The news out of Kabul has been dominated by the bombing deaths of more than a dozen US soldiers, but there's good news too:
Since August 14, the U.S. has evacuated and facilitated the evacuation of approximately 95,700 people. Since the end of July, we have re-located approximately 101,300 people.
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) August 26, 2021
Nearly a hundred thousand people! Nobody was guessing anything like that last Monday, when scenes of people falling off airplanes was all anyone could talk about.
If we end up evacuating 150,000 or more by August 31, will any of the skeptics revisit their initial reactions? Or will they remain obsessed with the American deaths, which had nothing to do with the competence of the airlift anyway? I'm guessing the latter.
"... Or will they remain obsessed with the American deaths, which had nothing to do with the competence of the airlift anyway? .."
Not buying it, keeping your people safe is part of the job.
Ending a 20 year war is hard. Thats why both Obama and Trump took a pass.
TFG made that almost impossible by "negotiating" with the Taliban leader he got Pakistan to release, continuing his pretense of being a great negotiator even as he refused to involve the Afghan government in the talks. Then he promised to pull our troops out by the end of 2020. And yet so many blame only Biden for telegraphing pullout plans. Now the same Taliban promises made & repeated are being violated.
If the over-under is 150,000 by August 31st, I'm taking the under, but would be pleasantly surprised if we hit the upper, just don't know how swiftly we can continue to process folks, given the fluctuating security situation.
Totally OT I suppose: I've watched Biden's press conference this afternoon and I don't suppose many others will, but may I say I think he's not just a good man, but also sort of fierce? He's old, sort of, I guess, but he's an actual real person. Sounds like he's giving away top secret information. Threats nearer to home than Afghanistan? WTF? I suppose it was a purposely vague reference to the Republican Party. I feel so safe again. A sane old white guy in the White House. Ending a war. More free money on the horizon. What's not to like?
I like Mr. Biden's heartfelt sense of loss over those that die.
👍👍👍👍
Yes I noticed Biden's reference to domestic threats at home that need to be dealt with. So refreshing to have a guy in the White House who understands the real dangers and is not afraid to say so.
TV enjoys showing pictures of chaos, as if none of them had ever been to a rock concert or a football game. But soon they are going to have to start figuring out how they can spin this as a "win" for the good ol' United States. So yeah, eventually it will be as if they never said anything about "trapped" Americans, "stranded" allies, or the "poorly planned" withdrawal.
I assume the airport has reopened? And Engel was mistaken in the supposition you repeated? https://jabberwocking.com/yes-its-depressing-to-watch-the-fall-of-afghanistan/
I think the assumption was that we were done with evacuating afghans and were only going to be evacuating westerners now, not that evacuations were totally stopping.
They were wrong, weren't they.
Yes it appears so but not sure ( re more Afghan evacuations). Some news reports say that we will still be evacuating as many afghans as we can but others seem to indicate that we need to start drawing down our troops now so only thing we will do otherwise is pull out Americans. Not sure which is right.
But even if we are pulling out just westerners, that would mean we could be cutting off afghans but the airport is still "open " for westerners at least.
"... Or will they remain obsessed with the American deaths, which had nothing to do with the competence of the airlift anyway? .."
Unfortunately, yes.
You know it wasn't too long after the disaster in Beruit back in '83, where 243 Marines were killed in a suicide attack, the Reagan Administration found a nice, little war they could stage which lifted everyone's morale. I wonder where the U.S. could invade to do the same, the Lesser Antilles?
re: Beirut. It's okay if you are a Republican.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/02/07/when-reagan-cut-and-run/
"Thirty years ago this week, President Ronald Reagan made perhaps the most purposeful and consequential foreign-policy decision of his presidency. Though he never said so explicitly, he ended America’s military commitment to a strategic mistake that was peripheral to America’s interests. Three-and-a-half months after the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 U.S. military personnel — and after repeatedly pledging not to do so — Reagan ordered the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Lebanon. As Gen. Colin Powell later aptly summarized this military misadventure: “Beirut wasn’t sensible and it never did serve a purpose. It was goofy from the beginning.”
