Afghanistan was the very definition of a strategic backwater for most of the US sojourn there.
The US leaves when it has actually regained some significant importance with the return of Great Power competition, it sits next to Chinas restive West and Russia’s Central Asian military bases.
IMO, the US military never actually believed they would fully withdraw and neither did the NATO countries.
I think that’s probably true since so many American Presidents had lied about wanting to withdraw.
Interesting you reference its potential strategic importance–I actually think one could have made the case for staying in Afghanistan for strategic reasons. But it’s just hard when you spend 20 years telling people you’re going to leave and saying all kinds of nonsensical things about why you’re there in the first place.
I think it’s a hard sell to the American people regardless.
No. To clarify, I see the attraction of just going over there and just kicking ass as punishment for hosting al-Qaeda, declare victory and go home. And tell them not do it again.
But thought we were better than that in the sense that the common Afghani people had nothing to do with it. And since we were over there kicking the Taliban out of power, we might as well try to set up a stable government.
I think it’s the same situation we saw in Vietnam. Every President knew we weren’t winning the war. But none of them wanted to be the one who admitted defeat and ended the war. So they all kept the war going and passed it on the next guy.
Okay, I agree that our original goal of stopping the Taliban from offering sanctuary to Al Qaeda was a legitimate and clear goal and we accomplished that. As I noted in another thread, I think even the Taliban has learned from that and will probably not allow Afghanistan to be used as a base for terrorist attacks against the United States in the future.
On the other goal of setting up a stable government in Afghanistan, I feel we put twenty years of effort into that. At what point are we allowed to say we gave it our best shot? And maybe say that we didn’t betray Afghanistan as much as they betrayed themselves?
the second part of that statement came up when it discovered that the forces on our side (and theirs) had a unique to the western world idea of “rape and pillage” in the fact that they’d carry off the younger males and according to news sources when one of our officers realized that had happened (he found the boy chained to a bed) he marched out and punched the offending officer …
the pundits made much hay out of it but all that really happened was the view of "things are different here " and apparently it’s just a feature of Muslim wars and not surprising as the powers in charge knew it happened and had looked the other way since we’ve gotten involved in the region
Just keeping Bagram and Bastion would have been enough. And much more importantly the massive Intelligence network based in country, which has now been lost.
I don’t think American presidents were lying – I think they wanted out of Afghanistan. Like most leaders, they didn’t know how to leave, without losing face.
I think the typical doctrine is we don’t like to keep large military bases in countries that don’t want us there, they tend to accumulate “problems.” We want willing host nations. So to keep those large bases indefinitely in Afghanistan you would need a friendly government, but if a friendly government cannot survive on its own, you have to prop one up. Suddenly you don’t need 2 bases you need 50. It’s a bit of a tar baby situation in that regard. Now, we did keep military bases in Syria that we kinda took over or setup for a few years while fighting ISIS, and Assad certainly didn’t want us there, neither did ISIS or Russia. But that was a much more limited mission, and so many factions there were busy fighting each other that they didn’t spend much effort poking the bear so speak. But for a long term commitment it’s pretty difficult to keep a large military base in a country that doesn’t want you there, without it leading to more problems.
True, but the bigger issue is that Syria has access to the sea. Afghanistan is landlocked, and requires the consent of its neighbours for the US to operate.
The Taliban aren’t a monolithic organisation anymore than the Mujahideen were. So it would have been possible to operate at least a small group by buying off the appropriate leaders and underlyings.
Look, dude, you can either dodge JDAMS all your life or take our money and go enjoy the nightlife in Dubai, Karachi, Doha
Biden has openly admitted that he was warned; but in his hubris and arrogance, he ignored the warnings. So far he has not apologized; all he’s done is try to defend the indefensible.
He made the right decision. Being done with this stupid, pointless, counterproductive war is the right decision. Thank God he made this decision - one of the best and bravest decisions any president has made in years.
This is one of those things that had it happen on the other guy’s watch that it wouldn’t have been an issue at all.
Had the exact thing happened under Trump, CNN would have been up in arms.
Umm, CNN is up in arms. They’re not treating Biden with kid gloves.
This is a straw man argument. Withdrawing from Afghanistan is right - precious few people are arguing that the war and occupation should continue. Withdrawing in chaotic, helter-skelter fashion is not.
If you have a big piece of metal shrapnel in your body, it needs to come out. But if a surgeon yanked it out of your flesh in a damaging way instead of removing it carefully and slowly, you’d have every right to complain.
(The surgeon’s supporters would say, of course, that “there was no other way.”)
I voted for Biden, and will vote for him again in 2024 if he is running. The more I read about how things are going down, the worse it looks. There certainly was a better way of doing things. Biden definitely seems to have screwed this up.
Indeed.
I think some Democrats are operating off of a reflexive defensive instinct, when they don’t grasp that, no matter what, Biden is light years better than Trump. They seem to be worried that conceding any point means a win for Trump and his ilk and can’t budge an inch.
Even if Biden were to screw up Afghanistan 10x worse than he is right now, he’d still be a light-years better president than Trump. It smacks of Democratic insecurity the way some (not you, of course, since you’re a realist) Biden supporters feel the need to refuse to concede anything.
The poster I was responding to criticized the decision to withdraw.
And I think your characterization of the withdrawal is baseless, and pretty much just echoes the brainless foreign policy “blob” of DC conventional wisdom that nearly always pushes for war, and nearly always criticizes pulling back from war.
I mean Biden has conceded that some aspects of the withdrawal are messy, I’m not sure to what degree he should say more. Like at what point does a President saying “there are some things that missed the mark” become redundant? I’d basically say after the first time he said it. The way politics works there’s little incentive to admit any problems at all, and way less incentive to keep repeating an acknowledgement. Like there’s no point of contrition that will make people quit screaming, if anything it just becomes further political ammunition.
A huge part of why the withdrawal was fumbled is the Afghan government rapidly collapsed in about 11 days time. That’s frankly an intelligence failure that while Biden has to take the ultimate hit for, isn’t something he could have easily avoided. Drawing down Bagram early would be maybe one of the few obviously poor decisions that should have been recognized as poor in advance.
I’m not so sure this really was a chaotic, helter-skelter fashion kind of thing.
The US Military had drawn down from something like 8600 troops in June 2020, to 2500 by January 2021, and as low as 650 by August. In May, with Biden’s announcement that the US would be pulling out completely, the Taliban launched their offensive. The long-term plan, prior to the Fall of Kabul, was that there would be embassy staff, and some small number of advisors for the ANDSF, but when Kabul fell, the whole thing became “Let’s evacuate all the Americans and our associated Afghans.”, and that’s the part when it got crazy. And we redeployed something like three or four thousand troops to cover that withdrawal in fact.
It wasn’t the overall withdrawal that was the problem, it was the fact that the city was invaded by a hostile force causing the collapse of whatever civil order there was, and trying to evacuate a bunch of your own people during that, as well as a bunch of friendly locals is extremely tough and likely unplannable.