It has been answered.
The US set up the Afghan force in such a way that it was totally reliant on American support, and couldn’t function without it… and then withdrew that support completely without notice.
They could easily have set up a force that would still have been able to function after they left, but they didn’t.
“Easily”? What a joke.
There’s a foreign policy conventional wisdom in DC, both in political officials and journalists, and both parties, that war and military strikes are ALWAYS responsible and reasonable options to consider, and skepticism isn’t necessary for such actions, while we must ALWAYS be skeptical of efforts to extricate ourselves from wars and military actions. It’s often called “the Blob” on Twitter.
The Blob is terrible and doesn’t deserve this sort of benefit of the doubt. They’ve been wrong for years and they still are. Getting out of Afghanistan was the only moral (and pragmatic, for that matter) action possible, and it was long overdue.
Yes, why didn’t we warn them we were leaving?
The Trump administration agreed to an initial reduction from 13,000 to 8,600 troops by July 2020, followed by a full withdrawal by 1 May 2021 if the Taliban kept its commitments. The Biden administration, however, said the US would not begin withdrawing until 1 May and would complete the withdrawal before 11 September.
Oh…
What do you imagine is the reason why the United States chose to do this? Do you imagine the United States wanted the Afghani government to collapse?
No matter what you’re imagining, it was always going to end this way. We were never fighting for peace or honour. And every president knew it, but didn’t want to take the hit that Joe is taking now.
But he’s not wrong, failure? Betrayal? Political posturing?, whatever started it, or it morphed into, or why, is for history to decide.
But someone had to end it, and Joe has the metal to do it.
Imagine living twenty years amidst a 21st century, American lead war effort.
If twenty years isn’t enough, when is it enough?
I agree with some of your post, but I wouldn’t draw this particular conclusion at all. Since 2019-20, the Afghan army and police have literally done 100% of the dying. They were heavily reliant on US air power just to keep the fragile nation-state afloat. But as they’re dying, what do they see? The Afghan government officials engaging in corruption and the Trump administration negotiating directly one-on-one with the Taliban without even consulting the elected Afghan government. In some cases, these soldiers hadn’t been paid in weeks or months. The last straw was the closing of Bagram and the withdrawal of air power. They knew they were not trained to win against the Taliban on the ground. You can say that they should have voluntarily committed themselves to Taliban slaughter but these people have families to think about.
Leaving, yes, but it was assumed that at least some support would continue, and that the contractors supplying logistics and technical support would still be there.
Did you bother to read that article about Bagram Airbase?
Did you read what Admiral Stavridis said?
They made a decision to set up a kind of force that was highly inappropriate for the country. But no doubt the contractors made huge profits from doing it that way.
Admiral Stavridis gave the answer:
A decade ago, we debated all this at senior levels, but kept coming back to a firmly held belief that we could succeed best by modeling what we knew and found comfortable: ducks like ducks, in the end. We did not sufficiently respect the culture, history, traditions and norms of this difficult nation. The Greeks have a word for it: hubris.
His answer is US arrogance and inflexibility.
Highly interesting article in the NYT:
It was in the waning days of November 2001 that Taliban leaders began to reach out to Hamid Karzai, who would soon become the interim president of Afghanistan: They wanted to make a deal.
“The Taliban were completely defeated, they had no demands, except amnesty,” recalled Barnett Rubin, who worked with the United Nations’ political team in Afghanistan at the time.
Messengers shuttled back and forth between Mr. Karzai and the headquarters of the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, in Kandahar. Mr. Karzai envisioned a Taliban surrender that would keep the militants from playing any significant role in the country’s future.
But Washington, confident that the Taliban would be wiped out forever, was in no mood for a deal.
“The United States is not inclined to negotiate surrenders,” Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said in a news conference at the time.
“One mistake was that we turned down the Taliban’s attempt to negotiate,” Carter Malkasian, a former senior adviser to Gen. Joseph Dunford, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during parts of the Obama and Trump administrations, said of the American decision not to discuss a Taliban surrender nearly 20 years ago.
