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.
This is the story that needs to be written.
And of course it already has been, about Vietnam, and it will be again, history repeating itself “the first time as tragedy.”
The lessons that really should be taken from
… this, though, ought to include WHY a generation of military leaders raised on the failure of Vietnam nevertheless were unable to overcome the institutional incentives of career, political machination, contractor/vendor influence, etc., and instead went down the same path for twenty years.
(I really hate this interface btw …)
The "Colin Powell Doctrine" didn't last long, did it?
But, in a very real sense, the initial invasion had no logic, no strategy, and no specified victory conditions. In that way it was identical to Vietnam and every other small war we’ve fought since the Second World War. It was simply doomed to failure.
Even so, the fault (and the mindlessness) was mostly that of the Bush administration. They were confused about why they attacked and what were their strategic objectives (evidently none beyond a desire to build support for invading Iraq). Rumsfeld was a particularly poor planner of the war since he was obviously out of his depth and was incapable of seeing the war as anything more than a struggle for power within the beltway.
Military doesn't provide overall objective. That's for the civilian leaders. Unfortunately, they asked for more than was possible (western style democracy). More clearly stating, track down bin Laden, remove Taliban from the field,and provide enough time/training to enable a counter-force to the Taliban.
The second was only temporarily possible (Pakistan provided a refuge for the Taliban, as it was where they grew from during the Soviet occupation).
It was up to the policy makers to set the timetable around those objectives (5 years, 10...etc). Instead they chose the nebulous, I don't have a clue so make a democracy out of scratch process.
The generals had twenty years, unlimited money, and absolutely no supervision or accountability. If an overall strategy was impossible to formulate because the policy makers objectives were too vague, it was the generals duty to say so instead of testifying at countless hearings and giving countless interviews to the press saying that everything was going swimmingly.
Also, tracking down Bin Laden doesn’t seem to have actually been an American objective since we knew where he was but couldn’t be bothered, especially since it might slow down the rush to get the Iraq war going.
As someone else has pointed out, the Army attempted to recreate itself using the Afghans. They made them dependent on air support which they never developed and so when we left they couldn't function.
I disagree with the 1st paragraph.
If you saw blinken yesterday he made a point which is being mocked ( and mostly deservedly so) but has some truth. It was that this is different than Vietnam because we basically actually won and accomplished our objectives in Afghanistan decades ago.
In Afghanistan, our initial more limited objective was to punish the taliban, remove them from power ( although that was maybe not definitively necessary) and destiny al queda and bin laden.
We did all that. Mission accomplished. And of course that was not doomed to failure as we did succeed.
But then we decided to add a different goal which was nation building and establishing a free democratic republic. And maybe THAT was doomed to failure ( although not sure I agree it was absolutely impossible but clearly so hard you have to make no mistakes and the cost is not worth it).
And if our addtl mission had just been to support a decent " as good as you can get" sort of dictatorship in Afghanistan, that would not be perfect but still improve the lives of the Afghan people and not threaten us with terrorism, that was definitely doable.
The return of the taliban was not inevitable. Remember they were defeated and thrown out of Kabul early in the war before a large scale us army involvement, by local Afghan forces ( who did not outnumber them) us air power and some special forces. But now they conquer all of Afghanistan is a week against a force that way outnumbered and outgunned them?
In Vietnam, the goal was to prevent a communist takeover and that was always the primary goal. Building a democracy was always secondary and mostly because that was maybe the best way to accomplish that ( an eventual stable democracy in Vietnam was always more conceivable and realistic in vietnam).
As the communists conquered , we lost in Vietnam. But no way was that inevitable or close to it. We made a ton of mistakes and, in the end, s Vietnam just might have survived if we had honored the treaty.
Maybe, it's because different groups learned different lessons. For instance (sweeping generalizations):
Military: If you break it, you own it (all about honoring commitments).
Public: Beware of the military industrial complex's penchant for chasing wars (don't trust the military).
Poli-Sci: Military is a tool to be used with caution (use the military as needed).
Diplomacy school: We've failed if we rely on military (wars are a last resort).
Because the system rewards conservative competence, not talent. We mostly avoid complete military failure (the Taliban and the Caliphate could never beat us in a fight) but the result is conventionally minded mediocrity all the way up the chain.
Neither could the Viet Cong or the NVA. Too bad that truth was also completely irrelevant.
