Maybe I’m missing the obvious, but I don’t get why evacuating all the Americans wasn’t the plan to start with. Shouldn’t they have all been leaving back in May or June, before the shit hit the fan? Of course I don’t understand why there even were Americans there to begin with, other than military and diplomatic personnel.
The US embassy has been recommending that Americans leave Afghanistan since June. They can’t force them, so I’m not sure what else they should have done.
The withdrawal wasn’t ever an absolute pullout- it was the withdrawal of US combat troops from Afghanistan. We’d still have the usual embassy staff and military advisors, etc… that we likely have in dozens of other countries. That’s the same exact situation as in 1975 Saigon; combat troops were gone two years earlier in 1973, and all that were left were embassy staff and other US government aid people working with the Vietnamese.
And the same sort of thing happened- the adversary attacked, and the ARVN folded. Then Saigon was under threat from the NVA, and the shit hit the fan, causing the frantic evacuations. Just substitute “Afghan Army” for ARVN, “Taliban” for NVA, and “Kabul” for Saigon, and you have the same exact story.
There’s the complicating factor of 10,000 to 15,000 American citizens in Afghanistan whose reasons for being there aren’t being described, but who aren’t necessarily State Department or military. They probably should have got out sometime before now, but it’s not like the government can force them either, if they’re there of their own free will (yay homophones!).
I really do suspect that everyone involved, including the local friendlies, thought the Afghan Army would stop the Taliban at some point, and life in Kabul would go on much as before. But they didn’t put up a credible fight, and everything went insane, leaving the military to try and make something out of the chaos.
As I posted upthread, it is NOT an intelligence failure. And yes, it IS something that he could have easily avoided. All that he needed to do was to believe the warning that he was given.
He refused to do that, and now he is refusing to apologize for his colossal blunder.
He could have believed it and it still would have been the right decision to get out. And he’s gotten us out with zero US casualties so far, and so far three times the airlift numbers as the fall of Saigon.
I think things fell apart much quicker than was really expected and so we bungled that up, but the administration has made a course correction and have now evacuated about fifty thousand and is even sending helicopters out for folks that can’t get to the airport.
Short of going back in time, what more could they do?
He was not given any warnings that the country was going to collapse in eleven days, if you have evidence of that I’d ask you to cite it. I’m one of the first ones, maybe the first one, to mention the State Department’s dissent cable that was sent to SecState Blinken, that warned the government could collapse in as little as a month–but being a dissent cable we do not know if it was ever conveyed to Biden. Nor did it actually suggest the collapse could be as fast as 11 days or so.
Every administration owns a piece of this failure. I think GWB owns the lion’s share of it. Obama owns the surge and not devising a plan once Bin Laden was whacked. Trump doesn’t own the Taliban resurgence, but he owns part of the mess that happened with our withdrawal for negotiating one on one with the Taliban, and of course, Biden owns the sloppy exit.
John Wayne was never in the military, I hate to tell you. Stewart and Mitchum served, but Wayne ever did.
We couldn’t have successfully stormed the beaches at Normandy without him. 
I’m not sure if this is like such recursive sarcasm I “missed it”, but I’m pretty sure his post was about the fictional soldiers those people portrayed, not any actual military service.
Maybe, but there were quite a few celebrities who did legit serve in WWII. Just that for all his rep as a big macho man, John Wayne was not one of them. It was especially disgusting when you consider his stance on Vietnam.
The Powell Doctrine was fine. Perhaps one addendum to it should be: Only wage wars against conventional, clearly-defined nation state opponents. If one must wage low-intensity war against terrorists or whatnot, then get it done ASAP then get out of Dodge.
Wayne didn’t storm the beaches at Normandy, he parachuted in (and broke his ankle).
The problem as we all know is that we could kill 95% of the weeds, but once we left, they’d just pop up again and we’d be mostly back where we started. The solution to that problem was to “nation build” a county that would hold back those weeds for us. And we could never build that nation and here we are.
