I suppose it is mostly that this particular withdrawal is shameful. Which I suppose it is, given it has the same “hanging off the landing skids” feel of Vietnam.
But I was also following some conversations on LinkedIn regarding the deployment of 3000 US Marines to the airport. People didn’t seem to get that regardless of how “badass” the USMC is, they weren’t being deployed there to “get some”.
This. The only right thing to do was to stay and finish the job when OBL was trapped at Tora Bora. Then declare victory and go home. Everything else that happened instead in the last 20 years, is disrespectful of our troops.
Even if they had recruited more female warriors, one serious problem remains: we trained the Afghan army to fight against street fighters by having them rely disproportionately on American air power.
Let’s be blunt: American air superiority is crucial for us because if we sustain even minor casualties in any of the foreign adventures we’ve been involved in the last 50 years, Americans start exacting political consequences at the ballot box. We rely on high-tech gadgets to minimize casualties, which allows the Executive and the Pentagon to basically lie their asses off about how we’re making progress against the enemy when we’re really not.
The Afghan army - many armies for that matter - don’t have that luxury. The Taliban survived American air assaults. They fought and died on the battlefield. They were ready for a street fight. The Afghan army was not. This should have been factored into any decision making about a withdrawal.
Evacuating valued personnel shouldn’t be a clusterfuck. Biden did chose this moment to withdraw, it is on him to do it well. I don’t think we are seeing a cohesive coordinated effort. That is on him.
I voted for the guy, so this sucks for us both.
In 20 years, nobody ever managed to cobble together a coherent vision of what “victory” would even look like.
Never mind
One of the strangest things to me during this whole episode is people like you who are treating Biden like a robot who is bound and helpless in the face of Trump’s decisions and agreements. Whereas, in actuality, he is fully President. That means that he has the power to change or reverse Trump’s decisions–and, in fact, he has done so in other areas.
President Joe Biden announced “America is back” on Thursday and declared that “diplomacy is back at the center” of US foreign policy as he said the US will end all support for Saudi Arabia’s offensive operations in Yemen, one of several changes he announced in his first major foreign-policy speech since taking office.
Biden’s announcement at the State Department was just one of the significant changes he said he will make to US foreign policy, including freezing troop redeployments from Germany, raising the cap for refugees allowed into the US and reaffirming US support for LGBTQ rights worldwide.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/04/politics/biden-state-department-visit/index.html
Biden had the power to cancel that withdrawal decision; he chose not to use it.
And he made the right call.
Of course he had that power. Thankfully, he didn’t use it. It was long past time to end this pointless war.
“Graveyard of empires”
Sunken cost fallacy, sounds like
I don’t know about you, but I’m a fan of the President standing by the foreign policy agreements of his predecessor, unless those agreements are so horribly against US interests or the situation has wildly changed - something Biden’s predecessor didn’t believe in and caused untold damage to the reputation of the US among allies and associates. Biden made the right call to stand by Trump’s agreement. He failed (in my eyes) in the actual execution of the follow-through.
To paraphrase Smapti and iiandyiiii - good.
I think it was a collective failure of the DoD and intelligence. Various senior ranking officials anticipated and warned Biden of the expected resulting collapse of the Afghan government and military. But they all seriously underestimated the rate of the collapse. Some estimated it would take months for the Afghan military to capitulate to advancing Taliban forces. They expected that at the very least, the Afghan army would control the main roads leading to various provincial capitals, including Kabul. But the capitulation was almost instant and caught everyone by surprise.
It’s all well and good to Monday morning quarterback about who should have known what and when they ought to have known it. But as powerful as the US military and intelligence are, they are not omniscient. I think managing the resulting chaos is the only thing that anyone can be reasonably expected to do. With 21,000 Afghans lifted out in the past 24 hours, and no casualties among coalition forces, is a feat that deserves to be commended at all levels - especially on the ground.
It’s essentially a failure of logic. If the U.S. knew that the Taliban was going to take the country eventually, and the Taliban knew it, and the Afghan Army knew it, then why wait a few months? Why not surrender now and be done with it? U.S. intelligence forgot that the Afghans were human beings and thought like human beings - sensibly. That’s much more than a failure of intelligence.
Yep. Let history be the guide. History suggests that Afghanistan’s value as a country isn’t enough to justify the enormous efforts and resources required to maintain control of the land.
Here is a very interesting (and longish) read about how we got here, and what the Taliban was doing before Doha, and following the agreement.
My assessment is Trump was eager to get out of Afghanistan and was willing to cut a deal with the Taliban in order to make that happen, by throwing the democratically elected government under the bus. The Taliban have been clear to make plans for taking over the country since May 2020, and used that time to their advantage, so I suppose it should be no surprise how swiftly things went to get to this point. Biden was left holding a bag of flaming turds.
During the talks with the Taliban, the Trump administration stood firmly with the Taliban against the democratically elected Afghan government. There were hopes that in dealing with the Taliban, the new U.S. administration would uphold the democratic institutions established in Afghanistan over the past two decades, ensuring that democratic achievements such as women’s rights, a free press, and the rights of religious minorities would remain protected.