The bureacratic state and general American culture plus military culture. Blindness to certain kinds of cultural differences, leading to profound mis-estimations.
And how long before "Miss Saigon" be rewritten for the fall of Afghanistan?
The military deserves blame for the lies and bad advice they have peddled, but the bulk of the blame lies with the civilian foreign policy establishment. They got us into this in the first place, and to this day, few of them have recognized that it was a mistake. Hell, even now, they're still out there saying we shouldn't leave! These people, if they had a decent bone in their collective body, would give a big "mea culpa." Given that they won't do that, at the least they should STFU, preferably never to be heard from again about anything important.
Unfortunately, that is not the world we live in. The neocons will still be calling the shots, and the next war, rest assured, is just around the corner.
I have to admit, I have not been an enthusiastic Biden supporter up to now. When he first announced he would get us out of Afghanistan, I believed that like Obama and Trump before him, he would not actually do it. But he is doing it, and he will take a lot of flak from the foreign policy charlatan community and the Republicans. I give him a lot of credit. He's really earning my respect at this point.
Agreed. Unlike Bush, Obama, and Trump, Biden did what was right and has been willing to pay the political price rather continuing to pointlessly squander more American blood and treasure. I, too, have increased respect for him.
Nixon didn’t seem to pay a big price for being the president that “lost” Vietnam. My guess is that Biden won’t either. Far too many finger prints from other presidents on the whole fiasco.
Gerald Ford was president when Saigon fell.
Who lost Vietnam? No one did.
https://www.state.gov/u-s-relations-with-vietnam/
Twenty-five years after the establishment of bilateral relations in 1995, the United States and Vietnam are trusted partners with a friendship grounded in mutual respect. U.S.-Vietnam relations have become increasingly cooperative and comprehensive, evolving into a flourishing partnership that spans political, economic, security, and people-to-people ties.
Tell that to the ghosts of over 50K men and women. They might be surprised to learn that they left their souls on the battlefield to open the opportunity for Intel to build a fab in southeast Asia.
A flourishing relationship that includes a mutual distrust of China. The domino theory could have not been more wrong; as soon as the US left Vietnam and China went to war with each other.
Nixon was embroiled in Watergate at the time, and resigned before Saigon fell. It could be argued that Ford didn't pay that high a price either, that it was his domestic and economic stumbles that ended up helping Carter win the election.
Honestly? I would have accepted remaining in Afghanistan forever. It didn't cost that much in terms of either lives (2500 troops 3500 staff so 6k every 20 years) or budget (2 trillion over 20 years but thats for Iraq AND Afghanistan) and was a decent proving ground to get the military experience.
You can say I'm a big talker because I didn't risk myself. And you'd be right! Which is why I kept my mouth shut for decades and have only ever blamed Biden for not getting our Afghan employees out first. But it's over now so I can say it.
I would have accepted remaining in Afghanistan forever. It didn't cost that much in terms of either lives (2500 troops 3500 staff so 6k every 20 years) or budget (2 trillion over 20 years but thats for Iraq AND Afghanistan) and was a decent proving ground to get the military experience.
That's generally been my take, as well. And if anything you've greatly overestimated the financial costs with that 20 year average, because the US military footprint had been much smaller since 2014 or so.
HOWEVER, one element we need to consider -- and I frankly wasn't doing so (but have caught up in my analysis) is that the Taliban have largely been "standing down," at least with respect to targeting NATO forces, since they and Trump agreed to a ceasefire. IOW, if Biden had decided to reverse that move, there's zero question but that we'd have seen a sharp increase in violence directed against our people there, which would have necessitated an increase -- maybe a pretty large increase -- in our military footprint to defend ourselves properly. So we'd have also seen a concomitant increase in US causalities and financial costs (had Biden decided to stay on indefinitely).
Yep. It was a failure of the commanders, who squandered the abilities of the troops serving under them. It was an especially brazen failure of the generals back in the Pentagon, whose concern for anything other than their careers kept NATO in the meat grinder and made it into an international failure. Germans are mad at the US military for making it impossible to get out all of those who helped them.
The grunts didn't fail us.
The fat-cat generals did.
The Guardians’s assessment: https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/08/15/asia/afghanistan-taliban-advances-kabul-intl/index.html
A lot of the blame belongs to the oft praised "can do" spirit of the military. Few officers were ever willing to admit how poorly the training was going or how many construction or social projects had failed under their watch. So that spirit attained right up to the end with the generals telling Biden that the Afghan army could hold off the Taliban for 6 months or whatever. And now after twenty years chasing what was always going to be a failed war, Biden takes the blame because the ending is inelegant? Give me a break.
