Like it or not, this is true:
The Biden White House will have to contend with images like this every single day for the foreseeable future pic.twitter.com/A7mhWlCpjk
— Brad Mielke (@TheBradMielke) August 15, 2021
This is why we stayed in Afghanistan so long: no president wanted to be the one who "lost Afghanistan." Because of this, a war we should have exited at least a decade ago lasted twice as long as it should have.
But put that aside for a moment and let's zoom in on recent events. Who's really to blame for the events of the past couple of months? Who's to blame for the obviously disastrous collapse of the Afghan military and the rushed evacuation of US personnel?
For partisan reasons, Republicans will blame Biden. Even some Democrats and policy experts will do the same. But it just isn't so. Nobody wants to say this out loud, but the real blame lies with the US military.
In a broad sense, of course, they're the ones who were never able to carry out their training mission in the first place. But in a narrower sense, they're also the ones who gave consistently bad advice to Biden practically from the day he entered office. How long would it take the Taliban to take over once the drawdown was in progress? At least six months, they said, and they acted accordingly. In reality, it took weeks, not months, and the result is the panicked evacuation we're now seeing.
Nobody ever wants to blame the military for failures in the field. For one thing, there's no partisan advantage in it. For another, the military knows how to fight back in news outlets, in Congress, and in the public eye. Nobody in Washington wants to make an enemy of them.
But make no mistake: Civilian policymakers made plenty of mistakes in Afghanistan, but it was the US military that was behind all these failures. They provided bad advice. They failed in their mission. They were never able to understand the country they were occupying. This is the story that needs to be written.
Actually, there is a lot of fairly harsh criticism of the US military from the right at this moment. You can start with Instapundit for some samples.
Just watched "Shock and Awe". [Movie about how we got lied into Iraq.]
We, as Americans, are not very good at soul searching. We do not seem have the capability to see beyond our own short term benefits. And passing the buck...we invented it. So here we are again. Reaping the spoils of another war.
Let the finger pointing begin. "We have met the enemy and he is us".
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I had a random thought this morning.
The Bay of Pigs is of almost no consequence (except to the sad victims immediately involved) but it sets up the Cuban missile crisis later.
My intuition is we are going to get tested really hard, by something, in a few months. Maybe it won't have anything to do with Afghanistan, but with whatever conclusions our non-friends draw from it.
everyone is in cya mode
Have you all seen this deer-in-the-headlights interview of Antony Blinken by Jake Tapper?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBE9OqILRrk
I can't imagine Mr Biden would want this disaster show, & by his own remarks didn't expect it. Blinken had NOTHING in this interview. It's professional but he looks shook. And maybe he should be. If we're looking for blame maybe we should start here.
There's no question that there have to be consequences for people in the Biden administration that had a hand in this. They should be hanging from the fuselages of airplanes themselves if there was any justice.
tRump basically cut the official Afghan government and military out and directly negotiated with the Taliban to set a date for withdrawal of the US from the country and turnover to Taliban rule. In August 2020 he had 5000 Taliban soldiers, including senior commanders released - a large boost to the Taliban. Even as late as last week people were predicting collapse in "90 days or less" - it took barely 3 days. The Taliban started laying the groundwork as soon as the turnover date was set - they've been working on this since February, 2020.
Every one in the Afghan government and military became VERY receptive to Taliban outreach, and despite some reports of hard fighting, the supposed 700,000 non-Taliban troops and 10s of thousands of air force personnel disappeared/surrendered as if they had never actually been.
This needs a thorough investigation, everything in Afghanistan for 20 years has been based on delusion supported by the US military and intelligence organizations and willingly lapped up by all too many politicians. A lot of heads should roll - but I'm not going to hold my breath.
Seems like a combination of corruption and an impossible mission. No one really had their heart into supporting our occupation. There was a huge opportunity for hundreds of billions, maybe trillions, of dollars, to be poured into the sand.
Rumsfeld, Cheney, et al started with a badly conceived plan to start with. There was no recovering from that.
It's hard to read anything about Afghanistan that isn't horse manure.
The only justifiable reason for invading Afghanistan was to get Osama bin Laden. We got him -- 10 years ago, in Pakistan. Mission accomplished.
Nation building was never a good reason to be there, and never had a chance of succeeding. We should be glad the charade is over.
Based on the coverage this past week, you'd think the Taliban took power after a terrible bloodbath. But the surrender of the Afghan government was almost entirely peaceful. What everyone knew was inevitable happened quickly but also favorably.