"Although the Marine’s mission in Lebanon was not clearly defined and, subsequently, not achieved, Reagan’s tacit admission of failure and withdrawal of the Marines from Lebanon limited America’s further involvement in foreign-policy disaster — saving money, lives, and time. Many pundits later claimed wrongly that Reagan was erroneous, because Osama bin Laden contended that the withdrawal was a sign of U.S. weakness; as if America’s strategic choices should be held hostage to how terrorists choose to describe them."
If one week ago, evacuations were going well, why did they have to ramp up with commercial airlines and makeshift shelters in multiple countries?
If *everyone* knew that the exit would be chaotic and messy, why weren't administration officials and the military ready for the chaos?
On August 2nd, Biden expanded refugee admission to the US to Afghans (who did not qualify for an SIV but had nonetheless helped us previously) via Priority-2 Refugee Admissions Program. The number of Afghans seeking evac, as a result, more than doubled.
Add in all the P-1 refugees who fear persecution, such as female judges, and the number swells even further. We'll be lucky if we evac half of the people who wanted to get out and qualified.
So don't be gloating about 150K.
yawn.
Just because we expanded eligibility to P-2 doesn't mean we intended or had expectations to rescue all of them, we had plane capacity to fill.
But we might have had plane capacity to fill because we were not getting out the siv holders and that was because of the crush at the gates making it impossible to get through to the airport and that was because they announced that p2 was eligible encouraging them to crowd the gate ( and others because once you expand eligibility for p2, others think they have a chance too).
No problem if you expand eligibility once you can see you are going to have spare capacity and are going to be able to get out almost all the siv holders. But don't do so on Aug 2nd.
You're overthinking again, the crush of people was there the whole time.
It Doesn't Seem as Though Anyone Can Criticize the Dead Soldiers:
But I might.
I've seen images, before this suicide bombing, of soldier bunched up at Abby Gate. Soldiers kind of looking over each other soldiers as Afghans present papers. I've been concerned about this, though not overly so. As I previously noted, I was worried about a hand grenade smuggled on a C-17, bringing down the whole plane, passengers and crew. I worried about RPG's from roof tops and lastly, lobbed mortal fire from up to 4 miles away from a very small 81mm mortal tube.
In one sense, stopping the suicide bomber at the gate may be a tremendous success, preventing it from getting on a plane soon to be in the air. But at another level, this could be due to bad discipline and a violation of the simple rules of field operational security...See 2017 Army Ranger Handbook (fight as a team, but never bunch up).
What were 13 of them doing together, possibly in close proximity? Of course, we would need to know the blast radius, were there ball bearings in the vest, where were the soldiers located at the time of the blast?
These questions should be asked in any investigation...but I doubt that they will and so I bring it up now.
I could be entirely incorrect, (I am with some frequency), and I will freely apologize if all the terms of proper operational security were being adhered to.
In any case, I am curious on this...so have at me.
Best Wishes, Traveller
Everyone wants to believe that if we do things just right, bad stuff won't happen. The bad stuff was baked in long ago. War is immoral, illegal, and just plain stupid. When you do immoral, illegal, and stupid things bad stuff happens.
Don't do war.
But now Biden says more stupid things are on the way...
“We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay. I will defend our interests and our people with every measure at my command.”
Our interests... my interests... are not defended or advanced by more war.
I wonder how many "innocent" afghans Biden will have killed in order to defend his interests. No one will care.
Biden didn't mention a war, in fact he downplayed that aspect of it. Call it whatever you want, a police action, pursuit of justice, whatever, we will find ISIS leadership and organization behind this, and they will pay (and not just for the dead Marines).
You are free to call it what you want. I call it war since the military is engaged. It’s not like the FBI pulls up to their houses with warrants for their arrest. They will be blown to bits by drones or something like that.