There's no reward in telling the depressing truth in the military.
And then it was 6000 going back, though that decision may have been made by Biden before Kabul fell: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/afghanistan-updates-us-airport-operations-continue-taliban-negotiate/story?id=79464831
What I find interesting is that the major cities fell to the Taliban without a shot fired. From what I've read, the Taliban basically paid Afghans soldiers to give them their weapons. And lot of Afghan soldiers did that because they hadn't been paid in months. Some soldiers complained that they weren't even properly fed.
The government in Kabul was responsible for paying its soldiers, but I find it hard to believe that the US military trainers and advisors were unaware of the situation. I'm sure they sent reports to their superiors but as news traveled up the chain of command those reports were filtered and massaged to present a rosy picture of the situation on the ground.
The US military has a culture that rewards success and harshly punishes failure. Excuses are not tolerated and you don't want to get a reputation as a whiner. You are expected to get the job done, regardless of whatever obstacles are in your way. The result is a culture of risk-avoidance that's particularly strong in the officer corps and it becomes more evident the higher up you go in the chain of command. Reporting harsh truths is a quick way to end your career. So I agree that the military has much to answer for.
The Taliban will take over & marry off girls as young as ten, flog women caught on the street without face covering or a male blood relative, only educate girls to age eight, prohibit employment of women.
What should be done? I'm particularly interested in what progressives say.
Outrageous as is the plight of women and children over much of the world, the answer is not unending military occupation.
How about guerrilla warfare against the Taliban? It was pretty effective for the Taliban. As the party in power, it's no longer an option for them.
Who are you planning to use to create this guerilla force?
" You have the Persian-speaking Shiites in the center of the country, the Hazara, who often have an East Asian appearance. In the far north you have Sunni Turkic speakers, Uzbeks and Turkme"
https://www.juancole.com/2021/08/sharif-taliban-massacres.html
After a time and when the dust settles, the former regional players (northern groups and Iran backed groups) will begin making a play against the Taliban. It's the history since the Soviets occupied and displaced so many . The Taliban were those that fled to southern Pakistan and taught S.Arabian fundamentalism (think middle eastern incels).
In other words Hannity and Ingram will be cheering them on, with Leon Black buying all the ad time.
Only thing I can think of that I think coulda/shoulda been done is get as many people, especially. Females, out as possible. Screw the visa rules. There are people, esp. women, all over the world in this type of situation. We have a special responsibility to Afghanistan only cause we invaded.
If the people fleeing the Taliban fought the Taliban with the same energy with which they exhibit their cowardice, they could successfully establish a nation free of theocracy.
I don’t think there’s anything that can be done. There’s a point where we could have been the impetus for positive things in Afghanistan and the afghans seemed quite receptive. But instead we allied with horrible warlords and installed a central government that utter lacked legitimacy and was mainly interested in robbing the Americans blind. That was our shot and we chose not to take it.
If the afghans want freedom or equality for women or simply to be rid of an oppressive theocratic regime, they will have to make their own revolution. My vote is that we find it by seizing the money stolen from us and handing over every high ranking official who got out to the Taliban. .
Brings to mind the old AA 12 step prayer: “Dear God, grant me the power to change the things I can, the strength to accept the things I can’t, and the wisdom to know the difference”.
This progressive says you'll have to ask the Afghan people. It's their country, not ours.
This progressive notes that there are many societies around the globe that treat women poorly. The US cannot afford to usurp all such governments and impose its will.
This progressive says that it is conservatives, not progressives, who have been the impediment to women's progress. Why aren't you interested in what conservatives say?
Why should progressives put the concerns of Afghan women over those of American women who can't access a safe abortion in their own states?
And people in our own country who are having their voting rights attacked, attacks on public health measures intended to save lives, and so many minority groups oppressed in so many countries, etc, etc,
And is your view that we should have stayed militarily involved in Afghanistan for another 20 years to protect the rights of Afghan women? I'm seriously interested in what you say.
How much longer before the military industrial complex and the jingoism it feeds on will find an excuse for the next ruinous misadventure?
That's simplistic and wrong. The most immediate failure came at the hands of Biden's NSC where intelligence, military commanders, diplomats, and civilian leaders are put together to give POTUS their assessment.