There may be a bloodbath and purges to come. But maybe not. We should be rightly concerned about the plight of the Afghan people but for now we can still be glad they have been spared a bloody civil war, which was certainly a possibility.
That said, almost all the harrumphing in the media has been about domestic politics and has little to do with the Afghan people.
Meanwhile, the war is over. Is that really a bad thing?
A positive from all this is few will be able to claim the occupation and nation/military building were working, it's pretty obvious to all at this point the emperor was wearing no clothes, so to speak.
Had this gone cleaner, and the advice that it would have taken several months for the Taliban to take over, that would have left maneuvering room for those resisting the withdrawal to say, "see, we should have stayed longer, and it would have worked!".
That won't happen now, we withdrew from Afghanistan, which the American people wanted, and it's going to stick. President Biden showed a lot of courage doing this, walking the walk instead of just talking the talk, there was a lot of establishment and complex resistance to actually withdrawing, he defied that and got it done.
Sure he got a lot of bad advice and rosy assessments, that's the name of the game in the occupation business. And yes he rejected some of that advice, which some will play up right now (leaving residual force). Forget about it though, were out of Afghanistan, it's an amazing thing and we're going to be better and richer for it.
All that said, let's try to help as many Afghans who helped us as we can in the next week, it's the least we can do, but we can't do tate our own destiny on it either, this whole this is messy, has been messy, will continue to be messy, but we're in a much better position now, one a large majority of Americans wanted since we got Bin Laden and defeated AQ.
Also I'd love to see some data and metrics on why suddenly Al Qaeda and terrorism are suddenly going to rise like a phoenix now. 9-11 was probably more about Saudi money than any "training" and "planning" going on in Afghanistan (which could have happened anywhere), and 9-11 was a one-off anyway. Also, clearly we weren't impacting the Taliban all that much during the occupation, considering how quickly they're consolidating control (although this is also thanks to Trump announcing withdrawal so far in advance), so they obviously were training and planning in their caves or wherever without much hindrance from us.
Last, I did hear some really sharp commentary from an American colonel (I believe) on BBC World News yesterday, who remarked that the Taliban skillfully negotiated these surrenders of various local leaders and warlords over the past 17 months without seemingly the Afghan government or our military knowing about it, which allowed them literally to walk into some places without much of a fight. This is likely the reason for the rosy assessments and bad advice given to President Biden.
That fits with the Taliban starting to work on "outreach" and negotiating surrender conditions with various groups starting on the heels of the February 2020 agreement TFG/Pompeo(?) set up. If they got moving right after the ink was dry I get a little over 17 months. No wonder the collapse was so rapid at the end.
And yeah, nobody "on our side" saw it coming as late as last week.
'And yeah, nobody "on our side" saw it coming as late as last week.'
Including many Afghanis, apparently - the ones at the airport.
If true it is a colossal intelligence failure not to have picked this up. Heads should roll.
There needs to be a formal Congressional investigation of how we flushed several trillion dollars down the toilet in Afghanistan just to watch the regime and its army fold in a matter of days. There will be many postmortems of our time there, but we can't just have realized two weeks ago, after a 20-year occupation, that the whole government and army were just Potemkin cutouts, right? Right?
Re blaming the army, I think it is fair to consider three groups.
1) the civilian leadership from the president on down to civilians in the pentagon, state dept and intelligence agencies. And they deserve plenty of the blame here as they set the policies. And that includes all administrations involved.
2) the higher leadership of the military like generals who are commanding way back behind the lines or in the USA. And their advice and execution sure contributed plenty too.
3) the soldiers actually fighting the war, say maybe up to colonels. Do you know many of them and have you talked to them? They generally understood what was going on because they lived it and dealt with the actual people. Do you think they wanted a slimy corrupt intl beourocrat in charge?
Group #2, since it has been so long since we fought a serious war ( one where our country was in actual danger) is filled with people who got promoted for political reasons, not being good soldiers.
Re blame, it makes more sense to lump the top generals with all other politicians than as part of the army. If you had formed some committee of lower level officers and enlisted to decide on policy, maybe they would have known how to support a stable govt.
Biden is free from blame because he got bad advice? Nonsense. He CHOOSES from whom he gets advice. That's part of the President's job: to get advice from the right people. Nobody forced him to listen only to the military, let alone the brass who advised him, and not to sociologists, foreign policy experts, and Afghans.
