I liked the one they linked to, Disappointed Taliban realizes taking over Afghanistan more fun than running it.
“I became a terrorist to terrorize—to detonate IEDs and shoot rocket launchers at American tanks. If you had told me that instead I’d be spending most of my time trying to develop a unified national identity around fragmented tribal communities spread out over thousands of miles of mountainous terrain, I never would have signed up. Now I get why America wanted no part of this.”
I don’t think this will happen. There’s also some pretty conflicting reporting about the Taliban preventing people from getting to the airport. They are enforcing time based curfews in Kabul, and are not making exceptions for anyone, and they have setup checkpoints around the city (not just on roads leading to the airport), and there is some reporting that it’s been difficult in some instances to get the checkpoints to verify the documentation needed to let people through. There’s been some reports of them harassing people as well.
But at the same time airlift operations have continued apace and have been moving out several thousand people (including mostly Afghan nationals the last two days) in each 24 hour period. Some people are still getting through to the airport. My guess is, and this is probably typical, discipline in the Taliban ranks is low, and that plus the nightly curfews are causing issues, but I don’t actually think there’s a consistent and concerted effort to stop people from getting to the airport, and I don’t see any evidence they’d want to take U.S. hostages.
We have almost 7500 soldiers in Kabul right now, that’s literally enough to kill every Taliban insurgent in the city if they get out of control, and if things got that bad it likely would lead to an even larger deployment. They’ve won, they have 0 reason to steal more war with us from the jaws of victory.
I agree the optics are bad, but I also think that’s partially to blame on how the reporting has been frankly pretty poor, but I’ve seen it improving in the last 24 hours. I honestly suspect this falls down to " Benghazi" level shit in a month. Meaning stuff that foams up the Republican base but not something the rest of the country will care about.
The fact is, Biden put the safety of every American in Afghanistan in the hands of the Taliban. If they wanted, theyncouod slaughter thousands, and there’s nothing the U.S. could do about it. They also shut down Bagram much earlier, so there is only a single runway open to get people out. All it would take is a mortar shel, or two on that runway, and thousands would be trapped.
Relying on the good behaviour of the Taliban for safety was reckless beyond belief. Whether it works or not, it was a huge gamble with thousands of lives.
I remember hearing this PERSONALLY, not in articles but from actual friends who were sent to Afghanistan. It seems to be an extremely common viewpoint.
But it begs the question then, of how is the Taliban able to train them, if they’re supposedly so untrainable. Is it simply that they don’t respect outsiders enough to get past the cultural barrier? Do all the capable Afghani dudes run off and join the Taliban, leaving only the slackers?
Are the Taliban actually well trained? There’s no doubt as an organization that they’re more capable than the old government’s forces but in what way?
The answer is staring you in the face but until you fully let go of US government propaganda version of the situation, you may not see it.
Your country is invaded by complete foreigners, alien in language, religion and culture.
The best, brightest and most motivated of your countryfolk (a) fight for the freedom of your country or (b) become traitors fighting for the invaders and their puppet government?
One of the claims I’ve seen floating around is that the Taliban is more reliable than the outgoing Afghan government at making payroll. I’m not sure it’s that the Afghan soldiers were untrainable so much as that the money to keep the trainable ones around was being continuously diverted to other uses.
And doing this would benefit the Taliban how, exactly?
Remember: “They hate us 'cause of our freedom” is not an acceptable response.
…by following Trump’s plan. A history the Republicans are busily re-writing.
Biden still owns the blame for the massive logistical fuckups here, but let’s not pretend that there was some outcome in which America left behind a stable democracy safe for Americans staying in Afghanistan. That was always inevitable.
Right. The deal, all the way back to the prior agreement, was that they would stop directly attacking Americans as we left. Which at some point had to rely on them keeping to that word, since at some point the remaining presence would be too small to be defensible.
What for some reason neither administration seemed to wrap their heads around, was that “we will not directly attack the Americans before they can leave” did not mean “we will stand by doing nothing until after all Americans leave”.
Whoa hold on there, buddy. I’m NOT bought into the US propaganda version of the situation. Now, I was 15 years old when 9/11 happened, so when we first invaded Afghanistan, I wasn’t exactly informed enough to have much of an expert opinion, but AT THE TIME it seemed logical. But by the time I was in college I was under no illusions that the war in Afghanistan had anything to do with freedom or the benefit of my country.
We should have left Afghanistan a LONG time ago, but if we were going to establish a puppet government there which was even SLIGHTLY better for the people of Afghanistan than the Taliban was, it stands to reason that we should have attempted to build up their army so they could fight off the Taliban at least to the extent that the people in Afghanistan who supported our efforts would not all subsequently be killed. But maybe it was a lost cause.
I don’t really agree with this analysis, actually. I think it’s more accurate to say that President Trump put the safety of American non-military personnel in Afghanistan in the hands of the Afghan government, and Biden continued that policy. On January 15th, 2021, our troop level in country reached 2500. This is a level simply too low to protect that upwards of 15,000 American civilians in country in various roles from the 60,000+ strong Taliban. So intrinsically the assumption was being made that their safety was implicitly guaranteed by the host country. This is not, FWIW actually that unusual. Generally speaking it is not the norm that diplomatic staff are protected from harm by a large military deployment. The norm is that diplomats are safe in a host country because the host countries values and encourages diplomatic safety. Embassies have generally small security details to handle minor issues, but are not intended to function as fortresses. This is how our Embassies in countries like China, Russia etc operate.