Fine, if your choice was to leave, so be it. But, you should have evac'd everyone before the military left. I find it really implausible that the military would have said otherwise, particularly since the world of punditry had been saying this for months and former military and current military were taking to the airwaves that we had to work harder and move faster to evac our allies before we left.
The buck stops somewhere, and you're telling us that it stopped with the military? No way.
This blame game is all bullshit, though, to alleviate the obvious cognitive dissonance tugging at the conscience of good liberals and faithless conservatives.
Can you say it? We fucked up royally. This is our FUBAR clusterfuck of dumbassery fuckups.
Eliot Cohen speaks with an even-handedness that I simply won't do, but perhaps people are more receptive to his approach.
Actually I understand Pres. Biden addressed that in his speech today. The Afghan government didn't want the US to start evacuating Afghans because they were afraid of widespread panic. Of course, that's what they got anyway, but would they have joined the Taliban even earlier and the use would have a small number of troops facing a lot of enemies.
The corruption of the Afghan government is at least 10 year old news; I can't even remember when I first started reading about it.
If the government was so corrupt that it failed to arm or pay its soldiers, wasn't it just a matter of time before we ended up here? And this couldn't have been a secret to the intelligence services.
The intelligence services may not have said it in public, but I'd really, really, hope that they warned the President and his staff that things were going south over the last decade.
I don't think you can blame the military for what's happening. The sudden withdrawal, and Trump's draw downs before this, triggered the collapse. The civilian leaders - Biden and Trump - are to blame.
From the London Times:
"The almost overnight withdrawal of the vast bulk of American troops last month, followed by their counterparts from other Nato countries, set the stage for the collapse of the demoralised Afghan forces.
The Afghan air force has struggled to keep its fleet maintained after the disappearance of civilian contractors employed to do so, while Afghan army commanders report being forced to surrender outposts after running out of food and ammunition.
The Taliban claimed this morning to have seized Bagram air base outside Kabul, from which American troops departed en masse and unannounced on July 4, leaving behind vehicles, equipment, weapons and ammunition."
"the vast bulk of American troops"? There was little more than a token force left in the country when Biden took office - 2,500 compared with 15,000 in 2018.
I certainly can blame the military. You are mistaken to look only at the last 18 months. The military was largely responsible for the strategy of creating a functional Afghan democracy and functional security services. They abjectly failed at doing that. And then the military was at least partially responsible for assuring Biden that we'd have six months to evacuate those that needed to leave the country, which turned into a searing indictment of those involved in our intelligence operations.
No they were following the orders of the President w/guidance from NSC etc. The failure was thinking that you could have created a functional country in the first place. I should have begun an orderly departure after we got Osama.
Bothsides!
The Taliban were merely waiting until we were gone to make things easier. They had this capacity long ago, but why waste troops when you can accomplish your goals by waiting a few months?
Hate to say it but, to be honest, classic August story. 99% of Americans have no idea where Afghanistan is.
That said, I’m mildly curious to see if if Tucker supports the Taliban since they share so many political ideals.
Naturally the search is on to find someone to blame, because admitting that the entire US military and political establishments were collectively responsible - along with a bunch of other world leaders who opted to humor Washington by supporting its "good" war - would be unthinkable. It remains the truth.
This is such a disaster. It appears thousands who worked with the US, or had important government jobs in Afghanistan, are not going to get out. I wonder if the Taliban will be holding mass executions of these people which they will declare to be traitors?
Like anybody cares
People with normal empathy toward others care. Are you a sociopath and things like this don't register with you?
I don't think it is. I think by Thanksgiving, no one will care - not even if the Taliban over the next few weeks shoots a bunch of people who worked with the US that we didn't get out in time.
By New Years 2022, it'll seem strange that we didn't withdraw years ago.
I agree. How many Americans even remembered the war existed a month ago?
I think Thanksgiving is actually too far away. Americans have been done with Afghanistan for years. Only the most dedicated news and politics obsessed will still care by Sept 15.
Is Military Intelligence still an oxymoron?
"The speed with which Taliban forces were able to take control of the country has apparently caught our own military and intelligence forces by surprise; military estimates had continually predicted it would take months or even a year before Taliban forces were able to win against Afghanistan's U.S.-backed government forces. The United States recently completed a draw-down of U.S. forces inside the country after twenty years of armed occupation.'