However, it appears that President Biden’s Afghan policy, being steered by the Trump-appointed U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation Zalmay Khalilzad, is no different from the one pursued by his predecessor. It imperils the future of democracy in Afghanistan. If the U.S. stands for democracies and democratic institutions, there is simply no explanation for why the Biden administration would support the Istanbul conference in which: a) the current president will be removed three years before his term ends, b) the Taliban will be given power without participating in an election, c) a new religious constitution for Afghanistan would be initiated.
In March 2021, U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken wrote a letter to President Ashraf Ghani pushing proposals in favor of “Afghanistan’s future constitutional and governing arrangements” and “to build consensus on specific goals and objectives for negotiations with the Taliban about governance, power-sharing…”[55] Blinken’s letter was threatening in nature to the Afghan head of state by telling him bluntly “I must also make clear to you” and reminding him to understand “my tone.”[56]
Ahead of the Istanbul conference, a draft proposal being shared in Kabul presumably on behalf of the U.S. and which seems to be in line with Secretary Blinken’s letter, states: “[Transitional] Peace Government shall exist until it transfers power to a permanent Government following the adoption of a new constitution and national elections. This transfer of power shall occur no later than (xx) months from the date of this Agreement.”[57] If this agreement is signed in Istanbul, it will establish an interim transitional government with no limit to its term, thereby removing the democratically elected Afghan government mid-way and giving the Taliban a share of power without them having to participate in an election.[58]
Hence in the case of Afghanistan, America, the first democracy, is sacrificing an emerging democracy in favor of a jihadi terror organization as a cynical face-saving measure facilitating an American exit from Afghanistan and power grab by an Al-Qaeda ally.
Except that you can’t really have a “democracy” if it requires a foreign power to prop it up, can you?
Presidents aren’t gods. Biden was told by basically all the intelligence officials he had, and it was “common wisdom” that worst case scenario the Ghani government would collapse in 180 days to a year. That was the worst-case scenario. Some projections were saying he’d be able to hold on to parts of the country indefinitely, albeit in an ugly and perpetual civil war. What’s being expected of Biden here is that he would have known that whenever he set a withdrawal date, the country would collapse rapidly in less than 14 days about a month out from that date, and to address that he should remove almost all Afghans who have special visas from the country long before then, and only at that point evacuate the military.
The issue with that thinking is, removing those Afghans was supposed to be predicated on the country actually collapsing, if the country actually wasn’t collapsing, the expectation was they stayed helped run their country. Because many of them were educated and experienced members of the state’s bureaucratic framework. I don’t really see an honorable or intelligent way you evacuate them all back in say, June, if you’re still maintaining the position that you expect the Afghan government to continue on as a going concern. Moreover, let’s say we did evacuate those people back in June…as we start that evacuation, all the provincial commanders surrender to the Taliban–since all their people fleeing the country in Kabul convinces them they have no reason to keep fighting. The country collapses as it has now, likely ending in chaotic days as we get everyone out.
Result? Biden is blamed for causing the collapse due to his early withdrawal of tens of thousands of people who were supposed to help run Afghanistan going forward.
You can either get out of Afghanistan, or you can maintain some level of troops forever to avoid a situation at the end that “is chaotic.” Take your pick. Biden picked right for what it’s worth.
Now I have said elsewhere on these forums–Bagram should have been maintained, as far as I can tell until basically the last day of the military withdrawal. I disagree, based on what information I have, with the decision to have evacuated it earlier. I think having control of Bagram could’ve helped smooth this evacuation, but even that would not have eliminated the current chaos, the core issue causing this chaos is the rapidity of the evacuation running up against a hard deadline. The only way to avoid that chaos is to extend the evacuation out to many months. The only palatable way to have extended the evacuation out to many months would have been for the Afghan national government to have collapsed in a “slow and predictable manner”, allowing us the moral cover of a gradual complete withdrawal of all Afghans on special visa.
We never trained the Afghan Army to only fight with American airpower. This is a “great myth” akin to the fascists in Weimar Germany who blamed the loss in WWI to the politicians “knife in the back.” It’s a retcon designed to absolve the Afghan Army of all blame, and blame America for everything. The reality is the regular Afghan Army had horrible morale and horrible corruption. The non-commando units had a habit of retreating anytime they faced fire, and refusing orders to engage the enemy. The Army had hundreds of thousands of people go through it over the course of the last 20 years, and tens of thousands died. So I’m not saying all of them were this way, but a military can only afford a small % of units behaving this way before it becomes a non-viable fighting force, and that was not the case with the Afghan Army. Large number of soldiers going AWOL to work on farms for harvest time, officers fraudulently saying they are still at post, soldiers refusing to fight in areas of the country “they didn’t have a personal connection to”, and soldiers fleeing battle at first engagement, is not a failure of “air power”, it’s a serious failure of command and morale across the board.
Yeah, reading about the Afghan army now makes me think of this scene from The Man Who Would Be King…
