Yeah, the things I want/demand answers for is some of the specifics around the decisions made in the last 3 months. Specifically:
Was there a plan to evacuate U.S. personnel and any Afghans eligible for visas quickly in the case of a sudden Afghan government collapse? If not, why not. - To me this one is the most likely question where the answer is just “incompetence.” Reason being, even if the intelligence was saying the Afghan Government would last months and months…you still should have a contingency.
Why was Bagram Air Base closed before we were completely done with our military withdrawal? Again, not a general, but to my thinking Bagram was an important tactical command center and huge staging ground. I have to think there are clear benefits to it being the last place we leave from, because it would have kept us with maximum flexibility. Hell, we could stage an entire new, 150,000 person invasion of Afghanistan from holding Bagram. Not that we should, just saying Bagram gave us incredibly strategic flexibility, and I would like to hear a really good reason that it was shuttered when it was, frankly it seems almost obvious it should have been literally the last site at which our flag was pulled up.
If U.S. intelligence was really showing that the country was going to muddle on for 3 months, 6 months, a year, whatever, I’d like to know why it was so wrong. The Taliban cash-for-surrender shit was even being reported on (but not getting much coverage) months ago. Was there not any intelligence understanding that could have a “roll up” effect that lead to a general abandonment of post by the entire military? It looks like a State Department cable was sent in a month ago warning that just such a thing was possible. This actually wouldn’t be the first time analysts at State had a better handle on a situation than military and intelligence analysts, I’d like to know what the hell was going on in the Pentagon and at Langley.
It wouldn’t be the first hundred times. The State department Bureau of Intelligence is the smallest of the intelligence agencies, for obvious reasons they specialize in international relations, they only do analysis and they are purportedly the most insulated from political considerations. Also they purportedly have an internal culture of being upfront and letting the chips fall where they may.
It would have been not just politically unpopular, but inexplicable, to give the Taliban a guaranteed, non-democratic say in Afghanistan’s governance at a time when it appeared they had little chance of victory. And the countries where it would have been unpopular include Afghanistan.
But the idea that they had little chance of victory was a miscalculation, and if you look at the history of Afghanistan, it should have been clear that the US-led reformation of Afghanistan was not going to succeed uniformly. The problem that the US runs into over and over and over again, is that we don’t read history, and we think we’re special. We’re leaving with our tails between our legs, just like the Soviets, just like the British. History repeats itself - especially when history is ignored.
I think that starts with our viewing the Taliban as like an al-Qaeda type group. I.e. an ideological terrorist group that has to recruit members, build up over time etc, and the lower its active member count got, the closer it was to being unable to function. The issue is the Taliban could go away but the problem they represented don’t. The Taliban is a natural expression of angry Pashtun tribalism mixed with Islamic fundamentalism. A group named “The Taliban” could disappear but the underlying issues haven’t really gone anyway, so there was probably always some reason to consider giving forces like that some sort of seat at the putative table.
I agree. The bulk of the Afghan people, including Taliban conscripts, are victims of an extremist minority. As for delaying the inevitable by fighting on after you know you lost, that’s the sort of thing that the Japanese militarists, and Hitler did. It just leads to more death. Engineering a calm end to a war when you have been thoroughly defeated is impossible,
As for the U.S. side, one reason we couldn’t plan properly was because the idea of lots of refugees coming here was unpopular. Maybe harrowing scenes of babies thrown over the airport wall will change this for a while, but before now, letting in lots of Muslim refugees was U.S. political poison.
I mean, the “country” of Afghanistan is just terribly conservative, extremely local and village oriented, tribal. You can take away the organization “the Taliban”, but they will just reconstitute as something else. You cannot ignore the history. Afghans hate foreign occupation, but it goes even deeper than that. They are resistant even to reformation movements that come from Kabul. They’ve turned on their own kings, presidents, and what have you for the crime of importing foreign ideas and customs.
Much has been made of the Taliban’s imminent abuse of women. What a lot of people don’t realize is that even among non-Taliban there are a lot of conservative Afghans who have no regard for women’s rights either.
