Nobody gets letters of commendation or promotions for being the one who came up with the Plan in Case We Fail and from various experiences in different fields, even acknowledging a Plan in Case We Fail outside a reserved inner circle is a major no-no no matter what the organization.
Right. We unseated the Taliban and damaged Al-Q and rightly realized, oh wait, there’s really nobody reliable to truly take over and prevent it happening again.
Sometimes even putting in the effort to come up with a plan to succeed can get you fired if the plan diverges too extensively from what superiors have in their head as to what should be done.
…yeah I did.
No it wasn’t. My analogy was directly analogous to your scenario. In neither case did the “people of Afghanistan” nor the “people of France” run into the arms of the enemy. That’s too broad a brush to be applying here.
It doesn’t work at all and I’ve bolded the word that shows why. Democrats and Republicans aren’t in a shooting war (yet) . There is no comparison.
I mean…yes they are?
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/17/asia/afghanistan-women-taliban-intl-hnk-dst/index.html
They turned ugly long ago. Its too late to be worrying about this. They’ve been in a shooting war for a very long time.
You misunderstand the context of my use of the word referendum.
They probably didn’t want this to happen to them.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/13/asia/afghanistan-taliban-commandos-killed-intl-hnk/index.html
It’s called “sending a message.” And that message was heard loud and clear.
LOL.
Why only some?
And you know this how? Did you conduct a survey or something?
And I don’t understand the obsession with a paycheck. They were a standing army. People in armies get paid. And if they weren’t getting paid then what the hell have the Americans been doing there for the last 20 years?
None of this is relevant to the OP. The question was have you morally failed Afghanistan. I think that the answers you have provided so far in response to me show that yes, you absolutely have.
You invaded the country, killed thousands of people, set up in occupation, tried to reinvent the government in your own image, stole resources and turned it into a money-pit for private contractors, built up hope for a generation of Afghanistan then left, effectively overnight, under the cover of darkness, shrugging your shoulders saying “we did the best that we could.” “Oh, and by the way, none of this is our fault, you were always destined to fail, and you were cowards and you deserve everything thats coming to you.”
That is moral failure.
[note the you I use above is a generic “you”, and not directed at any particular poster.]
I’m not going to get involved in a tedious frame by frame quote parsing contest. So I’ll just address this:
Do you understand how armies work and who is responsible for ensuring that your national military is paid and has all the resources it requires? Who is ultimately responsible for ensuring the command structure is maintained and enforced? Is it typically a coalition of other nations in perpetuity or is it, after 20 years and well over a trillion in foreign aid, the nation, government and citizens themselves that must assume that responsibility? For 20 years the Taliban was under attack and siege by the Western coalition. Meanwhile, for 20 years, the Afghan military and government were financed, propped up and trained by the Western coalition. And in the end, all it took was for Taliban to kill 22 Afghan commandos for the Afghan military to lay down arms. Why is it that the Taliban was able to do what the Afghan military could not or would not?
…yep.
These are all the wrong questions.
Perhaps the financing was shit. Perhaps the training was shit. Perhaps the fundamental idea of “propping up the military” was fundamentally flawed. Perhaps the Coalition soldiers treated the Afghan soldiers with disdain, just like you have been here, and after being treated with disdain over 20 years fighting a nebulous war on behalf of the occupiers who decided to just “cut and run” they didn’t feel they could continue to fight a war that had no clear outcome or objectives when they hadn’t even been paid for months. Maybe it wasn’t just those 22 soldiers. Perhaps it has hundreds more, or even thousands over the last few years. Perhaps they knew that if they took up arms and fought and died then there would be nobody to earn money for the household (because the Taliban aren’t allowing women to work) and they put down arms in a moral obligation to family.
Whatever it is: America still morally failed Afghanistan.
How about the far more likely and far less speculative “perhaps”? Perhaps the majority of Afghans do not see the Taliban as the enemy; never have. Because the Taliban are Afghans too.
…have you been reading the things that you have said in this thread?
I’ve provided more cites in a single post than you have in response to anything I’ve said. I think that everything I have said is much more likely to be true than the things you have said. I don’t think I’ve speculated at all: I think the evidence is pretty much in my favour. So while this thread remains in IMHO I’ll continue to express MHO.
Ahh, well then… since you’re prepared to declare unilateral victory, take another lap.
I guess ‘Kill the guys trying to kill you so we you can live in a country not run by the Taliban.’ wasn’t a clear enough objective and outcome?
…you suggested that how "about the far more likely and far less speculative “perhaps”?
All I’m suggesting is that you do the same.