The issue with a lot of the criticisms of the Biden withdrawal is it relies on cart before the horse logic. If Biden knew Afghanistan was going to collapse in 11 days, he should have withdrawn everyone months ago. But if he withdrew everyone months ago, he’d have to answer the question “why are you doing this, you’re saying Afghanistan’s government can hold out indefinitely?” Since our intelligence analysts were not producing analysis indicating the government was going to rapidly fall (which is an intelligence failure), Biden would basically be saying “well I have a hunch the Afghan government is going to collapse in a few weeks.” I don’t see a real pathway to that being considered an acceptable action/statement from an American President, especially when that American President and the broad American foreign policy establishment ostensibly supported the continuation of the Afghan government.
In many ways it’s actually a better case scenario for Biden that the intelligence was so wrong. If the intelligence clearly indicated the country was going to collapse within days of us finalizing our withdrawal, the pressure to stay in country would have raised tremendously. Given that getting out of Afghanistan was a good goal, and one worth pursuing, it’s frankly good that the waters weren’t muddied.
There’s actually a reason Trump continued to escalate withdrawals to the very end of his Presidency–he wanted to tie the hands of the future President to not reverse the withdrawal. This also isn’t that unusual, most outgoing Presidents, particularly when the incoming President is from a different party, wish to perpetuate as many of their policies as possible and always seek to entrench those policies as best they can. Biden would have to seriously alter U.S. policy to have done anything other than withdraw.
And FWIW there doesn’t appear to be any coordinated effort by the Taliban to attack U.S. personnel, military or otherwise.
One explanation for the success of the Taliban vs the Afghan army: the Taliban is fighting for a cause they believe in (religious fanaticism). The army is fighting for the concept of a nation that really only exists on paper.
I think it’s even worse maybe than that, the Afghan National Army, at least the hundreds of thousands of regulars who ended up leaving their posts, were primarily fighting for a pay check. They were mercenaries. That doesn’t mean they were cowards necessarily or unwilling to fight, but when the paychecks stopped and American support went away, well…not a very good job anymore is it? By all accounts the 20,000 Afghan special forces we trained were as tough and tenacious and can be and more ideologically committed to winning. But because of their quality, they were spread all over the country to bolster local detachments, and when the local units are all surrendering the small special forces detachments couldn’t really fight it.
Back in June in the town of Dawlat Abad, 22 of these Afghan commandos were surrounded by an overwhelming number of Taliban fighters. Surrounded and outnumbered, they fought ferociously until they literally had expended every round of ammunition they had, and then the Taliban moved in. They were all executed on the spot after being captured.
That ranks up there with martial bravery as highly as any venerated force has ever fought, for any country.
FWIW, while I fucking hate the Taliban, them executing those guys is relatively understandable in the heat of a war/battle. I understand its illegality, but it’s a hard thing to have men kill your friends and comrades and then only when they’ve literally ran out of bullets do you stop them, to just peacefully march them away as prisoners. There’s a number of stories like this from WWII where U.S. troops behaved no differently (executed the defeated on the other side.) War and crime are virtually synonymous.
There is a whole lot of Western Chauvinism being expressed by some of those criticizing the Afghan military. The general sentiment seems to be that although they were doomed to eventual defeat in the next couple of months, the soldiers should have laid down their lives specifically to delay the inevitable long enough for us to complete our retreat.
FWIW if they had fought their defeat was not inevitable, they outnumbered the Taliban by a large amount, had international financial backing, had control of extremely defensible urban positions etc. The core issue is many of them were not being paid and many of them felt the Afghan government was illegitimate and corrupt, and had only signed up for the paycheck (which had been missed a lot.) I definitely put almost all the blame on the Afghan government not building legitimacy with its people, and American blame on not making sure that happened–we basically handpicked the Karzai government in 2002 despite serious red flags, confirmed his reelection in 2009 when we know he committed serious electoral fraud, and did nothing to push for real political form in all these years.
Have there been “massive logistical fuckups”? It was a rough beginning, but things seem to be running smoothly now.
There’s nothing they could do to prevent it maybe, but there’s a lot we could do afterward, and the Taliban knows that, which is probably why they won’t slaughter Americans.
I won’t disagree that there was clearly a lack of logistical planning that borders on delusional thinking.
It’s also worth wondering if a deal with the Taliban couldn’t have been struck much earlier when they were on the ropes. Yes, it would have been politically controversial at home - perhaps Bush thought that the domestic optics made it nearly impossible, since people equated the Taliban with Al Qaida in the same way that people equated the regimes of the Ayatollah and Saddam Hussein with Al Qaida. But the reality is that there has always been a distinction to be made between the Taliban and the terrorist groups that they befriended over the years. By rejecting opportunities to negotiate with the Taliban in the early 2000s, they made it clear that the Taliban would have no future in any Afghanistan that had America’s fingerprints on it, so rather than accept being wiped out of existence, they fought. And as we know, they also had the continued support of Pakistan, which had concerns about Pashtun nationalism spilling into the Pashtun population there in Pakistan.
Would a deal with the Taliban have prevented democratic backsliding? Almost certainly not. But it could have allowed for an exit much sooner and more smoothly than the debacle we’re seeing now.