I think it was an example of power over principle 
They cared about beating the Soviets more than they cared about the women of Afghanistan.
Getting out quickly may have been the only way to get out. The generals, over and over again, for over a decade, were dragging their feet, insisting that progress was being made, and just a few more months/years could give us space for a negotiated peace (or some other bullshit). The generals were, over and over again, lying or bullshitting because they refused to admit that the US military wasn’t actually accomplishing anything…
If Biden had gone for a more gradual draw down, the generals would almost certainly have pushed for a boost here and there every week or month, and a delay to the leave date, endlessly and over and over, just because they didn’t want to be the ones blamed or called out for the obvious collapse of the Afghan government.
This was all a huge pile of bullshit. Just a massive, monumental waste of lives and money. We did absolutely nothing except waste trillions of dollars and thousands of lives. It was long past time to end, and getting out this way may have been the only way to end it.
The ones they didn’t send to an early grave p.
I am not qualified to say if the US morally failed in Afghanistan. It seems to me their involvement came at a time when they felt threatened by terrorism and lacked a complete understanding of where it came from and what actions to take.
Their practical role in Afghanistan was enforcing a stalemate whereby the Taliban did not control larger cities while they were there. This allowed some improvement in the lives of women and those opposed to this group. It seems that spending more time before withdrawing would mean a longer stalemate but would require generations to change the game board. The moral calculus is complicated - a lot of money and men were used to accomplish small steps. I do not know the degree to which being there made the world safer, but I do know it probably was not the best way to do that.
I think the US should consider resettling some refugees and those who they felt were genuinely helpful. I feel sad for those who will suffer. I do not know to what degree the Taliban IS Afghanistan, but it seems to be a fair chunk.
I think we can all agree that the women of Afghanistan have been put in dire straits. The question is, what is the price we should be willing to pay in order to help them? More hundreds of billions of dollars for an occupation that would never end? At some point, the Afghans have to stand on their own if they want to have a functional government. It’s clear that they weren’t ready this year, wouldn’t be ready next year, and very well wouldn’t be ready decades from now. How many hundreds of billions would the US have to spend to avoid the coming humanitarian disaster? How many more thousands of lives? In a world of infinite resources, of course we would like to help as much as we can. But infinite military spending wasn’t going to turn Afghanistan into Sweden. This was a war which never should have started and had to end sometime.
It’s likely that we’re going to abandon many thousands of Afghans that worked with the US. If so, we’ve morally failed them.
As far as the country as a whole… I dunno. Corruption is endemic. Some government officials have already announced their positions in the Taliban government. I’m no expert, but getting the government to be able to stand alone was not likely to happen. If so, the choice might be a permanent presence, or letting the Taliban take over. And if that is the choice then it’s a difficult one that I’m glad I didn’t have to make.
It’s one thing to withdraw; it’s another thing to withdraw this way.
Had the U.S. waited until the winter, when Taliban offensives are typically much less, then they could have avoided this fiasco and done the pullout in a much more orderly way - and also had more time to evacuate the thousands of interpreters, etc. who helped America out but now face grave risk to safety. Instead, this is a shambles.
As the expression goes, if you have a piece of broken glass in your body, it needs to come out, but you don’t just yank it out at once. You have to do it slow and have a plan.
Yes this is bizarre. I was in Gtmo in the mid 1980s and when we did mock evacuations we always got the civilians out first. I thought that was standard.
Dear God, will you lot stop with the whining about the ostensible loss of “women’s rights”? The vast majority of Afghani women agree with the standard Taliban position, though perhaps not its implementation. This will affect the lives of 95% of Afghan women, not one iota.
(That the position is a repugnant one is true but irrelevant).
Anyway, women’s right were always an excuse for western machinations, much like the civilising mission was used to justify imperial adventures.
If it still bothers you, consider this
This is the 4th time Kabul has fallen in my lifetime. And I am in my mid 30’s. My father who is 68 has seen seven falls. Lots of the recently evicted regime personnel spent most of the 1990’s shivering up north or in exile (like Ghani and Karzai). The current Taliban leadership contains former Gitmo residents.
If the Taliban start doing something really stupid, like restarting publically flogging women and beheading people in stadiums, they will lose support, hell its already a much more factionalised organization than the 1990’s incarnation, so this is a distinct possibility. Then you will see another fall in 5-8 years, at which point a lot of the “people who worked for/with us” will be back in power.
The smart people leave Afghanistan. Like my ancestors, for which I am grateful every day.
Your point is well taken. But slow or fast, we all knew that when the US left that the Taliban takes over. We can give them training, we can give them weaponry, but we can’t make them want to fight for themselves.
We’ve had American troops in Afghanistan for twenty years. The conditions in 2021 were still going to be there in 2022 and 2027 and 2050. Why should we stay when our presence is changing nothing? The only thing we’re doing in Afghanistan is increasing the number of Americans who die there.
I’m glad Biden was willing to face the mindless criticism he will receive from Republicans and say “Enough”.
When I started this thread, I had no idea how soon everything would collapse.
I am disheartened for the people of Afghanistan. I understand there are cultural issues and not everybody wants to live in a US style society. And the Taliban are Afghanis. But this is not a good thing by any stretch of imagination.
Best case scenario, they just become a Theocracy like Iran. Not that I like Iran.