“We were hugely overconfident in 2001, and we thought the Taliban had gone away and weren’t going to come back,” he said. “We also wanted revenge, and so we made a lot of mistakes that we shouldn’t have made.”
But in the end, the US did negotiate a surrender – their own.
“When I heard the U.S. were going to meet in Doha with the Taliban and without the Afghan government, I said, ‘That’s not a peace negotiation, those are surrender talks,’” said Ryan Crocker, a former ambassador to Afghanistan.
“So, now the talks were all about us retreating without the Taliban shooting at us as we went,” Mr. Crocker added, “and we got nothing in return.”
Idiocy from a bunch of idiots (this is a characterization of the article). Rumsfeld was an idiot, Crocker was an idiot, and so was nearly everyone else. Every year we stayed we lost more and more and gained nothing. Leaving was the only rational choice.
Admiral Stavridis, in July of 2020, maintained that the US should not pull out of Afghanistan and continue to provide support to the Afghan army.
However, Stavridis, who served as a commander of the U.S. European Command and NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander for Europe from 2009 to 2013, said that any further reduction should be based “completely on conditions on the ground.”
He charged that al-Qaida and Islamic State are still active in the Central and South Asian country as the Taliban continue its violence.
Admiral Stavridis told VOA Afghan Service that negotiations with the Taliban should be from a position of strength. He added that military pressure on the group, forcing it to negotiate with the Afghan government, and economic assistance to Kabul should be the U.S. approach to the negotiations.
I actually like the guy. But for all his talk of “hubris”, he did not propose any new plan that wasn’t the same as the old plan. If I was in his shoes and in the shoes of the various generals who oversaw the 20 year engagement, I would almost certainly offer the same solution to the problem. I can completely understand the temptation to maintain the status quo in which the enemy (Taliban) is pinned down and unable to advance and take new territory. The last thing any soldier wants to see is the enemy take territory that they once defended. It must be soul crushing.
But there has to come a point when enough blood and treasure has been spilled with nothing more to show than maintaining status quo. It was always going to end like this. Arguably, it never should have began.
The above quote attributed to Adm. Stavridis can be interpreted in another way. It’s entirely possible that what he is saying isn’t that we should have been more culturally sensitive but that the west should never have involved itself in Afghanistan.
Insider viewpoint
Exactly. 20 years, trillions of dollars, and thousands of lives down the drain, with absolutely nothing to show for it.
As I was saying, you don’t need to take my word for it (thanks to @Knowed_Out for providing the article):
The truth is that the Afghan National Security Forces was a jobs program for Afghans, propped up by U.S. taxpayer dollars — a military jobs program populated by nonmilitary people or “paper” forces (that didn’t really exist) and a bevy of elites grabbing what they could when they could.
You probably didn’t know that. That’s the point.
Did the war in Afghanistan have to happen? Of course it did. It passed the House and Senate almost unanimously. Support in Canada, the UK, France, Germany and other allied nations was universal. The UN was for it.
There is no doubt that the U.S. was going to go in and crush the Taliban. Anything else is a fairy tale.
As to what should have happened next, that’s much more difficult. I’ve said that the U.S. should have just smacked them down, installed some government and then left because nation-building would never work there. But that was also not in the cards. These things take on a life of their own.
But, this did not have to end like this. A more reasonable pullout strategy would have looked like this:
Negotiations with other invested nations like France and the UK for what, if any forces should remain, and a coordinated plan for withdrawal concocted.
Start processing visas and ISV applications months before the pullout.
Keep the military in place, including Bagram, while you start an orderly withdrawal of civilians to Bagram, where they and the aircraft can be protected.
Once all or almost all of the civilians are out of the country you begin an ordered withdrawal of troops, removing equipment and destroying bases as you go so they can’t be used by the Taliban.
Leave behind a contingent of multinational soldiers and US troops at and around Bagram to provide air cover for the Afghan army. If that’s untenable then everyone leaves, and the last one out turns out the lights and sets the demolishion charges on aything you don’t want the Taliban to have at Bagram.
