends, who matters and how we defend our interests.”
“Let me speak clearly and bluntly. This is a catastrophe,” said Josep Borrell, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, in an address Thursday to the European Parliament.
“I say this with a heavy heart and with horror over what is happening, but the early withdrawal was a serious and far-reaching miscalculation by the current administration,” Norbert Röttgen, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the German parliament told Politico.
A US Army Ranger gives the Taliban view:
This was a war that you didn’t have the stomach to fight.
When I posted the OP, I had certain misgivings about how the whole thing turned out. A lot of the arguments, pro and con, are things I have considered. And appreciate some new perspectives.
I feel like I’m still where I started on the issue. Invading Afghanistan, killing Al-Qaeda, and their Taliban protectors, was morally justified.
I think we should as a responsible nation, attempt to instill some sort of stable democratic nation. But Afghanistan is not a liberal democratic country, never has been. So was it our moral failure? Or did we give it a shot, but they don’t want a liberal western style democracy? Not everybody does.
But on the other hand, some people, like those trying to flee as we speak, did want something like a stable government. And believed us, worked with us. I think we morally failed them. The rest of the country that folded in days, not sure we morally failed them.
It’s been a long and winding thread. Between this and the sister thread “Afghanistan Today”, I suggest you read some of the excellent rebuttals to your objections by many posters such as Stranger_On_A_Train, Alessan and Martin_Hyde. I’m in no mood to repeat what they said or to attempt to steal their thunder.
I’ve read their posts, and I also think they’re excellent.
Can you point out where they ‘rebut’ what I’ve said?
Well,
I don’t think they’d agree with this statement:
I mean, obviously some think it and say it. Doesn’t make it true.
Additionally, as stated by aforementioned posters, people who criticize this situation have little to offer in the way of viable alternatives. I’m ignoring, by the way, the absurd statements made by Britain, chief among others. I’m further laughing at the cited sources of the criticism. Is it now my turn to ask you if you’re being quite serious?
Finally, I don’t understand people who labor under the illusion that this sort of action could ever be anything but chaotic. The minute the US had announced that they will be transporting tens of thousands of “qualified” Afghans out of the country, without a significant troop surge to handle the reaction, exactly this kind of hell would ensue.
The purpose of invading Afghanistan was to depose the Taliban. Now the US is leaving and the Taliban are in charge.
There is no way to spin this as anything other than a humiliating defeat.
If the wealthiest and most technologically advanced country in the world, with vast military resources, has been defeated by a bunch of uneducated fundamentalists armed with AK-47s, how can the world see this as anything other than a failure of moral will and determination?
No it was not. It was to eliminate Al Queda. I know it’s hard to tell the difference sometimes, but they are a different set of bad guys.
Oh I dunno. After being humiliated by a bunch of Afghanis wielding jazails, and a bunch of Boers with Mausers, there was a nation that still remembered it was a bearer of civilization, lender of soft credit, liberator of slaves, etc. Sometimes losing a war sets a nation on the better path.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/20/politics/fact-check-al-qaeda-gone-afghanistan-biden/index.html
Biden’s claim that al Qaeda is “gone” from Afghanistan is false – as his own administration acknowledged soon afterward. Following Biden’s remarks, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby told reporters, “We know that al Qaeda is a presence, as well as ISIS, in Afghanistan, and we’ve talked about that for quite some time.”
Article also states the following:
Kirby said Friday after Biden’s remarks: “What we believe is that there isn’t a presence that is significant enough to merit a threat to our homeland as there was back on 9/11, 20 years ago.” He said he did not have an estimate for the number of al Qaeda fighters but the administration doesn’t believe it is “exorbitantly high.”
Asked about Biden’s claim, a White House official who commented on condition of anonymity said in an email: “As the President reiterated today, we have achieved our objectives in going to Afghanistan in the first place 20 years ago by bringing Osama Bin Laden to justice and decimating al Qaeda to the point where it longer presented a threat to the homeland.”
And yes, it also says this:
“The Taliban and Al-Qaida remain closely aligned and show no indication of breaking ties. Member States report no material change to this relationship, which has grown deeper as a consequence of personal bonds of marriage and shared partnership in struggle, now cemented through second generational ties,” said the UN report released in June.
The report also said that “Al-Qaida’s own strategy in the near term is assessed as maintaining its traditional safe haven in Afghanistan for the Al-Qaida core leadership.” And the report said that an al Qaeda affiliate, al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, “is reported to be such an ‘organic’ or essential part of the insurgency that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to separate it from its Taliban allies.”