I often think of it this way: the year before 9/11, many of us in the West were decrying and denouncing the Taliban’s atrocities against women, against cultural and historic heritage, against social progress.
And no major or minor power anywhere was lifting a finger to force them to stop.
“It’s terrible, but it’s not in our security interest.”
Only when their guests from Al-Qaeda took actions to cause major damages to Western lives in Western home soil, did anyone feel oh, now we’re justified in going in and getting them out of power. And of course then we reached back and said “oh yes, all those terrible things, yeah, we’re here to stop that”.
And then we did not do what it took to really get rid of them. Our “allies” were satisfied with being propped up in power but never bothered helping create a non-Taliban alternative the people could rally to – because of course that would mean creating something that could one day itself challenge them.
Similarly with the Uyghurs in China. We deplore the inhumane and vicious way the Chinese government treats them.
And we do nothing.
That’s right. My informal estimate is that 84% of those criticizing the Biden Administration today for 'abandoning the Afghan women’ and such are exploiting the Afghan women’s plight in a spectacularly bad-faith tactic. (They care about the plight of Afghan women and girls not at all.)
We had zero chance of changing the culture of the people of Afghanistan. If we stay another year or another ten, the probability remains the same: zero chance of changing them into a liberal democracy. Zero.
Could the withdrawal have been timed differently? Possibly. Recall that the Trump Administration, in its capitulation, er, “negotiations” with the Taliban, promised we’d be out by May 1. Biden gave his generals and the State Department more time; perhaps not enough; perhaps another six months would have yielded the same tragic results we’re seeing now.
The politics of this have to do not only with the reluctance of various American administrations to be held responsible for a withdrawal that would inevitably be tragic. The politics also have to do with the money money money involved. American defense contractors made billions off Afghanistan. They did not want to give up those profits. Donations were at stake, and politicians knew it.
And thousands of other interested parties were making money, too. Putting a stop to that situation was never going to be painless–no matter what the Biden people did.
The thing is, Afghanistan being what it is, there was bascially only two ways this situation would play out.
- US/Allies essentially annex the country in part or full.
- US/Allies leave and the Taliban take over again at some point.
As much as we’d like to believe option 3 - set up democratic government and leave, everything is fine - was on the table, it wasn’t and the collapse of the entire government in essentially a week has proven that.
Since option 1 would cause the woke social justice types to scream about how evil it would be (not to mention the pretty much perpetual ongoing insurgency it would create), then leaving was the only other likely outcome and we’ve just seen what happened there.
I’m still trying to work out how 300,000 government troops, with armoured vehicles and at least some aircraft, appear to have not even bothered trying to to fight 50,000 Taliban, who have no tanks, some humvees and technicals, and no actual aircraft (that I’m aware of).
There’s obviously a lot of stuff to do with the political situation there which I’m simply not across, but it’s hard not to look at the utter collapse of the government and apparent complete lack of resistance and think “This appears to be what the Afghani people want”.
I’m inclined to be far more generous. I believe a majority of those bringing up the fate of the women DO care… but must know that it is not going to make anything happen.
I have no doubt in my mind that as with many other things, the Trumpsters were telling themselves:
“Here’s this Achievement to trumpet on out watch, an agreement to end the endless war! As to making it work, if we lose the election it’ll be the next guy’s problem and the shit will stick to HIM; if we’re reelected, then we’ll wing it as usual. And hey, sure, they’ll take over once we leave… but c mon they’ll wait until after we completely leave to attack, won’t they? Then when that happens we’ll just say the Afghan Government were weak losers. You know the deal, we can lose Afghanistan in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose one vote”.
The idea all along seemed to be that we’d leave by May or by September and that a few months later the ersatz government would fall after at least putting up a fight for show.
“Hollow Army”. A lot of that force was “ghost troops”, either entirely fictitious to inflate the rolls and budgets, or not to be counted on if it was time to be home bringing in the crops or taking care of the family business. Whenever the US/allied advisors were not around to watch, training and the logistics chain got sloppy. Command appointments and promotion heavily reliant on connections and patronage. Those aircraft, armored vehicles, C3 networks? Reliant virtually entirely on external “contractors” to stay operational, and the contractors were among the first to GTFO. Reports are that the Afghan government was NOT paying the troops or the suppliers in full or in time. And that the Taliban had already approached many military and civil leaders and said “be reasonable, brother, why should you die for some foreigner-lackey in Kabul? You don’t have to join us but we can make it worth your while to walk away safely”.
That seems to match up with what I’ve read elsewhere. A sorry state of affairs indeed, to say the least.
Okay, so just so we’re clear, the “woke social justice types” would be, in your view, opposed to “essentially annexing” a country and dealing with a perpetual insurgency in the aftermath, and you somehow think the “woke social justice types” would be… wrong to want to avoid such a thing? Because people who mean to express agreement with “woke social justice types” seldom refer to them as “woke social justice types” when doing so.
They’d be wrong to be opposed to even considering essentially annexing a country in an Afghanistan-like scenario on ideological “But that’s wrooooong” grounds, IMO.
Annexing the whole country wouldn’t be feasible and would understandably lead to an insurgency, but a partition or establishing Kabul as something like the Shanghai International Settlement would be something I’d support if it was an option.