I’m increasingly sure that there should have been a force left in the country. That’s what Britain, France and Germany apparently wanted. But that would have been the time to negotiate with them on a better force-sharing deal that leaned less on the US and more on international partners. And if they refused, that would hasve given the President more cover. He could have said, “We wanted to stay as part of an international peacekeeping force, but our allies wouldn’t pony up and we can’t do it ourselves.”
Instead, Biden did everything backwards. Without notifying allies he began a midnight pullout of soldiers, closed Bagram, and put all of the country’s eggs in one basket - a single runway that could easily be blocked or controlled by the enemy. When Boris Johnson called him to find out what the hell was happening, Biden ghosted him for 36 hours. The civilians were left to fend for themselves, and the embassy abandoned.
90% of this clusterfuck is about HOW the pullout happened, not whether it should have happened at all. Some Democrats keep trying to change the topic to ‘forever war vs comingh home’, when the real argument is about how incredibly bumbled the pullout was, and how awful Biden has behaved since.
Getting out is the only way to get out. Your preference is the opposite of getting out - it’s staying in. You’re free to advocate that we should have stayed, but to those of us glad we’re leaving, that just lumps you in with the decades of wrongness lead by the chickenhawk idiots and warmongers.
I’m glad we’re getting out. Getting out is the right decision when we’ve accomplished nothing in 20 years. Staying in would have resulted in more death and more money wasted for nothing.
That is a very well put together “ideal” pullout strategy. Given that we can’t turn back time, how long do you estimate something like this would take to accomplish? I mean, certainly not by August 31, 2021. August 31, 2022?.. 2023?..
Any thought to how many additional troops would be needed to ensure a safe and orderly withdrawal of civilians around the country?
And say all of this goes off without a hitch. What are we left with? The Afghan army still collapses. The Taliban assume control. The citizens (women and children in particular) resume suffering under a brutal theocratic state.
It’s not nothing that we can get tens of thousands of Afghans with papers out of the country in a potentially less chaotic fashion. But tens of millions are left behind.
In other words, exactly where we’re about to end up.
Winter of 2001-2002 would have been politically too damn early for such a plea to succeed. Nobody in office in DC would have survived conquering the Taliban to then just let them go home with a promise to Karzai that they’d be good boys, while there was still digging out debris at Ground Zero.
OTOH had ObL and Mullah Omar been taken (or taken down) right then… maybe, then the public would have been receptive to the notion. But that was not happening.
This is one thing that is peculiar about both Afghanistan and Iraq2 – how many times have people come up saying “major objectives have been achieved”, “major operations have ended”, “ground combat has ended”, “major US involvement has ended”, etc., trying to project as “the worst is over” but still wanting to be able to say “but we did not say it was ALL over”.
After the death of Bin Laden in 2011, that could have been a propitious time to say Primary Mission Ogdamn Accomplished, and set up the multinational limited support mission Sam contemplates, to reduce our footprint and expenditure and say “sure, we still have a howevermany-man multinational security support mision but that is all it is, really”. That may have worked then… By 2020 alas any such move would have been seen as simply “continuing the war”.
…you’ve cited the opinion of a single soldier having a rant. I’m not entirely sure why I should be taking his opinion as authoritative here. The words of Afghan soldiers would probably be much more useful here than the opinion of someone who was essentially part of the occupying force.
But a question for you: does " a military jobs program populated by nonmilitary people or “paper” forces (that didn’t really exist)" sound like it was particularly well trained army to you?
We know that many Afghan soldiers continued to serve even though they weren’t getting paid. Perhaps it was the second part: the “abandoned by their allies” leaving them with no air support and no logistics support and no intelligence, and the threat of summary murder and nobody to provide for their families that was the primary motivation, not just a paycheck.Nothing said by Kunce would disagree with that.
…because none of this is relevant to the thread. The question posed by the OP is “have we morally failed Afghanistan?” The question you ask is intended to take things off topic, and I’m not particularly interested in playing those games.