How 13 soldiers and 90+ civilians were killed by a single sucidie bomb is going to be a question. Even really powerful car bombs in crowded markets have killed less. The location of the attack was a ditch/canal beside the airport wall, with the US forces on one side, and masses of Afghans in and on the side of the canal. Still, unless there was a cluster of troops at just the right moment a single blast shouldn't have taken out so many. There might have been multiple blasts. Or a second blast after the the first.
(Someone dropped me an email and my response)
A Suitcase!?! A Thought I had Never Even Considered....
...I mean it is utterly perfect....and much larger than any suicide vest possible.
I mean a suitcase, a carry on with wheels, is diabolically perfect.
I slap my forehead and thank you.
There need be no op.sec failure.
I am not sure...but your suggestion is damned good.
(we often only know what we have experienced directly...but a suitcase is very good)
Best Wishes, Traveller
D ohrk,
That point about expanding the eligibility via P-2 on aug 2 is not something I have heard brought up before but it is a good point here. Did we also expand to the P- 1 refugees or are they still just people who might want to get out and maybe deserve to but we never said we will.
We should not have expanded eligibility to P-2 until we were sure that we could get out all Americans and SIV holders ( well not 100% all but all we could possibly so have room for P-2. Not only might you be giving false hope, you can cause more of a crush at the gates . Should have made it clear that we were not evacuating anyone but non afghans and SIV period- do not even bother to try to come otherwise- at least for beginning . Then , when you can see you have extra time as running out of SIV , you can announce you will start taking others the next day. Might have helped a little in keeping it more orderly.
I know it would be hard to watch us soldiers refusing to take babies being handed over the wall, but you have to do that sort of thing. Because then you get the chaos at the gates everyone thinks maybe they or their child will get lucky.
Traveller,
You go where no politician or press will ever dare to go.
And not sure whether the soldiers followed technical procedures or not, but how can they? Processing refugees at a GATE. How do you avoid bunching up some and still having the people to do that job at the gate? Impossible.
Simply the fact that we were trying to evacuate from an airport without controlling the urban area the airport was in put us in a militarily untenable situation.
I cannot blame biden, the us army or even the taliban ( assuming they were not complicit or negligent) for not stopping this attack as really no way to do so once we were in that position. Any blame goes into how we got into that untenable position
Just a note to say thank you for your continuing sane posts on this situation. They are much appreciated.
Thanks if you are replying to me.
As to Kevin's questions re revising criticisms if we get out 150,000, not so much with me.
Because I never was focused on the airlift capacity issue or the number we get out as the criteria.
All of the stupid errors ( and there were many) regarding problems with airlift capacity ( like empty flights for a day or so because we had not worked out the processing bottlenecks in advance) were not going to be that bad as long as they were not to the extent where they would reduce the total airlift capacity through 8/31 where we could not get out enough people. And they were not that extensive and never expected they would be.
Yes , if things had gone better and every flight went out at full capacity, we could have gotten out more afghans other than siv holders and p2. That would have been nice but we never made that commitment.
And seems that we did have more than enough capacity to get out who we said we would, leaving extra margin for some screwups . So even though the screwups there were worse than they should have been , still had enough margin . Note always expect some screwups and always a good idea to plan in case you do screwip real bad - have extra margin for error. Assume you are going to be incompentent in advance .
I never thought capacity issues were the big problem and downplayed those issues. The real issue to me was the problem of getting people to the airport- those who we promised to evacuate - not evacuating once they were in the airport.
And re 150,000, compared to what number? There is a bit of goalpost moving going on . The 150,000 number, I assume, that kevin is referring to , as he is now doing this consistently and the administration is too, is the number evacuated by everyone not just the USA.
Someone did say is that not the better measure as how can you separate out the different nato nations efforts. OK I can accept that and do not object to that standard. But then have to be consistent.
The numbers that were used consistently at the start were the numbers the USA alone was expected to evacuate ( of Americans and siv holders and others promised by usa). The initial numbers of maybe 100,000 were usa only numbers.