I would suggest re-reading McMaster's Dereliction Of Duty. The lower levels of military talking among themselves have been pretty aware that the training was not going well. That whenever we left it was going to look like the last days of Viet Nam. What I think has been going on, and the incentives will always push things that way, is a civilian leadership that wants tone told things are going well and military leadership that gives the best possible assessment to everything they do. No one at the flag level was going to tell POTUS that we couldn't turn the Afghan military into a functioning unit with the corrupt, inept govt leading them.
Steve
This, exactly
I just watched the final days of the US in Vietnam. Pretty insightful.
"The US military has a culture that rewards success and harshly punishes failure. Excuses are not tolerated and you don't want to get a reputation as a whiner. You are expected to get the job done, regardless of whatever obstacles are in your way. The result is a culture of risk-avoidance..."
I would like to steal the above from George Salt....and so I think I will...sneaking away like a thief in the night with his words {grin}).
What can be said? A snarky....the wrong people are going to die now because we refused to kill the people that needed killing.
But seeing all the people dancing in the streets today...was disheartening. The Afghan people we were supposed to be protecting...wanted an Islamic Caliphate...the 20% of the population that we knew, the urban elite, were us...therefore that is who we knew.
I try to war game this out...46% of the total German male population were killed or wounded in WWII....about 20%....and that is leaving out the 350,000~500,000 left out of the total but killed by the Allied air campaign.
Was the United State (and the West) ever prepared to kill this many Afghani's?
Well, of course not, not even me...and without a doubt somewhere along the way Pakistan's 220,000 people would become inflamed and enter the war...
So no, No Way Out.
Traveller
https://abcnews.go.com/US/afghanistans-collapse-us-intelligence-wrong/story?id=79470553
Col. Kurtz Likewise understood this about Vietnam. The only way to win was genocide. It was what drove him insane.
In fact that makes me feel better.
"The intelligence community assessment has always been accurate; they just disregarded it," the official told ABC News, speaking about the Biden administration.
I doubt the anonymous official is a mind-reader. Anything's possible, and one possibility nobody seems to be contemplating is that the President of the United States knew damn well there was a strong possibility of precipitous collapse by the (now former) government of Afghanistan. And he was ok with that, because a fast collapse is better for Democrats (and the country) than a slow, more agonizing collapse.
I'm hardly suggesting Biden and his party will pay zero political prices for what has transpired. But it's hard to imagine Afghanistan will still be dominating headlines next April.
Maybe we're thinking about this wrong.
We went there and beat these guys up for twenty years and there was nothing they could do about it, and then we left because it just got tedious.
Is that really failure?
Exactly.
Regime Change: failed
End Radicalism: failed
Control the entire country: failed
End the Taliban: failed
Neo-Con foreign policy: failed
Spend trillions in US wealth: SUCCESS
We changed the regime for twenty years, we killed masses of them with impunity, the Taliban may have won the day but where will they be a year from now when they'll be forced to prove they can be better than the US, and when they can't do that and the Afghan economy has collapsed it will leave them more vulnerable than ever.
Afghanistan is a quagmire even for Afghans.
So, give it a year and a half and this is the perfect neo-con outcome, murder them with impunity for two decades, give up because you're bored, step away and watch them collapse on their own and then everyone remembers all the nice things you did.
Nobody ever wants to blame the military for failures in the field.
I have zero problem blaming the military when they're to blame. And sure, there's plenty of blame to go around for this fiasco, including the Pentagon.
But in a country where the military answers to elected, civil authority, it is ultimately the latter that's most responsible. (And if we're really being brutally honest, that latter translates into us voters). There's no law of physics saying government officials have to blindly accept the recommendations of generals, especially year after year after year...
Anyway, Kevin's right no US president has wanted scenes of Taliban triumph to make the evening news on his watch. But "cold-eyed" Biden (that's how the media has taken to describing him) has had enough sense to take the hit early enough in his first term that it'll likely cause little political damage. Midterms are still a long ways away (never mind the presidential election) and my reading of the tea leaves suggests most Americans support the decision to pull out, even if the process has been messy, chaotic and humiliating.
Lots of posturing from the media today. Few of them really care about Afghanistan. They are just afraid (or hoping) republicans will get some votes because of it. That’s silly.
Next up… republicans will start going after Muslims again. Terrorism! Round them up before all the Taliban sympathizers can attack us here at home!
