I’m just not seeing the right manner of pulling out that wouldn’t result in the government’s collapse. There can be legitimate debate about if it would have been better to stay there indefinitely, but once you fall on the side of getting out, you are conceding the country.
There was definitely a failure in the withdrawal plan to take care of American citizens and the Afghanistans who assisted US and coalition forces. But that failure has no relation to the eventual Taliban takeover.
As I noted elsewhere, the Afghanistan conflict log ago ended being about “winning” in any traditional sense of that word. For the last couple administrations, it’s been pretty much about kicking the can down the road to the next guy so you don’t have to get the stigma of being the one who “lost” the country. I give Biden respect for finally being the one to take the responsibility to end it.
Given how quickly the Afghan forces have collapsed, it is readily apparent that broad swaths of the country were not ours to begin with. I cannot speak to the actual pullout itself, and whether or not it is being handled correctly, but the rapid advance of the Taliban has probably gummed up the plans to some extent.
I just know that, politically, Biden cannot be in a situation in which the Taliban attacks our embassy and takes hostages - or worse. That would be a disaster, politically speaking. It would also put a lot of pressure on other aspects of his foreign policy, including the Iran nuclear deal. I also think it would actually encourage some adversaries to become more confrontational.
I absolutely agree that losing was assured before Biden arrived, but how we lose matters, I think.
There’s an opinion piece today in the NY Times (probably paywalled) by Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute. (So, you know, keep many grains of salt handy). He puts forth a couple of points:
To be clear, Mr. Trump did put the Biden administration in a bind with a peace deal that specified U.S. troops had to leave by May 1.
and
As U.S. military planners well know, the Afghan war has a seasonal pattern. The Taliban leadership retreats to bases, largely in Pakistan, every winter and then launches the group’s fighting season campaign in the spring, moving into high gear in the summer after the poppy harvest. At the very least, the United States should have continued to support the Afghans through this period to help them blunt the Taliban’s latest offensive and buy time to plan for a future devoid of American military assistance.
The writer views the withdrawal as a mistake in general and wants to blame Biden, so he easily handwaves away that important first point. It is clear to me that we really had no good options. That said, the speed of the collapse has obviously caught everyone off guard, which does not speak well of how this was handled and gives me an aftertaste of the whole “we’ll be greeted as liberators” rose-colored planning.
The blame for this lies at rhe feet of a chain of politicians, both Democrat and Republican.
The only alternative that had a chance of keeping Afghanistan out of the hands of the Taliban was to maintain a peacekeeping force indefinitely. The number I’ve seen bandied about was about 8500 soldiers. That’s a lot smaller than the occupational forces that remained in Germany, Japan and South Korea. It could have been done.
Unfortunately, rhetoric from politicians past made that untenable, as all promised either victory in Afghanistan or to ‘get out’ completely. There’s now no stomach for peacekeeping forces of any size in Afghanistan. Trump was one of the worst for promising to abandon Afghanistan.
Maybe it’s even the right thing to do, although it’s being done foolishly and haphazardly. But be prepared for women to be shot in the head in soccer stadiums again, and a series of bloody reprisals are coming, It may even trigger another refugee crisis.
This is the worst of all resolutions. The U.S. should have withdrawn from Afghanistan immediately after they smashed the Taliban, OR they should have committed to basically being a protector of civil order indefinitely under the, ‘you break it, you fix it’ theory. Instead the U.S. did the worst thing - poured hindreds of billions of dollars into a feckless occupation for two decades, then decided that since Afghanistan is not yet like Denmark it was time to cut and run and leave all those newly educated young women and pluralistic politicians and advisors and translators to be slaughtered or re-enslaved by the Taliban.
The left should be the most angry about this as they spent years telling us that Afghanistan was the ‘good’ war, and needed more investment, and that’s where the U.S. focus should have been instead of Iraq. Now a Democratic president is pulling the plug.
All of that is true. But it’s the Afghans’ own country, to keep or to lose. And now I can’t help but wish, in near-despair, that the elected Afghan government, and the good people of that country (including many who lived through through the nightmare of murderous Islamist extremist rule the first time), would be more determined to effectively resist the Taliban onslaught now.
The Taliban outwitted some of their opposition, probably reassuring them that they wouldn’t be the Taliban of the 1990s-2000s. That might explain why some Afghans don’t resist, drinking the kool-aid.
I don’t believe there is any chance of that. The Taliban have already grown too strong and hold too much territory and have too much influence with various warlords and local leaders.
Best case scenario: Kabul holds as a sort of rump government while the Taliban controls the rest of the country.
Likely scenario: Kabul falls in the next few months, and Afghanistsn reverts to complete Taliban control.
Worst-case scenario: Kabul falls before the 11th of September, and we get to watch the spectacle of the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks being marked by the overrun of the Kabul U.S. embassy and another Saigon-like race to be on the last helicopter out of the country while the enemy cheers and burns American flags, leading to a major reduction in US stature around the world and emboldening bad actors everywhere.
