Why did the Afghan army collapse so quickly? Here's the New York Times:
As positions collapsed, the complaint was almost always the same: There was no air support or they had run out of supplies and food.
But even before that, the systemic weaknesses of the Afghan security forces — which on paper numbered somewhere around 300,000 people, but in recent days have totaled around just one-sixth of that, according to U.S. officials — were apparent. These shortfalls can be traced to numerous issues that sprung from the West’s insistence on building a fully modern military with all the logistical and supply complexities one requires, and which has proved unsustainable without the United States and its NATO allies.
Commanders [knew] that the afflictions of the Afghan forces had never been cured: the deep corruption, the failure by the government to pay many Afghan soldiers and police officers for months, the defections, the soldiers sent to the front without adequate food and water, let alone arms. In the past several days, the Afghan forces have steadily collapsed as they battled to defend ever shrinking territory, losing Mazar-i-Sharif, the country’s economic engine, to the Taliban on Saturday.
When U.S. forces were still operating here, the Afghan government sought to maximize its presence through the country’s far-flung countryside, maintaining more than 200 bases and outposts that could be resupplied only by air. Extending government operations to the most of Afghanistan’s more than 400 districts has long been the main pillar of America’s counterinsurgency strategy.
Mr. Ghani had ample warning of the American departure after the Trump administration signed the February 2020 agreement with the Taliban that called on all U.S. forces and contractors to leave by May 2021. Yet, the Afghan government failed to adjust its military footprint to match the new reality. Many officials didn’t believe in their hearts that the Americans would actually leave.
And let's not forget the Washington Post:
The near-collapse of the Afghan army in the space of just a few stunning weeks is prompting the military and Washington’s policymakers to reflect on their failures over the course of nearly two decades....“You look at the Afghan constitution that was created in Bonn [in 2001] and it was trying to create a Western democracy,” said Michèle Flournoy, one of the architects of President Barack Obama’s troop surge in Afghanistan in 2010. “In retrospect, the United States and its allies got it really wrong from the very beginning. The bar was set based on our democratic ideals, not on what was sustainable or workable in an Afghan context.”
....On trips to Afghanistan, she met frequently with young Afghans, including women’s groups, who shared America’s vision for the country....But those individuals were no match for the rot that had permeated the Afghan government. She and other U.S. officials understood that with all the U.S. money floating around in Afghanistan, there would be “petty corruption,” she said. What U.S. officials discovered in 2010, after the surge was already underway, was a corruption that ran far deeper than they had previously understood and that jeopardized their strategy, which depended on building the legitimacy of the Afghan government.
“We realized that this is not going to work,” Flournoy said. “We had made a big bet only to learn that our local partner was rotten.”
Let's round this all up:
- Hubristic nation building.
- Starry-eyed constitution writing.
- Wildly unrealistic military training.
- Vast corruption.
- Lack of food and weapons for Afghan soldiers.
- Bad negotiating from the Trump administration.
- Afghan leadership void.
I'm glad everyone is finally able to admit this now that the war is over, but it sure sounds like it's been common knowledge for at least a decade. This is why I think it's folly to suggest that things would have been any different if we'd waited another six months before withdrawing.
There's no question that the US policy class has a lot to answer for here, but the bulk of the blame has to be placed on the army. They were the ones on the ground. They were the ones who built an Afghan military that was completely unsuitable to the country. They're the ones who apparently never grasped the full extent of the corruption they were up against. They were the ones who advised four different US presidents that things were going well if they could just have a little more time and a few more troops.
The US military is hardly the only organization that hates to be the bearer of bad news. Nor are they the only organization that hates to admit they can't do the job they're being asked to do. But an unwillingness to do these things was one of the primary reasons we lost Vietnam, and our military leadership at the time swore it would never happen again.
But it did, just as soon as they found themselves in a similar situation. I remember years and years of blathering about counterinsurgency during the aughts, with army officers insisting that we could learn how to do it and skeptics pointing out that there were practically no examples of successful Western counterinsurgencies in the entire era since World War II. But after David Petraeus left the scene everyone got tired of this stuff and the nation's op-ed pages moved on to other things.
But guess what? The skeptics were right.
I don't entirely disagree, but with one very important qualification: it's not "the Army" that bears responsibility so much as the military and political leadership of the relevant branches. The men and women on the ground were let down by their leadership every bit as much as the country was.