I read an article a couple years ago from a retired general about resurrecting the “punitive expedition.” The punitive expedition was an instrument of state power widely used in the 19th century up through about the early 20th century–one of the last publicly stated ones I can recall was the U.S. small punitive expedition into Mexico after Pancho Villa’s raid (although that one isn’t a great historical example because it had broader specific goals.)
A punitive expedition is basically a military invasion that seeks to change no political realities on the ground, and to not effect any permanent, sweeping strategic changes in and of itself, it is instead designed to show a willingness to utilize force and to “impose a cost” on enemies of the country for negative actions they have taken. The hope is it will enter into their leaders’ calculations before future such actions are taken, and / or dissuade them from taking future negative actions or even bring about a change in their policy.
A punitive expedition recognizes the limitations of open-ended invasions and occupations, and attempted regime change. They are essentially the infantry equivalent of the famed “surgical strikes” of the 1980s and beyond, in which series of U.S. Presidents utilized limited airstrikes to impose negative costs on countries and entities that had harmed the United States (Libya, Iran, Iraq, etc.)
One of the General’s most honest reasons for supporting the resurrection of punitive expeditions is what he calls the “irresistible pressure to act” over certain events. Afghanistan is a prime example. After 9/11, and after it was definitively linked to al-Qaeda and bin Laden, who were sheltered by the Taliban–the American public was going to demand action. The pressure of such an event would be so high that it is highly unlikely any American President can or would resist the pressure to take military action.
What a punitive expedition to Afghanistan would likely look like would be very similar to how our invasion of Afghanistan began–heavy airstrikes allowing Northern Alliance forces to take territory and degrade Taliban positions. Followed by our own invasion–except this time we would not be concerned with permanently removing the Taliban or weighing in on the future government of Afghanistan at all. We’d likely push the Taliban out of Kabul and destroy any built-up fortifications or military bases they had occupied. We would likely then seize a series of bases in the east of the country on a longer-term basis, staffed with the soldiers needed to defend them and a lot of special forces for counter-terrorism. Those guys would be left to continue the hunt on bin Laden, the 150,000+ troop deployment would be scaled down, and the rest of Afghanistan left to its own devices.
With a penalty applied to the Taliban, they could then focus on attacking us and bringing more forces back in, or they could focus on rebuilding and trying to fight against the Northern Alliance. What they would do is impossible to predict, but we aren’t committed to a permanent conflict with them. The counter terror mission in Eastern Afghanistan could continue as long as it was felt to be productive.
Note that this would not be fundamentally that different from Syria, we had over a dozen bases in that country during the Syrian Civil War. While the regime forces did not want us there, they never made any serious attempts to dislodge us–an enemy fighting more serious problems has little reason to provoke more needless fighting.
The punitive expeditions of the 19th century frequently involved serious war crimes by modern standards, and it is obvious that is not acceptable in a modern sense. But they can be tailored to the times to avoid problems like that–targeting of military infrastructure and not cultural buildings or civilian buildings, focus on hurting an enemy’s military capacity, something they will have to spend time and money to replace etc.
That’s basically what Israel has been doing for the past 20 years, with the incursion into Palestinian-controlled areas in 2002, into Lebanon in 2006, and several smaller-scale incursions into the Gaza Strip. Whether they work or not is an open question; basically they just “reset the clock” for a few years until another round of violence, although it’s been 15 years since the Lebanon conflict and there haven’t been any major incidents along that border since.
I think the issue that differentiates Israel’s experience from the punitive expeditions of imperial powers of the 19th century is Israel is stuck like glue to the troubled areas under its occupation and on its borders, which means there is no real clean ending.
That’s true. They’re more punitive incursions than punitive expeditions.
It’s because many of these wars involved contradictions and involved the military industrial complex plus attempts at controlling weaker countries. For example, most don’t know that the U.S. armed Saddam, tried to make deals with Iran, armed Islamic fundamentalists which led to the rise of the Taliban, and so on.
The result, at least for the last two decades of the war on terror, was over a million dead and $8 trillion in costs.