Maybe not even then. Laura Ingram rejects accepting refugees from Afghanistan to whom we promised asylum to, because she didn’t personally agree to it.
[quote=“asahi, post:207, topic:948754, full:true”]The problem that the US runs into over and over and over again, is that we don’t read history, and we think we’re special.
[/quote]By itself, I agree with this sentence.
But as for a power-sharing agreement, the one country that comes to mind, where they guarantee a minority certain political posts, is Lebanon. Not a good model lately!
Some countries have quotas for the number of women in the legislature. I suppose that may work OK, but it is a lot different from guaranteeing a set number of seats to a group which opposes democracy, both in practice and in theory.
Democracy isn’t the only type of government on the planet. Not all democracies work well; not all non-democracies are failed states. It’s not critical for our national security that Afghanistan be a democracy. It’s critical that they don’t become a staging ground for terrorism.
We also think that we are so transparently special, moral, and good that we will not be seen as foreign invaders but instead welcomed with open arms as the liberators and protectors of the local population.* This feeds into and supports our belief in our own propaganda narrative.
We are then bewildered by the haplessness of the puppet governments and armies we set up - who are in truth traitors and collaborators with foreign invaders - and the effectiveness and motivation of the Bad Guys who are in truth the local resistance fighters who are well supported by (and indeed are) the local population.
We fucked up Vietnam through a failure to recognize that the locals just wanted an end to colonial rule and instead painted them as, and drove them into the arms of, communists. We fucked up Afghanistan in almost exactly the same way, except we painted them as and drove them into the arms of extremist Islam.
*I say “we”. I’m Australian and Australia participated in both Vietnam and Afghanistan so we can’t avoid some of the blame. Though frankly we just did that to bolster the US/Australia relationship and it’s essentially the USA’s fault.
You want to avoid terrorist attacks from a nation. Terrorist attacks are classic asymmetrical warfare, and are extremely difficult to stop by conventional means due to their highly random and individual nature, and the high motivation of certain individuals to carry them out. You should:
(a) invade the nation, occupy it for 20 years and kill lots of people there
The thing is, terrorist attacks weren’t from a “nation”; they came from an international non-nation-state networks. The US was extremely effective in disrupting those networks, in part by accepting the idea that it needed to build coalitions and coordinate international policework. It was necessary to confront the Taliban to demonstrate that they could not host terrorists with impunity – I think that’s a lesson learned. But trying to remake Afghanistan into a liberal democracy was overreach. It’s easy to play Monday morning QB, I realize.
Yes, I would recommend this in combination with (b).
Maybe but it’s a lesson that could have been taught by highly selective operations. Instead, I suspect the benefit of any lessons learned have been entirely overshadowed by the blood and treasure that have been and will be lost through the massively clumsy response.
FWIW we’re up to 18,000 evacuated through the airlifts. It’s unclear what number are Afghan nationals and what number are American citizens, or what number of American citizens remain in the country. It is suspected upward of 15,000 Americans were in country, but unfortunately any true accounting is impossible. Before this all went down when you flew into Afghanistan as an American you were highly encouraged to check in your arrival with the State Department, and were highly encouraged to check out when you left. But neither was a mandatory process, so the State Department has no idea if people came in, they don’t know about, or if people came in and checked in, but then left without checking out. They can work to try to extrapolate at least some of the first set of data by using flight records and departures, and they have supposedly been calling as many of those unaccounted for as possible.
Probably not for nothing but if you’re ever in an unstable part of the world–take the time to register your arrival and departure with the State Department’s consulate/Embassy etc in country.
I took one for the team and watched a few minutes of Tucker Carlson tonight. He did an Afghanistan story, saying that the reason the army folded so quickly is because they were all on drugs and illiterate.
He didn’t try to pin this on Biden, but instead blamed it on “the media” for not covering the story.
He the segued gracefully into a Jan 6 story by addressing himself to “the crowd” that is so concerned about the plight of Afghan women: “what about Ashli Babbit? Wasn’t she a woman?”
