With the withdrawal from Afghanistan, I see a lot of statements by conservatives, military veterans, armchair generals, etc., basically stating that the withdrawal dishonors the servicepeople who fought there for the past 20 years,
Yeah, I get it that they would want to chalk this up in the “win” column, but “dishonor”? It’s not like the ref called the game at the last minute just before we were going to score the winning run.
Is the intent that we should fight in Afghanistan forever until we achieve some form of “victory”?
We certainly should have better planned our exit. Nothing happened that wasn’t forseeable. We should have left in a planned, professional manner without all of the clusterfuck and humanitarian nightmare. I mean, really, we fucked up the exit pretty badly.
How? I think it’s way too early to assert anything like this. No Americans have been killed during the withdrawal - surely that’s a major concern, if not the only one. How could the rest of the chaos possible have been avoided?
I’ve seen politicians with a D after their names who were Afghanistan vets express the same sentiment @msmith537 is talking about so at least a portion of them probably criticized Trump.
I think their sacrifice was for nothing. Any troops that died after May 2nd 2011 were pointless and the ones before that were dumb.
This is a reliable go-to from both armchair and real-deal hawks, and not just in this (remember how the anthem-kneelers were being accused of disrespecting “the troops”?).
I can understand and support a position that you should not commit the troops’ lives and safety unless you are committed to “going all the way”, but at the same time, there is such a thing as being humble enough to know things can go badly wrong.
But you know what? If the ANA had held together and we had been able to be gone w/o there ensuing a panic, few would be listening to those commentators even as they made the same arguments.
They who fought and bled and died, are in no way “dishonored” by the politicians changing objectives or public opinion turning away from the cause. It was not their fault. Any shame is upon those who made the wrong decisions expecting to avoid ill consequences.
We should have started, if not completed the evacuations before we announced that there would be no more American air support. We should have expected what a lack of American air support would mean for the Afghan forces. We (Biden) should not have been in denial after the taliban had taken every part of the country save Kabul.
I don’t believe the Afghan government (at the time) was okay with early evacuations. We could have gone against their wishes, but I don’t see how that would have necessarily given a better outcome. It could have just shifted all the chaos earlier.
ISTM that, since we’d done absolutely nothing in 20 years to help make an Afghanistan that could take care of itself, the chaos we saw was inevitable no matter how we left. There was no leaving without this chaos, or at least I can’t possibly see how. With a government and military that doesn’t function, chaos is inevitable.
Once we took our eyes off the ball to invade Iraq, this ending was inevitable. Asking whether Trump could have done any better is pointless. But I ask if Obama could have? I doubt it.
It could have been done by a temporary surge of troops - let’s say, at the end of July - to protect Kabul. Maybe 30,000 or so.
The rest of Afghanistan was hopeless and couldn’t be saved. But Kabul itself could have been safe. Evacuate all the interpreters, get all the Americans out. Then, once everything is all out, then, withdraw the troops.
Saying “This chaos couldn’t have been avoided” reminds me of a recent cartoon in which Biden cuts a surgery patient in two with a chainsaw while the surgeons were previously doing a very delicate operation, and says “This couldn’t have been avoided.”
Says some random internet guy. For all we know that could have created a brand new set of chaos – maybe the Taliban would have attacked before/during that temporary surge of troops since it would have been a violation of the earlier agreement with Trump.
I think chaos was inevitable. Maybe there were some other things we could have done to protect a few extra people at the margins, with perfect hindsight. We’ll probably know soon. But it’s hard to imagine how to end 20 years of totally incompetent occupation without chaos. I’m unconvinced by the armchair generals (or even the real generals) of the pundit class (and, obviously, even less convinced by the unsupported opinions of random internet strangers) who somehow have a perfect plan to avoid chaos after 20 years of lies and incompetence.
A troop surge would have doubtless caused American deaths and then you’d have the same armchair generals saying that we shouldn’t have done a surge, since the Taliban had agreed to our withdrawal and avoided US military deaths.
@Velocity, who was the surgeon in this situation? There was no careful anything happening. What a silly cartoon.
@panache45, I think that would have been a great idea, but we’re probably 20 years too late.
I hate to be “that guy,” but in that counter-argument, one could carefully open the cabinet door a crack, then insert a stick-like object to hold up the bottom bowl, then prop things up to steady the other bowls so that they don’t fall, or have someone else nearby to hold the bowls as you pass them to them one after the other. One or two bowls might still fall but not all of them need fall.
This meme sounds like some sour grapes type of fallacy - trying to soften a blow by saying that it was unavoidable.
As you said, there’s no way to open that cabinet door without at least some “chaos” (i.e. broken dishes). For all we know, they did it with the least amount of breakage possible. It’s way too early to have any actual idea – especially for armchair internet pundits. For all the chaos reported, there’s been very few actual deaths that I’ve read about.
While it would be a challenge to open that door without creating absolute chaos, it would be even more challenging if the only tools we have available are guns.
As a Vietnam veteran, I don’t feel the least bit disrespected or dishonored by what happened. I did my job and I came home in one piece. In terms of war, that’s the best you can hope for. If there is any dishonor to be had either then or now, it falls squarely on the people who got us into these messes for all the (mostly) wrong reasons. All those years, all those deaths, injuries, mental issues, addictions, suicides and trillions of dollars for little or no gain.
Are these statements to the effect that any withdrawal would dishonor those who served in Afghanistan, or that this particular screwed up withdrawal is shameful?