This is on the brass and the policy class, both "professional" and political. They got us into it, they ignored the problems, they lied to us, and they spent trillions and got thousands of our people killed.
The men and women and the ground failed too. Not to the degree that leadership failed and especially since it probably was an impossible task but they did.
This. The Army may advise but ultimately the decisions on policy belong to the civilians.
Yes the Army isn't at fault. The Presidents and their policy advisers are at fault. The Bush administration holds the greatest blame undertaking nation building in an area of the world called the graveyard of empires but Obama lacked the political courage to do what Biden is doing now. Trump was the blind squirrel who found a nut, his anti-internationalist instincts meant of course he wanted to pull out troops everywhere.
In fairness to Obama, when he ordered the troop surge in 2009 Bin Laden was still alive. If Obama withdrew from Afghanistan before Bin Laden was killed we would be facing the same situation we are in now, except that Bin Laden would have made a triumphant return to Kabul. I believe that would have ended Obama’s Presidency. Obama couldn’t leave Afghanistan without Bin Laden being killed. He couldn’t stay unless he sent more troops.
After Bin Laden was killed we had been there long enough to face the problem we face now, lots of Afghanis placed in danger when we leave. Also, the American military was indicating it was a war that could still be won. I think that is a very minority opinion nowadays.
The opinion that the war could still be won is a very minority opinion among the US population as a whole. I have no idea what the military think.
But among foreign policy "experts" it remains the dominant narrative, from which almost nobody dissents. Why those people have any credibility and get covered in the media after their track record of continual error and deceit escapes me. They are serial killers on a global scale. But here we are.
The Afghanistan Taliban was fed up with the Arab Taliban. They have spent 20 years in Saudi hotel rooms because they naively let the Taliban into their country. I don’t expect them to repeat this mistake.
Oops, I meant Arab Al Qaeda.
Political courage or political power?
He was Commander in Chief - so he had had the power but of course there would have been consequences to using the power, likely he was convinced by his Secretaries of Defense and Secretaries of State to stay because of the consequences of pulling out.
He also offered the Taliban a sitdown at Camp David tied to 9/11/2020.
El Jefe, despite railing against the Palestinian rooftop dancers of New Jersey on 9/11/01, actually thought the misogynist hardliners under Mullah Omar had a lot of good ideas. For one, they would have known better how to handle Hillary than Ken Starr did. (I mean, Wm. Safire died waiting for a Starr indictment of Hillary that was supposed to have arrived in January 1997.)
Come on, Ken Star’s oversight of a rape culture at Baylor has clearly demonstrated his mysogynist bona fides.
Yeah. Kevin's off in left field on this one. When you give the army an impossible mission, don't blame them when that mission proves to be impossible.
Bingo - that's a very good way of putting it.
"When you give the army an impossible mission…"
Problem is, there are people in the Pentagon selling the idea of staying in Afghanistan.
That's not a problem. We're not staying. We're 99% out already.
The US military is a disgrace from the lowest rank to the top and all recent veterans too.
Thank you, Red Army Faction, for your contribution.
We know, in the case of Vietnam, because there is a massive paper trail, just how much lying the military did about the war. We know that McNamara tried to send his own people in to get an accurate picture, likewise some of the big name journalists who got started via their experience in that war. But both those discoveries of the truth were somewhat impotent to change anything about the war in the face of the contrary story insisted upon by the military day after day after day in every press conference.
Now, was there the same degree of endless, deliberate, lying by the military in Afghanistan? Probably.
The primary difference from Vietnam is that the countervailing forces appear to have made even less effort, and to have been even less successful, in creating a counter narrative. "Everyone" knew the reality was hopeless, and that it would all end in tears, and yet "the establishment" continued this charade for 20 years, across 8 yrs of Bush and then 8 yrs of Obama.
Hate Trump all you like but
- he was absolutely correct about the existence of a Deep State that has a certain agenda for the US, and pushes that agenda more or less independent of whether Dems or Republicans are in power, more or less independent of what most voters wants, and more or less independent of ground-truth-reality,
Is this driven by military-industrial greed, or by ideology gone mad? I have no idea, but I think it's indisputable that it exists.
- Trump was the one who pulled the US out of this mess. He may have done so in a craven fashion, and at the last possible moment but he DID IT. That puts him substantially ahead of both Bush (mainstream/old-style Republicans) and Obama (Democrats).