The story that needs to be written, is that the most powerful military force the world has ever seen, is worthless when your mission is to prop up a corrupt foreign regime that lacks popular support.
Ho Chi Minh was right: we never lost a serious military engagement in Vietnam, and we still lost the war. We lost in Cuba, we lost in Afghanistan, we lost, we lost... every time that we prop up a government that puts American interests before its own people.
The irresistible might of the US Military is as much of am myth as "conservative principles".
Now, if the mission is to fleece the American people of billions and trillions in wealth to be hoovered up by the private sector: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
https://www.duffelblog.com/p/afghan-war-planners-caught-plagiarizing?r=askdd&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&utm_source=copy
“In Iraq, at least we did it in funky and creative ways,” said retired Gen. Mark Scruggsfield, who planned numerous ill-fated operations for which he was awarded three Legions of Merit and a six-figure job after retirement. “Makes me cringe that our best officers can’t even find original ways to lose.”
Bush/Cheney got us into Afghanistan in 2001 and we were still there at the end of the administration in 2009, about twice as long as our involvement in WW II. We had not accomplished either of our goals, which were a) capture Bin Laden, and b) establish a stable government. Later administration had to deal with the mess.
Why would politicians not realize that the generals always give overoptimistic evaluations? It was perfectly clear what happened in Vietnam. What the generals do is a constant.
Also give the "liberal" media a lot of blame. In effect they usually favor jingoism - they need it to draw readers/viewers. They strongly supported the Iraq invasion, which obviously drew attention from the above supposed real objectives for getting into the Middle East in the first place.
But were those are goals initially and/or should they have been?
Capture bin laden , yes, that was set as a primary goal. Personally I think it should have been secondary. Capturing a single person trying to evade capture is hard - not something you should expect to surely do within a decade. And they could end up dead and buried and you will not even know.
The primary goal should have been ( and it was one) to punish the taliban and send a message to anyone in the future not to harbor terrorists planning to strike at the usa. And prevent any future Afghan govt from harboring terrorists. A stable Afghan govt is nice, buy not essential to our interests. An unstable mess is just fine as long as no space for terrorists.
But really establishing a stable govt would not have been that hard. What was near impossible there was establishing a stable democratic western style republic and that is what we tried to do.
Someone above said we allied with "horrible warlords " but we did not. If we had, they would likely be solidly in power today. Being " horrible " , they would also be hard mean tough fighters who would do whatever they needed to win. And, if they wanted our support , we could probably restrain their worst excesses.
But we had a better choice. There were plenty of " not so horrible " warlords which we did ally with at the start available to build a nee afghan govt. It might not have been a true democracy and probably still been a more mildly Islamic state , but a lot better then the taliban.
Instead who we ended up installing were corrupt maybe " horrible " beurocrats who were far softer and outwardly "civilized " then a warlord.
Rule #1 do not expect a new leader of a place like Afghanistan to be someone who has to give up us citizenship to become Afghan leader or was a former intl bank official.
And we just were unable to accept the realities of tribal warfare and politics. Yes, the taliban was and is an hard line islamist group. But it also was mostly a Pathan group and opposed by non pathans. Some non extreme islamists supported the taliban as they were pathans and non pathan islamists fought against them .
Going in to defeat the taliban was also going in to defeat an ethnic group to a large extent and we had to accept that. And putting a Pathan right back in as leader because " democracy " was just stupid.
The American peace and anti-war factions blame the military but are insignificant compared to the toadyism of conservatives and liberals.
"They just need more training" was a refrain in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Clearly it's BS. There's no amount of training that will prop up a government that doesn't have broad support.
I never want to hear that we need to continue an occupation so that we can provide "training" again.
It looks like the Afghans are mobbing the airport. So. Since the concern is them sneaking some terrorists in with the refugees how about this:
Women and children go. Afghan guys who can prove they worked for us can go.
Perhaps this will help folks contextualize Afghanistan better. Most of this I've never heard discussed in the media, but that's to be expected as MSM like to focus on tragedy and finger pointing. Juan Cole, regardless of your view of his opinions, has a deep understanding of the ME and Afghanistan.
Top 6 International Winners and Losers from Taliban Reassertion in Afghanistan
https://www.juancole.com/2021/08/international-reassertion-afghanistan.html
(India, Pakistan, Iran, Russia, USA, Uzbekistan/Tajikistan)