Over at National Review, John Noonan condemns the fact that we have failed to evacuate every last Afghan who ever worked for the United States:
In our hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan — perhaps the most cynical display of national treachery I have witnessed in my lifetime — we left behind multitudes of innocent Afghans who trusted America, who worked with Americans, who risked their lives as interpreters assigned to U.S. rifle companies, who braved the Taliban by teaching little girls how to read, and who were betrayed.
We gave them our word and we broke it. To this day, no one has apologized to them. Few have offered to help. The president still claims his evacuation was a success, if and when he talks about Afghanistan at all.
National treachery? We were in Afghanistan for more than 20 years and we accomplished virtually nothing. How long should we have stayed? The military recommended that we keep 2,500 soldiers there, but that's a joke. It takes 100,000 troops or more to have any real effect on the country, and no one, Democrat or Republican, was in favor of that. The Taliban was ascendant whether we liked it or not, and withdrawal was our only choice.
As for the Afghans, we evacuated about 120,000 of them. That's a helluva lot. As painful as it is to say this, I don't think we ever promised to evacuate every single Afghan who ever helped us, and I don't think that would have been feasible anyway. It's just not something we could have done.
If you want to argue that we should have stayed in Afghanistan in force forever, fine. Make that case. But be prepared for not having many people on your side. In the real world, withdrawal was the only real option in 2021; the operation went about as smoothly as anyone could hope; and we rescued lots of Afghans from the Taliban. It's a tragedy that the Taliban is back in power, and it's a tragedy that we couldn't evacuate everyone who might be a Taliban target. But the truth is there was very little we could do about that. In light of that reality, the Afghanistan withdrawal was as much of a success as it possibly could have been.
Noonan's issue is with Trump, not Biden. It was Trump that negotiated an agreement with the Taliban and then cut troop levels to the point we had to send more troops in to manage the finale evacuation. Like with so many other issues, Trump made a mess of it and then left Joe to clean it up.
It puzzles me why anyone bothers critiquing anything in National Review.
I understand and weakly agree with the notion that you should see what the other side is saying, but TBH the National Review really isn't the "other side" anymore. They don't have any real clout. And on top of that, critiquing their drivel has always been pointless.
We admitted over 400,00 Vietnamese boat people into the United States. I really don’t see why we couldn’t have admitted a similar number of Afghans.
Well, I guess I do see why. In our current anti-immigrant/refugee political climate I suppose it would have been political suicide.
It's too good a campaign issue. Republicans can simultaneously scream for keeping all those dirty immigrants out, while simultaneously deploring "the Democrat Party" for "abandoning the innocent Afghan allies who trusted America".
Doublethink isn't just a word out of 1984!
You may want to look at the map and think about as well the phrase "Boat people" - it is vastly easier to get out of a country by water than a mountainous land-locked enclave (Afghanistan).
The movementy of large numbers of persons by boats of all sizes is a quite different prospect than the Afghani case (of course as I recall the boat people were not a flight organised by the USA itself but post-facto flight, so not proper benchmark in time either).
I wasn’t talking about method of transportation or date of flight. I was talking about the political will to admit hundreds of thousand of Muslims into the country as refugees. God help the Democratic politician who allowed that and a few ended up as criminals.
Because congress made it illegal for more than a token number of afghan allies to immigrate to the US. (Biden used his emergency powers to ignore that law after Kabul fell). And we admitted the boat people only years after we left Vietnam. In the time frame of admitting the boat people, we have presently admitted vastly higher numbers of afghans. In terms of afghanistan, to parallel vietnam's boat people, we would expect them to begin to arrive next year. Also, we have a soft spot for ethnic cleansing. (The boat people were ethnic chinese).
"(The boat people were ethnic chinese)"
Knowing numerous ethnic Vietnamese who came here in the late 1970s, this doesn't sound right. My evidence is only anecdotal, though. Do you have a citation or other evidence for this?