The military could have handled this differently. They could have engineered an annual jamboree at which they describe yet again, why they have been given a hopeless task, why what the politicians want will never work, complete with political and history lessons. They chose instead to behave as part of the Deep State. They are just as complicit in this mess, just as guilty. Not more so -- they were given an impossible task and mostly handled themselves well. But also not less so -- when the time came to tell the American Public and Congress the truth, they refused to do so, year after year after year.
Again. Stay 6 months to get the allied Afghans out.
At this point I wonder if the Taliban will try for Kabul even with 4k US troops there. Probably they sit tight until they leave. But maybe'll they take a crack at it to make our defeat really memorable.
I rather doubt the Taliban would be that foolish. It would provide plenty of pretext for return. And at the least a boatload of air strikes. Why invite that when it is clear they will get the country in short order with far less fuss.
The North Vietnamese recognized it was best to avoid interfering with the evacuations. I expect the Taliban will reach the same conclusion.
This is when we're supposed to be creating diplomatic channels, anyhow,
We'll see if you are right. Kabul is undefended right now and the helicopters are ferrying embassy personnel to the airport to get out now. They were already told to destroy papers and sensitive equipment yesterday. It's clear cut that the only reason the Taliban isn't in Kabul right now is that the USA asked them for time to get their people out.
Fortunately, the Taliban are not in favor of higher education. Otherwise, El Pepe Maximo would secure his position as the New James Earl Carter by enduring an embassy hostage standoff in Central Asia.
The Taliban are in Kabul, less than 24 hrs after your post.
https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/afghanistan-taliban-us-troops-intl-08-15-21/index.html
Nah, the Taliban planned to take Kabul only after they had taken a majority of the other provinces. They began this latest campaign in May, which was supposed to coincide with the original withdrawal date. Now they will consolidate forces around Kabul, wait for the US reinforcements to leave and then begin their assault. Probably September.
The corruption is not just in Afghanistan. Many, many millions (billions?) went to US "contractors". And the equipment sent to the Afghani's came from? Spare part supplies?
Follow the money....
I still blame Bowe Bergdahl.
Probably no one will be interested in doing it, but you can place a huge part of the blame on Pakistani intelligence services which were probably facilitating virtually all of the corruption here in one way or another.
It's cuz they have nukes. Otherwise there would be more interest. Going to get really interesting if the pakistan talibs overrun pakistan with help from afghanistsn.
Oh yes. The Pakistani intelligence service is a pit of vipers and really an organization we should watch out for because they really are our enemy.
After 9/11, Pakistan was scared out of their minds at our stirred up reaction and pretended for a while to be our friend and ally and allowed us access to Afghanistan. But that was never real. And all the while bin laden was hiding out in pakistan but somehow the compotent Pakistani intelligence service did not know? Give me a break. At least obama did have the guts to violate Pakistani sovereignty to get bin laden ( against Biden's advice).
And have you ever checked opinion polls on us favorability in various Muslim countries? Pakistan is always near the bottom. The problem we have there is not just the govt, it is with the people. They are not out friends. In contrast, the usa is relatively popular with the iranian people and the problem there is really just the govt. I give a lot of credit for bravery for any Iranian who answers any poll and says they like the usa. Which also means our support there is even higher than polls show.
We entirely in agreement on this.
I've long thought we were alienated from the Muslims we could actually be friends with while absurdly trying to force our friendship on those most naturally inclined to hate us, like the Pakistanis and the Saudis.
+1
Agreed. I'd rather have Iran on our side and cut the Saudis loose. Even the Iranian government, unpleasant as it is, pales next to the Saudi royals.
I recall a column by Dr Juan Cole, a middle eastern expert, who argued that the US would be much better off if we had Iran/Persia as our most favored middle eastern partner. He was arguing against the US's unhealthy relationship with Israel, but it goes double with the Saudis.
Yes!
Back in the day, a co-worker was chasing his girlfriend around Europe on the NASA dime. Ostensible purpose was visiting European wind tunnels. He was having lunch with Swiss engineers. The next table over were a couple of Iranian pilots. They noticed my co-worker and came over to tell him that Iranians liked Americans.
Never forget: Japanese pitching star Yu Darvish only exists because his Iranian father met his Japanese mother while both were university students in America.