So a sort of bait and switch when you set expectation of 100,000 based on us only and then, in the middle, switch to all nato and say look " we" got out 150,000 and that's great. If that is all nato, what was the initial expectation goal for that? I do not know as we never heard all nato evacuation figures before.
And not sure this fools many here , but it will and intended to mislead the public. Who, incidentally, have no idea that other nato nations are evacuating a large portion. They will just assume that the usa evacuated 90% of that 150,000.
From prior numbers, it seemed that usa was probably about 2/3 of total. If that % age is right, then maybe the expected nato number was 150,000 of which 100,000 by us. In that case a final number of 150,000 total of which 100,000 by usa is satisfactory. Not great we could have done better and got out more. But not bad either. Just OK. And I can live with OK.
But that would be total number. The big issue to me was who. Never really thought we would be unable to have enough airlift in the end ( although first few days were concerning).
If we get out a satisfactory number , but still leave a too high number of those we always said we would get out behind ( replaced with lower priority optional evacuees) that is still a failure.
And there also some goalpost moving. All the initial numbers of Americans discussed were total left in Afghanistan discounted only by those who maybe did not want to leave. And by those numbers, it sure looked like we were not getting all out because they could not get to airport. Then suddenly Americans remaining drop way down because they are only counting based on those who specifically said they wanted to be evacuated, even though we never heard that standard used before in the numbers? Do you think maybe some always planned to leave buy thought that sure there would just be enough time to get 30 minutes to the airport while the Afghan govt controls the city ( as biden said they would) so no need to contact as do not need any help. Except it all fell apart unexpectedly fast.
Seems trying to go now with the meme of trying to blame any Americans left behind on themselves. Not going to work.
And the root of the problem here to me is one that has consistently plagued the us ( and other nations) no matter republican or democratic, is tunnel vision.
They decide what is the most probable scenario in advance and decide on what is the optimal strategy based on the most probable scenario. But that is poor thinking.
Say you assess that scenario a has a 70% chance and scenario b has a 30% chance. Strategy 1 will produce a net benefit of 3.0 in scenario a and a net benefit of 2.0 in scenario b. Strategy 2 will produce a net benefit of 5.0 in scenario a and a loss of 5.0 ( negative ) in scenario 2. What strategy is best - obviously strategy 1 - I hope you all can see that.
But our govt goes with strategy 2 all the time.
And so does most of the public in their daily lives.
Covid vaccines. Why should I get the vaccine, even if it only had a side effect of feeling bad for a few days. After all, it is very likely that, as young I will not even be that sick if I catch covid. Tunnel vision.
In Afghanistan, it seems we decided that it was most likely the Afghan govt would hold out long enough to allow us to evacuate orderly from Kabul. Or at least we would see the collapse coming in time to rush the evacuation and get the Americans out ( or at least to the airport before the taliban take the city). So our strategy seemed to all depend on that most likely scenario coming true . And not take into account the less likely one which happened.
Now I am assuming and giving biden the benefit of the doubt that we did not have a plan to hold just the airport while the taliban control the city. If they thought that was a workable plan, they are complete idiots.
And what has happened so far at least ( even with the bombing) is a reasonably GOOD result for a scenario of the taliban holding Kabul and we only hold the airport.
The problem is that we never should have been in that position.
US special operations vets carry out daring mission to save Afghan allies,
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-special-operations-vets-carry-daring-mission-save/story?id=79670236
Americans don't understand numbers. To most of us, there's little difference between 100, 100 thousand, and 100 billion. The size of the number actually depends on how loudly or how distinctly you SAY it. A talking head says, "Your federal government spent THOUSANDS of taxpayer dollars on the sex life of spiders!" and people groan, but what he referred to may have been one grad student working half time for a year under an NSF grant. So unfortunately, saying we evacuated 100,000 people just doesn't register unless there is video. We gotta have video!