The buck stops on his desk and this is a debacle, a waste, a warning to local allies of the US in all parts of the world that they can be abandoned in the dark of night. Pulling out of Afghanistan is one thing. Doing so in the worst manner possible is another.
Not sure anyone is saying Biden is free from blame, but don't predict disaster before it actually occurs either, we gave our allies plenty of notice we were leaving, so let's get as many out as we can and then assess who were abandoned and to what extent (and here Biden is pretty blame-free, just about everyone told him Taliban were weeks to months away from capturing Kabul).
How is this the worst manner? And how would you have preferred it, given that the surrender of many provinces had already been negotiated, apparently?
Maybe I'm out in left field. Feel free to explain why.
"Follow the money."
One of the commenters above said that the Taliban were offering to buy weapons from demoralized (or unmotivated) government security forces. And they gladly sold their weapons.
Where did the Taliban get the money?
I'm not a deep student of the history of Afghanistan, but I believe the Taliban is an evolution of the Mujahideen which was active in resisting the Soviet occupation. Our CIA was supporting the Mujahideen. For what national interest goal? Did we want control of the poppy fields? Maybe making our global adversary look bad was part of it. How did we support the Mujahideen? Money.
Long before the Biden administration started up, the US negotiated our withdrawal with the modern Taliban. Why did we negotiate with the Taliban? Is the Taliban a world power?
The Taliban may be an Islamo-fascist movement currently but has the group's leadership left behind their skills at being a mercenary group? Tough fighters for hire. Pashtun. Not representative of all of Afghanistan. What dark ops arm of a larger world power could possible consider funding the Taliban?
What happened to the propped-up "legitimate" government and its security forces when the US made a commitment to leave? No more money spigot for the vast system of corruption.
Is it any surprise what's going on?
Murder, cruelty and oppression are evil anywhere in the world.
But the money we were pouring into that country was basically never going to result in us not having to continue to pour money in. It is arguable that what we were doing was preventing worse things from happening. Sustainable? Progress? No.
I think we can use the money better here at home.
Oh, I left out the punch line. I think there's more to this than meets the eye. It may take a long time to find out, and how much becomes public information is open to question.
I would say that "falling to the Taliban" - as this has been described - sort of carries with it the implication of a Western European style war where the start and end of hostilities are marked by formal battles and formal treaties.
That is obviously not what is going on in Afghanistan. The whole country more or less gave up - and the only take away is that if the Taliban had not been worried that too many US or coalition casualties would cause in increased US presence, that this would have happened years ago.
We were either supporting a majority of Afghans or we were propping up a minority. Kind of looks like the latter, regardless of how many are now rushing the airport.
It would have been nice if a 20 year presence had resulted in a majority in favor of democratic, non-theocratic, rule. But we know now the answer is nope.
Its not really evidence that we should have stayed, its evidence that we should have left years and years ago.
Yep, the situation could be more clear that we didn't accomplish much over past decade since getting Bin Laden and decimating AQ, we should left years ago, and this mess is making sure everyone knows it, no mulligans or excuses that in x number of Friedman units the outcome would have changed.
How does this mean that the majority doesn't support democratic rule?
It means a majority doesn't support a corrupt rule with the option to be shot.
But I think it is also true that a majority do not support a western style democracy. A majority support some form of an Islamic theocracy, but not as hard line as the taliban. If we had given the majority the option of a softer Islamic theocracy ( even semi democratic like turkey) vs the taliban, I think the taliban would have had limited support. Instead their choice was between a corrupt semi democracy led by western influenced beurocrats who had limited connections with actual Afghan society or the taliban.
And still not correct to necessarily say they " chose " the taliban. Quite possible a majority would have preferred the current govt, with all its flaws remain in power. And definitely would if usa kept sending money.
But the individual chose is which side to support, not which side you actually prefer. If you actually prefer the govt to the taliban, but the govt has no will to fight and will lose, of course you will publicly support the clear winning side to survive..
Credit where credit is due,
https://i.redd.it/4v55uxwmwqh71.png
"America was finally using Biden’s Afghanistan strategy. Then he pulled the plug."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/08/16/afghanistan-biden-withdrawal-military/
I tried to place this article here after I'd accidentally stuck it on a different thread and now I see it's vanished for some reason,
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-afghanistan-2654663943/
The gist being that it seems remarkably like Trump's negotiating with the Taliban was dictated from Moscow, to the extent of
releasing a number of Taliban prisoners including Mullah Abdul Baradar, the current self-proclaimed leader.
Just be nice about it, apparently.
[Just to be nice about it, apparently.]
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