I’m not a military expert by any means, but wouldn’t a gradual withdrawal steadily weaken US forces, putting remaining forces in greater peril? I sure wouldn’t want to be part of the last 10 percent on the ground.
That’s not the way you would do it. You would leave military forces in place until all the vulnerable people had been quietly removed. Then you start withdrawing base by base, flying out aircraft and weaponry so they aren’t left behind. You send out orders for all confidential documents to be shredded and you either remove computers or destroy their hard drives. Then you set up force protection around Bagram air force base and make sure enough soldiers are available to protect the evacuation. Then you pull out the soldiers.
The Biden administration had months to plan for this. They knew they were leaving since inauguration day. Yet we hear stories of aircraft and weapons being left behind for the Taliban, of sensitive documents being frantically destroyed, of all the civilian personnel being left in the lurch, and an unsecured airport causing a mess and preventing evacuation of people.
My guess is that Biden was sticking to the fiction that the country wouldn’t fall to the Taliban, and therefore none of these preparations were necessary. The other explanations are even less charitable.
As for Trump, he can screw off. He was singing the same song as Biden - that it was time to get out and he set a hard deadline. I have no idea if he would have handled the evacuation any better - he certainly didn’t publicly address the risks a withdrawal would face.
Biden can be faulted for the chaotic nature of the evacuation. He can’t be faulted for the Taliban take-over – if the Afghan armed forces weren’t willing to fight for their country after 20 years and $2T in training, then the outcome was inevitable, sooner or later. It just came sooner.
Republican politicians will yell for a long time, but it won’t stick. The American public does not give 2 shits about Afghanistan.
I believe this is absolutely correct. Afghanistan will be in the headlines for a while, and it will be a right-wing talking point for a while longer, but it will not be a major issue in future electoral campaigns.
BTW, if Joe Biden should resign due to the “tragic mess” in Afghanistan, shouldn’t Trump himself have resigned after the mess in Washington DC on January 6?
Fake news. The Taliban didn’t take over Afghanistan. It was Antifa in disguise.
Talifa
According to Biden just now, the Afghan government (or to be more accurate, the former Afghan government) didn’t want everyone (including Afghan citizen allies) to leave before the US military did – this was the only sort of withdrawal they’d accept.
Americans wanted out of Vietnam for a long time, but the images of the panic in Saigon and the Vietnamese boat people situation left a stain that Americans have been dealing with for decades, an became a symbol of American failure.
You’re right that Americans don’t care about Afghanistan per se, but they do care about America failing or looking defeated, and this looks like a gigantic failure rivalling Saigon or possibly worse.
Thanks. This question has been bugging me for a while.
The Trumpites are jumping on the bandwagon, as it were.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/rick-scott-raises-removing-biden-from-office-over-afghanistan/ar-AANnMwS
“The Florida Republican’s remarks echo calls from former President Donald Trump and his allies for Biden to step down, which began as the Taliban took control of the country and toppled the Afghan government.”
The failure was going in, not getting out.
Hey, it’s not just ‘The Right’ questioning Biden’s fitness to serve.
Ryan Crocker, who has been involved with Afghanistan from the beginning and was called out of retirement by Barack Obama to be ambassador to Afghanistan (and who earned the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work), is scathing.
This may get worse. Biden has ordered 4,000 soldiers back into the country to help secure the evacuation, but the Taliban control the entire country now. Biden has implored them to ‘go easy’ on the American troops and not interfere with the evacuation. We’ll see how well that works.
I mean it’ll be bad for a few weeks then no one will care. Ryan Crocker is also one of the people who was counseling we stay in Afghanistan for a thousand years.
Edit: Like in terms of “to understood what was likely to happen and not care”, what exactly is Crocker recommending? The same nonsense he did to Bush and Obama? That we continue to waste blood and treasure there forever? The reality is occupying Afghanistan was a huge mistake. Rectifying that mistake was always going to be ugly. Could Biden had done a better job with the withdrawal? He could have but he likely got bad intel that told him the capital would hold out for 6+ months so he assumed it wouldn’t be this bad. If he assumed the capital was going to only last for 10 days I’m sure he’d have deployed the troops earlier, but there’s been a long history of U.S. Presidents over committing here. I actually haven’t seen where much of what’s happening there is going to be that bad for the United States. I haven’t read that any of our diplomats or military have been killed, and I’ve heard an unconfirmed report of a single soldier wounded at the airport. Frankly it seems like it’s going to be just fine.
Harsh words indeed.
Why make this thread? Who gives a shit what Trump said?
Then there is Robert Gates, defense secretary under Bush and Obama:
For examples:
Biden voted against the first Gulf war. Which had widespread international support.
Biden voted for the war in Iraq.
Biden opposed the surges that turned the tide in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Biden opposed the raid that killed Bin Laden.
Biden proposed carving Iraq up into three countries. While Iraqis voted for power sharing.
Reports out now say that Biden was told specifically by his military leadership that pulling out the way he did would lead to disaster, and he ignored them. This might shed some light on that:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/17/us/politics/biden-afghanistan-withdrawal.html
The DC foreign policy blob wants endless war and is critical of steps that take us away from endless war. This is as notable and surprising as dog bites man.