I think with 20 years of let the US armed forces do the heavy lifting, the Afghans developed "Learned Dependence or Helplessness". Why fight and die when you can let the Americans do it.
Nah, lots of Afghans have been fighting and dying. Casualty rates in the military and police last year were north of 20%. It's been brutal. The Army has been bled out and morale is at rock bottom.
Did locals ever have input on what the us military was doing?
The US was burning everything each time they moved or replaced or recycled - literally - they weren't building economies. They were an outside alien force separated by language and security demands.
How were civilians supposed to build resistance to that when some bomber or column of technicals could roll in and blow it up?
Defense is not simple.
And this is all so maddening. We spend billions and billions of dollars building an expensive type of militart structure that Afghanistan can never afford to just maintain on their own.
And then they run out of FOOD?
Yes that's a real mystery.
Population was just over 10M in 1990, was 20M in 2000, is now almost 40M.
Who could possibly have imagined this might put a strain on local resources...
Building on BBLEH's comment:
NSC - principally civilians
SECDEFs - 8 SecDef (both parties)
JSC - Senior Military leaders of various services
CENTCOM Commanders - 5 Army Generals, 2 USMC and 1 Admiral (not counting fill ins)
ISAF Commanders - Various services and countries
Not to mention the bewildering number of intermediate commands, JTFs and other oversight elements (speaking as a retired Army officer)
Just a casual look at the rotating order of battle shows continuous involvement by Special Operations Forces, deployments by various Army, USMC, and Air Force units.
Let's not forget the various intelligence agencies with staff and leadership with repetitive tours or focus on Afghanistan.
This is not to indict every participant with the brush of culpability for our policies. Speaking as internal dissenter in a long ago conflict, divergent opinions are frequently brushed aside with a call to "get with the program" or "its the political leadership's call" or my personal favorite "You don't get listened to if you call the baby ugly"
But there is a organizational failure here larger than lower case "army"
But Mitch McConnell said it was all Biden's fault https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/13/afghanistan-likened-to-fall-of-saigon-as-us-and-uk-send-troops-to-aid-evacuation
And one of the Kagans said just a few more months.
Bill Kristol had an op-ed somewhere yesterday arguing that with a modest increase in US forces and a little more time, Afghanistan could be stabilized and America could keep bases there indefinitely. Some people seem impervious to learning from history.
Republicans are Machiavellian opportunists who never refrain from attempting to inflict political defeats on Democrats, regardless of the national interest.
News at 11.
It's lost in the mists of time, but there was this 'Project for the New American Century' that its proponents sincerely believed in, which was the ideological basis for the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld administration's foreign policy until the wheels fell of in 2006. A policy, as Bush expressed it, of "bringing God's gift of freedom to the world".
I suspect Obama and Trump had a pretty good idea of what would happen when NATO pulled out of Afghanistan. They had an even better idea of the political price the president who ordered it would pay. The tragedy is that Biden is the one who has to pay it. Obama should have done it in his second term.
Re w Bush,
He was a genuinely good human being who really did care about helping the Afghan and Iraqi people. But , in the end, that was part of the problem. Idealism without a practical recognition of its limits usually turns into disaster. Over and over again.
Sometimes it is better, even for the other side, to have someone who is a bit of an asshole hard ass who maybe cares about the people of the other country but still puts the interests of their own country first. For one, such a person can understand the people on the other side who are also assholes and are not just going to come over to your side because you are the good guys.
I think maybe many here think that description above is describing trump and maybe is to a large degree. But I think that fits Hillary Clinton too.
Maybe Trump and Obama were hesitant to pull thr trigger because they feared the political fallout. If so ( and more for Obama ) it would be because they live in a bubble surrounded by the establishment elite.
In reality, no, Biden will NOT pay a political price for this no matter how many screw ups might be made in the execution (unless it causes a lot of American dead).
I could go through many things that were done poorly here but will talk about one. We are clearly giving up and conceding. That is a fact anyone can see. But somehow nations always have to " save face" and pretend they had an honorable negotiation that they believed in and the other side just did not keep their word. I hope that Biden and Trump before did not really think the Taliban were going to abide by negotiations ( then they are just fools) . But having a fake negotiation to save face just makes it worse. Not only are you weak enough to give up, you look like a naive fool. Plus the fact that the Taliban did not get a clear concession means they need to humiliate us on the way out. If we had just made it clear we were leaving and only asked the Taliban for a window to get our people and allies out, they might have honored that.