For sure a lot of ethnic Chinese Indonesians became refugees as a result of ethnic cleansing, but I hadn't heard about this in Vietnam.
But the truth is there was very little we could do about that.
We could have clapped even louder. And faster.
J. Frank Parnell is absolutely right. Biden had two choices: go ahead with the planned withdrawal even as it was clear that the Afghan government would not survive, hope for the best and get the hell out of there with as many people as we could bring with us, or basically reinvade the country with tens of thousands of American troops, occupy Kabul, reopen a hot war with the Taliban -- which may have involved hundreds if not thousands of American of casualties/deaths -- all while trying to evacuate our allies under fire.
That was not a tenable option. These Monday-morning quarterbacks like Noonan have it pretty nice. None of the responsibility and all of the self-righteousness.
+1
Agreed.
Indeed. The Defendant deliberately made a mess of it, ordering all troops withdrawn once it had dawned on him he had truly lost the election (The military successfully kept a few thousand.) Tearing down the federal government, implanting maga sleepers throughout "the Deep State", replacing cabinet heads with even less competent stooges... if he couldn't have it, nobody could.
This was at the same time the Defendant was screaming "election fraud" and whipping up his little insurrection and queering the electoral vote. Gotta play all the angles!
"ordering all troops withdrawn once it had dawned on him he had truly lost the election" Trump didn't issue any orders after he lost the election. He was completely AWOL from his duties as president. And since the US brass was fundamentally opposed to admitting defeat, they weren't going to do anything on their own initiative to bring about the withdrawal. Miller explicitly stated in the announcement in November that the US forces would be down to 2500 by Jan 15 2021 that this was not a new plan or new orders.
He had already drawn down a LOT of troops before going AWOL, including Bagram air field. From the LA Times, published on July 7, 2021:
Hmm edit period timed out while I was trying to add a coda,
I don't think there were many US soldiers left at Bagram, so they were able to slide out without the Afghan soldiers even realizing they were gone. To me that says a small convoy. The Taliban were honoring the cease-fire - and had started negotiating the surrender of the Afghan soldiers starting shortly after TFG signed the surrender agreement. But ISIS remnants were still hoping to get a few last licks in. AFAIK an ISIS unit claimed "credit" for the bombing as Kabul when the evacuation started.
The big political failure of the Afghanistan War is that we never got the Pakistani government to get truly invested in the US-backed Afghan government, as opposed to the Taliban (who they were openly backing and sheltering even while they allowed US supply trucks to reach Afghanistan and cooperated on anti-terrorism stuff).
As long as the Taliban had their backing and shelter, the US was going to have to stay in Afghanistan forever at great cost or else they'd take over.
I do think we should have offered asylum to any Afghan who wanted to leave in the wake of the evacuation, and especially any Afghan women who was employed along with their families. We could absorb them - the US job market was incredibly tight at the time.
A job market for native language speakers is not the same as a job market for mass refugees. That is simply an incoherent non-sequitor and magical thinking.
Of course if one is focused on the English speaking elites, then rather the diffrent case.
This aside, such a mass proposition would have accelerated the collapse of the Afghan regime that the USA and allies were propping up.
The political failure you committed was engaging in a neo-colonial "remake the Afghani savages into good little American style Liberals with good little American style values" rather than allowing that whether Americans or Westerners particularly like Afghani culture (or cultures in the plural) it is the native culture.
Rather you reran a modernised colonial project, dressed up in the latest fadish equality and development language with proper Lefty call outs along with liberal Righty ones for balance.
That was short of engaging in a Stalinist style cultural genocide (see Soviet re-conquest of Russian Central Asia, and yes genocide), always going to fail.
Compromising and allowing a natively rooted compromise that would have included indeed retrograde elements was necessary, rather than trying to create Afghani Mini-Mes.
Who said they need to speak english well? The job shortages in 2021 were overwhelmingly concentrated in the services and lower income job sectors. Those have historically had a high concentration of non-English-speaking immigrants as well.