Good for Biden for getting us out and sticking to the decision.
I basically agree that he said what he said for political reasons and would go further - I also think he was partly speaking to our allies and Afghanistan and basically lying to project confidence in the hope they could avoid the debacle we’re currently seeing.
Also agree with this.
Americans are way too apathetic about US foreign policy in general and are WAY too pessimistic about wars like Afghanistan to really pin any of this to Biden. This is a repeat of Vietnam in more ways than one - the latest collapse is just another example of the fact that we were never building anything sustainable in Afghanistan - that’s how most of the public sees it (if they even care anymore) and frankly they’re right.
I actually agree Biden has been off the mark on a number of foreign policy positions in his life. But I note with humor a few things in your post.
One, you say he was against the “surge that turned the tide in Iraq and Afghanistan”, those are actually not the same thing. The surge near the end of Bush’s term did help to stabilize Iraq, in the short term. Obama’s decisions to withdraw from Iraq early in his first term undermined a lot of those gains–although I’ll temper that somewhat by saying Obama actually attempted to negotiate a status of forces agreement with the Iraqi government, and the negotiations fell through. He could have stayed because he’s the President of the United States and if he wanted to stay in Iraq the Iraqi PM couldn’t do much about it, but it would have been over the actual objections of the elected Iraqi political government.
The Afghanistan surge, which was proposed by Stanley McChrystal et al, certainly did not turn the tide in Afghanistan, unless you’re blind to the news of the last week. It would appear that Biden was almost certainly correct that we should have instead of a surge, been working on our withdrawal from Afghanistan back in 2011.
I personally think carving Iraq up into three countries would be substantially better than the current situation in Iraq, but I also think our diplomatic ties to Turkey make that more of a “wish list” item than a practical reality.
Now here’s the big issue–those three articles–one is by Kori Schake who is with the American Enterprise Institute, one is about Robert Gates, part of the entrenched military bureaucracy, and the third is an article about the President exercising his constitutional authority to tell the generals what to do.
I am genuinely sad for Afghanistan, but the more I think about this situation and the more I hear about it, the happier I am Biden has had the spine to carry through with it. I don’t think this is an easy decision. The sort of attacks seen in some of these articles and by people with axes to grind, show why it isn’t easy. It isn’t easy to have people write articles saying you’re asking “condescending and insulting questions” of the military leadership.
But here’s the key salient point, this point of view is coming from people who are entirely responsible for our “forever wars” and is almost a rehashing of discredited neoconservative ideology. It should actually raise serious questions about how decisions are made to use our military when it is considered “problematic” that the President is asking tough questions of the military, or disagreeing with his military commanders. The President’s position as Commander in Chief of the military isn’t ceremonial. Nor is it conditional or limited, under our constitution he has sole authority to direct our military. It should not be astounding that a political leader questions the received wisdom of the entrenched Pentagon bureaucracy–it should be recognized as an entirely appropriate and proper execution of Presidential authority. No one elected Douglas Lute, Mark Milley, Jim Mattis, or any number of these generals. They are accountable to the President, the President is not accountable to them. We elected Biden to run the military, not these other people. If Mark Milley has an opinion on the best way to invade a foreign country, I don’t doubt that every day of the week he’s going to draw up a better battle plan than Joe Biden. But when it comes to “is it worthwhile for America to continue a $50bn/yr deployment to Afghanistan, with no clear end in sight”, that is not a solely military question. That is also a political policy question and a national decision. Biden actually gets to make those decisions, not the Generals, and they don’t have special authority to know what is best for the country. We train them at military affairs, we do not train them to decide the future of our country, we supposedly get a say in that. And overwhelmingly in the last election the country voted for a man who, as part of his platform, promised a withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Now, do I think the withdrawal’s mechanics have been bungled somewhat? Yes I do, but I also think it was a rough situation. If Biden had started full scale withdrawal efforts six months ago, what would that have done to the Ghani government? That’s not a very good endorsement of that government for its major ally to be pulling its people out, and likely could have precipitated a collapse by itself.
Now all that being said, every indication I’m seeing so far is that the Taliban doesn’t want trouble with us right now. Reports are that none of their fighters have entered Kabul’s diplomatic zone where the foreign embassies are located–some embassies like those of Russia are not even being evacuated. I don’t really think the Taliban are just going to start attacking embassy staff. The chaos at the airport was actually due to desperate Afghans fleeing Taliban rule, it was not the Taliban attacking or interfering with our efforts. There’s additionally talk that we’ve reached an agreement with the Taliban’s representative in Qatar to formalize a process where we have an agreement to streamline moving people out through the airport.
While I understand it’s upsetting to see panicked people trying to grab military planes, not everyone who wants to leave Afghanistan is eligible to come to the United States, that’s the harsh reality. Afghans who worked for us can probably get visas, but most will not be able to, and unfortunately we cannot simply take every person unhappy with their home country and move them to the United States.