And the establishment Republicans will likely have commercials pointing to Biden's mistakes in execution and be correct about it. But they might as well be ads for Biden because it will just remind the voters that Biden finally did leave and that is all that matters.
As I said, if Trump had done this like he wanted to, he would still be president.
Biden will take massive political hits from all sides if the Taliban turn Afghanistan into a safe haven for radical Islamists to establish a Caliphate, then use it as a base for regional operations.
He may if that happens, but I do not think that is what the Taliban is about.
I doubt it. You just don't get it.
Whatever forces led to ISIS and its offshoots, they seem to have weakened considerably. In any case, we need to find a better way to eliminate safe havens for terrorists than 20-year quagmires.
The scenario I described was the rosier one. There is a worse one than that: Iranian-backed fighters rushing into the vacuum, drawing the
..drawing the Saudi-backed fighters, battling the Taliban and the Afghan gov't forces, turning Afghanistan into a central clusterfuck of the region that makes Somalia look like paradise.
Yeah... but an extrajudicial killing of Cliven Bundy would set off a powderkeg in the already tinder-dry west.
I don't even see Liebermann on there, let alone any other Democrat Leadership Council vipers.
Yet I had it sworn up & down to me by Naderites in 2000 that, while algore didn't invent the Internet, he was the father of PNAC.
Gore should just leave the mainstream all together and go post-left. He and Ted K can have a save the planet rally from jail.
Ted Kaczynski is still a greater credit to a Harvard education than Ted Cruz, Jared Kushner, Kayleigh Mc Enaney, Tom Cotton, or Brieannah-Joy Gray.
The tragedy is that Biden is the one who has to pay it.
It remains to be seen how much of a political price Biden will pay. I personally think the existence of recency bias suggests that price won't be very high at all: the fall of Kabul is likely to to proceed the midterm elections by at least a year (also, apparently quite large percentages of Americans agree with Biden's decision to pull out).
However, just a nit to pick: Biden didn't/doesn't have to pay a price. The buck stops with him, and he could have decided to stay on indefinitely. I realize a lot of people would have disagreed with such a decision, but that was nonetheless a choice open to him (Congress certainly didn't force his hand). And the reality is that, whatever gigantic costs the US has paid over the entirety of its Afghanistan war, over the last several years the costs have been eminently sustainable in terms of both blood and treasure.
I like and support this particular president, and he's obviously a gigantic improvement over TFG, but, not gonna lie, I think he made the wrong call on this one.
"whatever gigantic costs the US has paid over the entirety of its Afghanistan war, over the last several years the costs have been eminently sustainable in terms of both blood and treasure."
Whose blood? Yours? Or just some swarthy natives and a few young Americans every now and then?
Feh.
Whose blood? Yours?
I'm not in the military, so, not my blood, no. Are you suggesting than only active duty personnel should have a say in whether/where the military is used? That wouldn't be consistent with civilian control of the armed forces. Also, if the standard is that "zero" casualties is the only number that's acceptable, it wouldn't be tenable to have a military at all.
Kabul HAS fallen - as reported by CNN. President Ashraf Ghani has fled the country and the Taliban is making arrangements to transfer power. The US is evacuating the embassy in Kabul.
Staying on would have broken Pompeo's agreement with the Taliban, caused the token US military presence to come under immediate attack, forced Biden to send thousands of troops back to the country, and given the Trump Republican Party a weapon to beat him over the head with all the way to 2024. People forget Trump had 15,000 troops there in 2018, pending his negotiations with the Taliban that excluded what was supposed to be the Afghan government.
What was it the Taliban were quoted as saying: "The Americans can't stay here forever; we're just watching the calendar, waiting". Or something like that.
Every N years, we'd have a complete reboot of the effort to set up an Afghan military, just like we did in Iraq. But look at Iraq: Iran comes in, supports the Shiites, and they have their PMU up-and-running. It's a pity there's no big country neighbor that wants the Taliban gone, and no in-country group that actually wants that same goal.
There's nothing we can do about this, and there was never anything we could do about this.
The quote I saw was:
"The Americans have the watches but we have the time."
The big coutries in the region - Russia, India, China, Pakistan and Iran - all have an interest in containing the Taliban, not necessarily in eliminating them. The departure of the US from this latest iteration of the 'great game' will trigger a good deal of diplomatic and military movement in the surrounding countries. It already has.