… and this:
Berrier told Congress that “there was little discernible activity” out of the affiliate by the end of 2020 and “throughout 2021,” the group “very likely will be unable to conduct terrorist attacks. Instead, the group will bolster its relationship with the Taliban.”
Clarke, of the Soufan Center, said the threat to the US from al Qaeda in Afghanistan “is probably minimal right now compared to where it has been.” But he argued that the threat level “will definitely increase over time,” especially because the US will have far less intelligence capacity in the country following its withdrawal.
It’s complicated. Does that mean the US must stay another 20 years? What’s your solution?
What does Al Qaida have to offer the Taliban at this point? Recall that Franco marginalized the Falange (Spain’s Fascists) as soon as he’d won, even before Hitler and Mussolini looked like falling stars not to hitch one’s wagon to. Stalin showed his gratitude to the espousers if International Revolution by having them shot. Poland’s Pilsuski said it best: “Comrades, I took the red tram of socialism to the stop called Independence, and that’s where I got off.” Idealism is just a pawn of authoritarians.
Street cred?
Tribal and gang alliances remain a key part of the landscape in Afghanistan. Remember that if a group has access/control of smuggling trade routes (be it weapons or drugs) across neighboring borders, they are worth befriending. I just read that those relationships are now cemented through arranged marriages as well. So they are family too.
…more moderate Republicans aren’t in a civil war with MAGAs, and MAGAs aren’t currently murdering moderate Republicans. The analogy doesn’t work on so many levels. This wasn’t a referendum. There wasn’t a vote. The Afghan army didn’t “vote with their feet.” They were abandoned (long ago) and when the Coalition finally pulled out they didn’t have any other choice.
This sounds remarkably like groupthink, which I posted about in the other thread:
Groupthink requires individuals to avoid raising controversial issues or alternative solutions, and there is loss of individual creativity, uniqueness and independent thinking. The dysfunctional group dynamics of the “ingroup” produces an “illusion of invulnerability” (an inflated certainty that the right decision has been made). Thus the “ingroup” significantly overrates its own abilities in decision-making and significantly underrates the abilities of its opponents (the “outgroup”). Furthermore, groupthink can produce dehumanizing actions against the “outgroup”. Members of a group can often feel peer pressure to “go along with the crowd” in fear of rocking the boat or of what them speaking up will do to the overall to how their teammates perceive them. Group interactions tend to favor clear and harmonious agreements and it can be a cause for concern when little to no new innovations or arguments for better policies, outcomes and structures are called to question. (McLeod). Groupthink can often be referred to as a group of “yes men” because group activities and group projects in general make it extremely easy to pass on not offering constructive opinions.
It’s complicated. If you go back to the 1980s, you could certainly argue that the US used Afghanistan as a pawn in its game with the Soviets, and we had a lot to do with the rise of radical Islamism there. I view the outgrowth of the Afghan effort from one of mainly counter-terrorism to building a nation as an attempt at political error correction. The US and NATO didn’t want to just bomb and then leave a power vacuum. That is essentially what led to the rise of the Taliban after the Soviet-backed government collapsed. We probably had good intentions, but as with many of the political arenas we’ve been involved in over the last six or seven decades, we tried to devise American political and military solutions to fit Afghan problems - and that just doesn’t work.
YOU brought up the comparison of Nazis and French. So your initial analogy was bullshit in this context. The Democrat vs. Republican analogy works better because this really is an internal Afghan civil conflict. The Taliban are every bit as Afghan as the moderate Afghans trying to escape. The fact that MAGA are not killing moderate Republicans “currently” is equally true when compared to Afghanistan, i.e.: The Taliban are not murdering the moderate Afghans “currently” either. We’ll see how long that remains the case. But if things turn ugly, and they likely will, that comparison will also become useless.
As to the referendum voting, Afghanistan’s elections were notoriously corrupt. Insinuating that a referendum vote on the Taliban question was ever even possible is absurd. The Afghan army voted with their feet when they refused to fight the Taliban as they surged across the nation, occupying provincial capital after capital. The Afghan army wasn’t trained for 20 years in order to carry water and supplies for Western troops, they were trained to fight for their own country and citizens. No doubt some did fight bravely. But the majority saw it only as a paycheck and abandoned the minute they realized they were on their own. I’m not sure what your expectations are. How long did you expect the western allies to stay in Afghanistan and baby sit the Afghan army? Does the Afghan government share any responsibility in the failure and collapse of it’s own military and police force? How long should the west prop up a corrupt and cowardly government? Is another 20 years enough?