But in any case, the people most likely to flee to the US under this situation are going to be folks who are more likely than the average Afghani to be educated and english-speaking.
Pretty sure the translators had excellent english skills. And the original commenter did limit it to those who worked with the US, most of whom could speak english. Also, how does someone become as evil as you?
I agree with Kevin. If we had withdrawn in 2006 ,2011, 2016, 2021, 2026, or 2031 the results would have been the same, and the departure would have been as messy.
That's why I think Obama should have cut them loose in 2013. Bin Laden was dead, Obama didn't need to worry about re-election, and three years between February 2013 and November 2016 would have been enough.
He didn't do it because he didn't want to rock the boat in his final term on foreign affairs, and was much more ready to move into the Davos Man buckraking phase of his life post-Presidency.
If you don't count a mass rise in youth literacy, women's rights, freedom, and so on, nothing was achieved, no. Otherwise, a lot was achieved but all was lost BECAUSE OF the withdrawal. And no, you don't have to hold an entire country to influence things positively. The US and its allies could have just held the cities. It's how things work in Afghanistan anyway: progress spreads from the cities. You don't impose it in the countryside at gunpoint. In fact, what one might call the "Berlin option" worked even in Germany. Perhaps holding Kandahar would have been difficult. But Kabul, Mazar-i-Sharif, Herat? I don't think so.
All US administrations, Dem or GOP, let their Afghanistan policy be set by the military. Who think in terms of conquering and holding ground. Kevin follows that mindset too: either you hold everything or you abandon everything. Right up to the end, a switch to a more sociologically sound policy would have been possible.
This is incoherent and wishful thinking.
Just hold the cities and let the countryside go. Alrighty then. When everyone in the cities is starving because delivery trucks can't pass through the countryside, what happens then?
Presumably you fly everything in, the same way that West Berlin was sustained for years when Russians restricted bringing stuff in by road. (Although I don’t know how many missiles the Taliban have to shoot down aircraft.)
I don’t think holding the cities while letting everything else fall would be a successful or promising strategy, but it certainly has been done before.
How much did the Berlin airlifts cost, in both money and lives? And how long did we sustain it?
Were Americans really ever willing to commit that much to Afghanistan, with no end in sight?
Please.
The Taliban de facto controlled enough of the countryside for TWENTY YEARS to prevent delivery trucks from passing through. The thing nobody here seems to realize is, they didn't attack major cities with an intent to hold them until the Americans left. Even in war, there are such things as ententes. Trade continues. Civilian contacts across the lines continue. I've been in civil war zones and in Afghanistan too. Clear separations are a fiction. I insist, the cities could have been held. Also, anti-American feeling grew because of what the US did in the countryside.
Except none of those things were popular enough among Afghans, across two entire decades, to last a month past our military's departure.
I have no idea how "things work in Afghanistan", but the cities had twenty years to influence the country side and they failed.
I wish it weren't so, but we accomplished very little.
+1
America didn't fail Afghanistan, the majority of Afghani men (and probably many Afghani women) did. We spent 20 years trying to Americanize a country that clearly didn't really want it. Some of their people did, sadly, but not nearly enough.
So yeah, nation-building lesson learned for the 900th time?
+1
This. The Afghan people voted for the Taliban through their support. They were happy to take the aid money though.
The berlin option worked because, with the exception of 11 months beginning in June of 1948, the Soviet union cooperated and aloud free travel of goods through their territory to Berlin. There is zero chance that the Taliban would allow that.
Nah. Once it was clear the US wasn’t honouring the agreement Trump signed the Taliban would have resumed hostilities against US forces. Therefore your idea would have left the cities open to constant attack by the Taliban/ISIS and indefinitely supplying them for years/decades it would take for the cities to maybe sufficiently influence the countryside would be much, much longer than the Berlin Airlift (which was not conducted against a backdrop of constant Soviet fire). Endless attacks on the cities from an uncontrolled countryside and the impositions that securing the city and supplying it by air would have on Afghani civilians would have made such an idea incredibly unpopular with them. While the cost of years and years of supplying Afghani cities by air and the increased deaths of US forces would make it an incredibly unpopular idea with US citizens.