Pakistan will now have to worry about its own Taliban while trying to make sure that India's influence in Afghanistan goes nowhere. In the case of Pakistan, it's 'be careful what you wish for' time. Russia will simply beef up its military presence in Tajikistan while the Tajiks called up 20,000 reservists and is sending them to the border. The Uzbek military is capable of protecting itself. Iran has sent troops to the border already and the Taliban have told China it will not allow the Uighurs in Afghanistan to pose a threat to China.
Russia was always pleased that the US was enmeshed in Afghanistan and Iraq. It gave them a freer hand to cause trouble elsewhere. Now both are off the table.
Even in Afghanistan, the Uighurs say, "Fuck the Free World!"
The Afghans failed. We lent a hand and they failed to take advantage of the help. To hell with them. They deserve their fate. The Taliban are, after all, Afghans themselves. So much like we have to coexist with trumpist republicans, the Afghans will have to embrace the Taliban.
I’m sure it will be fine. The toothless old men raping little kids are gonna have a blast.
First it was 3,000 troops to cover the evacuation/abandonment. Now that seems to have grown to 5,000: https://news.google.com/articles/CAIiEOfAMS1Jkfviq4pb4gIc0sQqGQgEKhAIACoHCAowvIaCCzDnxf4CMM2F8gU?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen
Which seems to be well more than before the pullout:
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/08/09/taliban-seizes-several-afghan-capitals-as-us-nears-withdrawal.html
Have you ever moved? Like, moved an office, or anything more than a room?
You call in a truck, you call in your friends, you call in professional movers. And suddenly you have twice as many people packing, moving boxes, and cleaning than were there when you weren't moving.
Sure, but I don’t have to go back weeks later with two thirds more people than I started with to clean up a mess of a move.
Yes you do, when your speeding up the move.
I don’t have to go back weeks later with two thirds more people than I started with to clean up a mess of a move.
So what's your point, we shouldn't provide adequate security for the pullout?
We should have done so to begin with rather than bug out and then go oops and have to rush back.
Rick Jones pullout game weak.
Rick Jones pullout game weak.
LOL
Drop 100,000 US military in Kabul and evacuate anyone who wants to leave the country. Then level the rest of that awful place with nukes and bio weapons.
No? Well, that’s really what all the warmongers and hand wringers want. Kill all the Taliban. Save all the allegedly good Afghans. So go ahead.
In game theory, packing up and leaving had two basic potential outcomes (four in total, though), but it depended on how the Taliban and Afghans acted. The US believed that the Taliban would stick to the peace deal negotiations to achieve political power, rather than achieve it militarily. Some in the US (spanning the Trump and Biden administrations) thought the Afghans had enough capability to at least reach a detente if the Taliban chose to pursue war.
That's the reason why the US pulled out; the US wanted to believe in Zalmay Khalilzad's optimism, and so, US officials (outside of the military) thought that this was the best, reasonable choice.
This sour grapes bullshit covering all the American and western media is what people do after making bad choices, without admitting to making a bad choice.
You really think that was believed? I do not but maybe I am giving the administration to much credit for not being complete fools..
Zalmay Khalilzad has been involved, one way or another, since before the start of the war.
Everyone -- you and me and the smartest person in the room -- all fall for confirmation bias. Both Trump and Biden wanted to get out; when people tell you things that you want to believe, you're prone to accept it as good advice.
Petraeus was interviewed recently on NPR: https://www.npr.org/2021/08/13/1027537415/former-cia-director-gen-petraeus-discusses-the-talibans-resurgence-in-afghanista
The gist was, we could never win, but we could ‘manage’ in Afghanistan, apparently by maintaining a six-figures troop presence indefinitely. If this is his brilliant idea for counterinsurgency warfare, it seems like a cure worse than the disease.
The bulk of the blame for future misery lies with Afghans - the Taliban, and those who support or decline to oppose them; and with Pakistan. The blame for the misguided US intervention lies with the civilian policy-makers who gave the military an impossible task.
The US did not educate Afghan women to reject ancient patriarchal customs or kill their fathers, husbands, brothers, uncles. Most Afgahns want a fundamentalist Moslim theocracy. The US also gives traitorous Afghan collaborators like interpreters visas instead of making them stand and fight the Taliban. Except for the Taliban, Afghans are cowards just like America's chicken hawks.