I get the feeling that a lot of people in Afghanistan are just tired of the constant state of war and may have been led to believe that the Taliban aren’t that bad, or that maybe they’ve changed to become more moderate. I know that seems insane given their history, but perhaps the Taliban learned to be more effective politically. I suspect that there’s an element of ‘We can solve our own problems’ mentality. Benevolent intentions or not, the US and its allies are still foreign occupiers, trying to shove an experiment down their throats. On one hand, it seems incomprehensible that they would just roll over for the Taliban, but Afghanistan is a complicated land with a very complex history.
Unless the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban results in terrorist attacks on US soil (and for now signs say that it won’t), this is kind of a non-issue for the US, strategically and politically. The right is trying hard to make this seem like a big deal, the same way they’ve been trying to make the “crisis” at the southern border seem like a big deal, because they can’t touch Biden on the issues more people care about: economic stewardship, meaningful legislation, etc. Only conservative es really care about the border, and it’s mainly conservatives that want to talk about Afghanistan, less because they actually care and more because they think it will hurt Biden.
Two major infrastructure deals are about to pass. I think the wind is still blowing Biden’s direction.
I think it is telling that the US forces left and all of a sudden the Taliban was instantly everywhere. To me that suggests that they were there all along, biding their time. I don’t think another hundred years would have made a difference.
This seems to be a classic example of how morale is a huge force multiplier or force destroyer. If - and if - the Afghan military had had high morale and fought against the Taliban to the best of its extent, it may have very well won, given its superior weaponry, gear, etc. But the Taliban is the side that has all the psychological momentum. Just like how thousands of better-equipped Iraqi forces fled Mosul 7 years ago in the face of a numerically inferior and lesser-armed ISIS foe.
What’s unclear is what happens after Kabul falls and whether the Taliban has an iron grip on the country. Obviously they will be the power that takes over the capitals and corridors of power, but there will be rival groups that take up arms against the Taliban, which is something group like ISIS could capitalize on.
In the larger sense, we barely tried to permanently change Afghanistan. A few tens of thousands troops is nothing. The only way we would have had a chance to succeed is a massive occupation of the entire country, along with massive rebuilding, ala Japan and Germany after WWII. It might have taken a million troops, ten years, and a trillion dollars, as a guess.
Without that there’s no point in even trying. Glad we’re leaving, and we should have left after bin Laden was killed.
The point isn’t to make the country into Denmark. It’s probably true that the U.S. could stay for 100 years and Afghanistan would then revert to a failed state when they left.
But for those 100 years women wouldn’t be shot in the head for the ‘crime’ of being raped. And young girls could go to school. And maybe a few more decades of that would actually lead to a more pluralistic society.
Or aren’t we caring about the poor and downtrodden people of the world any more? I’m so old I can remember when ‘peacekeeping’ was a thing, mostly championed by liberals on the left, without the attempt to nation build. It was enough to just keep the peace and allow the average citizen to have some form of life.
Bill Clinton called his failure to act in Rwanda the biggest mistake of his Presidency. Joe Biden’s decisions may actually create a humanitarian disaster when he already had forces in the country to prevent it.
The thing is, Sammy, occupation costs money. And since bipartisanship works when it comes to spending money but almost never when it comes to raising revenue, it’s essentially guaranteed that we wouldn’t be there beyond a decade or two at the most.
The better option would be for the US to swallow its pride and accept that it’s got a hyper-powerful military when it comes to combat but much less power when it comes to working out the political aftermath. We should have swallowed our pride and brokered a multi-national peace agreement that, yeah, would have given the Taliban power and global recognition, but with just a few very simple but necessary conditions, a few of which are vital to the US interests but that otherwise give Taliban power in exchange for stability. We’d obviously argue for some measure of human rights but we’d not be in much of a position to achieve that.
The thing is, Assy, everyone understands that occupations cost money. And yet, there has been bipartisan support for 50,000 soldiers in South Korea, 50,000 in Japan and 50,000 in Germany.
And guess what? Not everything is about the U.S. and its pride. I’m thinking more about the thousands of women you are leaving to be rqvaged hy the Taliban, all the girls that will no longer be allowed to be educated, and all those people who trusted the U.S. and allied with them in the country who are now headed for a bullet in the head or worse.
All that sucks really bad. But getting out is still the right move. Should have been done years ago. Only stubbornness and sunk cost fallacy thinking kept us there. Doubling down on a bad hand is the wrong move, no matter how many times you’ve done it before.
Agree. It was apparent probably 18 years ago this was a cluster and was never not going to be a cluster. Now I’m hearing “if we’d just withdrawn the right way!” or stayed just six more months! (thank you, Friedman) the other side would have had a chance! Really! Nonsense, piffle, balderdash, bollocks, codswallop. Naive and stupid fantasy, pure and simple. This was always going to be the endgame.
Then I suppose we should just evacuate every at risk person and look toward settling them somewhere better, leaving Afghanistan with a population around 8 million, including 17 women. Meanwhile, women and others get treated like dirt in dozens of other countries, which an Afghan evacuation would fail to address.
If you were genuinely compassionate on this score, I would suggest a global holy war against oppression in the name of religion, but I doubt you have any real interest in the matter, other than to make liberals feel sad.