I suggest you read this article in Bloomberg:
President Biden Dishonored Afghanistan’s Long-Suffering Military
In the course of two decades, more than 66,000 soldiers and police gave their lives to preserve their nation.
The fact is that Afghanistan’s police and security forces have been fighting and dying to protect their people — as well as the American soldiers and civilians living and working among them — for two decades.
Over 66,000 Afghan soldiers and police have paid the ultimate price. Hundreds thousands have been injured, many of them for life. There is no accounting for how many of these casualties are a direct consequence of decisions made by the U.S. military and political leadership. In roughly the same period, coalition forces suffered about 3,500 deaths.
No less important is the American culpability in the failures of the Afghan security forces. It was the U.S. military, in the main, that recruited and trained the police and soldiery, which on paper number around 350,000. The Afghan military, cast in the American mold, was set up to fail, as Admiral James Stravidis has persuasively argued.
So, we shoulda stayed and made them fail harder?
It’s up to you whether you want to take the trouble to actually understand what happened and why, or whether you’re satisfied with ignorance and prejudice.
Another problem is that while we hypothetically could have negotiated with the Taliban once they were on the ropes, the political reality made that nearly impossible. At home, this would have been about as popular as, say, negotiating with Japan in 1942-43. This also explains why a lot of people are confused about the objectives. The primary objective was eliminating AQ’s capabilities, but because the justification for invading Afghanistan was a direct response to the Taliban’s explicit refusal to expel Al Qaida, the mission crept in a sense. And once we nearly vanquished the Taliban, the reality is that in some ways, we made our escape a lot more complicated. Afghanistan is the Hotel California for aging empires.
If this is true,
The Afghan military, cast in the American mold, was set up to fail, as Admiral James Stravidis has persuasively argued.
then how the fuck is it in the Afghan’s interest for us to not leave?
Maybe it was the way of leaving that made the situation far worse?
See the article about Bagram Airbase.
Our failures weren’t confined to the military either; we knew that Hamid Karzai had some shady connections.
Having said that, Afghanistan’s political history is littered with examples of corruption and resistance to reform - that’s not on the Americans or NATO. I don’t know if we had a lot of options – at least not a lot of good ones in terms of setting up a representative democracy.
Perhaps that was our mistake: assuming that Afghanistan needed to be a checks-and-balances type presidential democracy modeled after the US, something underscored even more by the events of January 6 in Washington, DC.
What you and the other likeminded poster, continue to avoid answering is the fundamental question of why a smaller, less well funded & armed, arguably far more beleaguered group of resistance fighters (Taliban) was able to do what the Afghan army could not do unless they continued to receive permanent aid of Western coalition forces.
I’m not saying that 66,000 dead Afghan soldiers didn’t fight bravely. I’m saying that those who remained chose not to do so because they came to the realization (a very long time ago) that life under a theocratic regime is not so terrible after all. So, while the West is handing out paychecks, why not pretend they were Afghan army soldiers. And why not as long as the risk of dying was relatively low due to the overwhelming support of the foreign army nanny troops.
I’m pretty sure we all agree that Western ground force involvement in Afghanistan was a mistake in 2001 and that the mistake was compounded in the 20 years hence. The thing that I find puzzling is that your argument seems to be that the Western coalition has the moral obligation to stay & continue to compound that mistake, as if there is an alternative strategy available to turn things around. If so, I’d dearly love to hear what that other, morally justifiable strategy is. Since we can’t turn back 20 years of failed strategy, perhaps you can outline what the next 20 years would look like.
Fine. Let’s hear your winning, morally defensible, departure strategy.
This crap comes from the same people, including that journalist who wrote the article, who have been pushing for the endless war for over a decade.
They’ve been wrong for years, and they still are. The endless war helped no one but the profiteers. It’s long past time to end it.
Seriously, fuck the chickenhawks and the other endless war advocates. They’re not worth listening to, not in the least. Those who have been lying and incompetent for years on this issue should be cast from the realm of reasonable discussion and consideration.
You say nobody expected it and it was 100% clear it was going to happen.
I feel the reality is that we knew the Afghan government was going to collapse when we left. That it happened this quickly was a surprise but nobody thought it was going to last in the long term.
So what was the alternative? Keep our troops in Afghanistan and give the Afghanis another twenty years to form a stable government?
Yes, the collapse that’s going on right now is bad. But it was inevitable whenever we reached the point of leaving.
But I’ll make this prediction. In five years, nobody will be saying “Boy, I wish we still had our troops in Afghanistan.”
Getting out of Afghanistan is bad. But it’s a necessary step to being out of Afghanistan, which is good.