Hey Goosedat, go fuck yourself.
Liberal imperialists have no solutions for the people of Afghanistan.
I wonder how all those bottom lines turned out though...
They will turn on each other now. The Talibanian civil wars will be fun to watch.
My advice to Afgan women, lay their and act like your enjoying it. It will go smoother. Sorta the way Dexter made people believe he was happy despite being very unhappy.
Women are really tired of hearing this advice from men. Just sayin'.
Americans got what we really wanted, for the most part. Our mercenaries got to go on "missions." Our generals got to command troops, plan tactics, and deploy new weapons developed just for them. A lot of our teens and twenty-somethings got to have the adventure of their lives -- and be proclaimed "heroes" for it. And everybody got paid, especially the arms dealers. To be sure, a lot of money simply disappeared, but we can spin that as the fault of "corrupt locals." And yeah, a lot of our youthful heroes got maimed or killed, or mentally twisted, but it was worth it, wasn't it?
We will have another war in ten years or so, because we like to have wars. It makes us feel like big shots. Somebody somewhere will blow up an embassy or pose a "threat" to "our way of life." There will be a new crop of generals who haven't felt the thrill of battle, a new crop of kids wanting to defend the homeland, a new batch of chauvinist politicians to exploit these bloodthirsty urges.
And our brutal, stupid, wasteful past failures will be forgotten in the rush to glory.
"We will have another war in ten years or so, because we like to have wars. It makes us feel like big shots. Somebody somewhere will blow up an embassy or pose a "threat" to "our way of life." There will be a new crop of generals who haven't felt the thrill of battle, a new crop of kids wanting to defend the homeland, a new batch of chauvinist politicians to exploit these bloodthirsty urges."
Man, are you an optimist! I'll give you five to one odds we have another war in less than five years. And we don't need a new batch of chauvinist politicians to exploit these bloodthirsty urges, because the old batch is still calling the shots and there's no suggestion they're going away any time soon.
There's no question that the US policy class has a lot to answer for here, but the bulk of the blame has to be placed on the army.
I disagree. Blaming the army implies they "failed" to carry out a mission that was feasible. I'd submit it's entirely possible the mission (nation-building) was doomed to failure, and that there was no plausible way, at least given various, real world constraints, that the United States of America was ever going to transform Afghanistan into a democratic-ish, self-sufficient, functional state capable of independently defending itself.
In other words, the blame does belong to the American political class writ large, and not the US military, which is but one tool of that political class.
I hate to break into topic without writing at Least 10,000 words, but I will try to do it easy;
I respect Jasper in Boston, but Afghanistan could never be help without going full Patreaus...100,000 US troops virtually permanently. The reason the cost in life and treasure has been so cheap lately, I mean over the past two years is simply because the Taliban knew we were leaving and so decided to take it on the cheap...were they to think we were staying, the daily cost in lives and treasure would ever have been increasing.
Here is the interesting idea....the fault was attempting to create a US Culture in Afghanistan...the US no longer is a warlike culture...oh, there is nothing wrong with being good in war...it may even be a necessity....but I watched tonight while working, Gregory Peck in the movie, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.
I had no idea it was a war movie and a very good one. But I doubt that it could be made today...Mr Peck murders and slits the throat of a German young boy...not because he was a danger to him or anyone...no, he murdered the boy to be able to steal his coat and thereby survive a cold German winter night.
The key is that there was no justification....good Mr Peck was freezing....and killed a boy. This raises the corollary question ever seen in every war...if a woman is a gun bearer for a Taliban or whatever fighter, may you kill her? May you kill her if she has a baby strapped to her back? (answer: of course you may, of course you must).
There are rules in war, important ones, but we have lost track of the idea that war is legal murder...a nasty business to be certain but once undertaken...your job is to kill people...in their sleep if possible since there is little retributive danger...in other words, murder fellow human beings, (to who you will have to eventually answer for to hopefully a merciful God for every single life robbed of life by you).
Believe me the Taliban do not torture themselves over such finer points of philosophy.
Well, enough of this.
Best Wishes, Traveller
Afghanistan could never be help without going full Patreaus...100,000 US troops virtually permanently.
That simply doesn't square with evidence. US forces were preserving substantial swaths of Afghanistan - numerous enclaves of the country -- from the depredations of these murderers and rapists -- with far fewer than 100,000 troops.
Although I don't agree with Biden's decision to pull the plug, I don't deny cogent arguments can be mounted to support such a policy. But at least possess a passing familiarity with the facts when you make your arguments.
The warlords in those supposedly pacified regions were perfectly happy to murder and rape their subjects without the Taliban.
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I must say I've been predicting this sort of end for our folly in Afghanistan for years. Once we got Osama we needed to get out, any casualties after 2010 were men asked to die for a mistake. MSNBC is showing footage of helicopters ferrying American to the airport to get out of Afghanistan. This is the Fall of Saigon 2.0.
The helicopters and desperate crowds of people trying to get on them is exactly what the Taliban wanted. Sure, they could have sat back and waited a few more weeks for the US to peacefully depart. But this -- their attacks all over the country, with one city after another falling, and the final assault on Kabul, making the Americans run for their lives -- that's golden. It shows the world how the Mighty American War Machine was defeated resoundingly -- again.
I keep coming back to the observation that the US military was trying to create a 21st c military for the Afghans. Just as in Vietnam, back in the day, when the Vietnamese were equipped with the most modern American rifles -- which were finicky, jammed easily, took excessive cleaning to maintain their functionality -- whereas the Communist-backed Vietnamese got kalashnikovs, simpler, more "primitive" rifles that could fall into a mud puddle yet still work. The US-backed south got high tech helicopters and bombers; the north had tunnels and support from the population.
Afghanistan seems, in at least this one particular, just the same-old, same-old. The US military and its compulsion to yank everybody centuries ahead in terms of ordinance and organization. Apparent inability to deal with the actual facts of the situation and culture.
+1 Coke bottle dropped from a helicopter
Oh, and talk about dependence on unreliable high tech: apparently, the Afghan military and police were taught to depend upon "air support" and US intelligence. Yet, it has to be noted, the Taliban seems to do just fine without air support or the military intelligence of a first-world country. It's as if the US only managed to teach the Afghans to "stand on their own" with the aid of intricate high-tech crutches. Not what they actually had available, or were good at using.
Yep. We should have armed them with AK-47's and Toyota trucks and let them get on with it.
At tbis point the question is if it will last 90 hours not 90 days: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/afghanistan-updates-us-airport-operations-continue-taliban-negotiate/story?id=79464831&cid=clicksource_4380645_1_heads_hero_live_hero_hed
President Ghani has fled Kabul and the country, the US is "hastily evacuating" the embassy in Kabul, all four of the main gates of Kabul have been opened to the Taliban, and the are already working on the transfer of power. It's over. Didn't even take a day.
Barely 90 minutes, it turned out.
And it wasn’t even 90 hours: https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/08/15/asia/afghanistan-taliban-advances-kabul-intl/index.html
We spent 20 years training what we thought was the Afghan army when in fact we were training the Taliban army. The army did not collapse it just showed its true colors.
People say, "The buck stops here".
Obviously, they mean to say, "Well, I didn't know how much incompetence and corruption there really was over there, I mean you know, how could I have possibly known after nearly 20 years? And oh by the way, why can't people do it for themselves? If anyone's to blame, it's all those men, women, and children who haven't learned to die for the right cause!"
The cornerstone for these corrupt acts was the explicit "peace" deal Trump made, guaranteeing that the US would leave Afghanistan. Who was at the forefront of that deal, including the release of 5000 Taliban fighters? Zalmay Khalilzad. Who was in Doha still trying to sell the media on the notion that the US had leverage over the Taliban, wanting to seek international legitimacy? Zalmay Khalilzad.
FFS people, we set the Afghans up for collapse.
From yesterday's discussion where I doubted that biden and the administration actually believed that the taliban would honor the negotiations, I concede that I was probably wrong.
Having now seen some of the fairly emphatic statements that were made ( like Biden saying there will not be helicopters on the roof of the us embassy when there now are) you just would not make such clear statements that now make you look so foolish if you thought that could happen.
And, although I still think that, in the end, biden will not be hurt politically be it, the disasterous execution of the withdrawal is going to mostly offset the positive benefit of it.
And would add that I, along with most here, did think the Afghan govt would collapse sooner than expected. But this quickly? No, this is amazingly rapid. The south vietnamese govt fought on for months. The afghan govt less than a week.