Exactly.
How many Afghans did John Noonan kill while serving in Afghanistan?
How many Afghan migrants did John Noonan sponsor after demobilizing?
John Noonan would have been writing articles during the evacuation about how we can't take in that many Afghan refugees because they might be terrorists.
Perhaps John Noonan of the National Review would like to go over there himself and take care of the situation.
Oh, he'd like other people to do it for him? Nope.
A continued occupation would cost money. Would John Noonan support a tax increase to pay for this occupation. Or should we just run up the deficit and National Debt?
I'm still waiting for republicans to explain what Trump would have done differently
He would have withdrawn our forces without casualties and the government would have held because the Taliban knew they couldn’t do anything because…TRUMP.
He would have abandoned 100% of our afghan allies. And all dual citizens and landed immigrants, (none of whom are real, i.e. white, americans i.e. he would have evacuated the US embassy and left everyone else behind.
Aw this is just more of the Gospel of St. Trump. It's a Received Truth that the False President who stole the election from him abandoned Our Heroic Afghan Allies.
You can argue facts and details all you want with the cultists and their propagandists, but they'll never admit to inconvenient facts nor to the logical implications of their assertions. They are simply reciting the canon.
You might as well have a discussion with a monkey. They may mimic your actions and look like they're engaged, but nope.
Have we forgotten what religion most Afghans follow? The same people who cheered Trump's ban on Muslim immigrants are now criticizing Biden for not bringing in 100,000's more Muslim immigrants.
They're not really the same people. National Review hates Donald Trump. The people aghast at the afghan allies being left behind are the people who would have continued the war, i.e. traditional conservatives who at best tolerate trump, while like Tucker Carlson, pray for his disappearance.
National Review hates Donald Trump.
Maybe, but it doesn’t stop most of their readers or their contributors from voting for Trump.
In my lifetime, I witnessed the United States shift its attention to a second land war in Asia before Afghanistan was rebuilt as a pillar of democracy.
Wasn't a big deal, but you mighta heard about it: a little thing called the FRENCH REVOLUTION! ????
While I broadly agree with the article, there was a third option. Keep maybe 10-20,000 troops in there, enough to guard Bagram and provide a special forces presence for selected missions, and use airpower to pummel any Taliban formation unwise enough to gather in somewhat large units.
It would have cost us some billions of dollars and a number of casualties and may have been enough to prevent a Taliban victory for a number of years. It would have been costly but not EXPENSIVE... The endgame of that option was probably an eventual Taliban victory, although it is possible albeit unlikely that something positive could have happened with more time.
(Not advocating it, just presenting a third option).
"Keep maybe 10-20,000 troops in there, enough to guard Bagram and provide a special forces presence for selected missions, and use airpower to pummel any Taliban formation unwise enough to gather in somewhat large units." We tried that for years. The afghan allies continuously assassinated US forces, and we weren't able to bring to bear anywhere near sufficient forces to assist the afghans.
Yeah, we did that for years and it was enough assistance that the Afghan Government did not fall while we were doing it. That is exactly the point of that option.
How is this a third option? What you described is option number one which is what the US did for 20 years. Stay there in perpetuity hoping that at some point down the decades something something will happen and voila, all will be well.
There's got to be a pony somewhere in that pile of dung.
"It takes 100,000 troops or more to have any real effect on the country, and no one, Democrat or Republican, was in favor of that. The Taliban was ascendant whether we liked it or not, and withdrawal was our only choice."
My suggestion was a far smaller footprint (10-15k?) at a much lower cost designed to just maintain the Afghan government, not to have a real effect like driving back the Taliban from various districts. And the psychological existence of the U.S. still being in country was a vital stiffener on the Afghan troops' willingness to fight.
That is a different option than withdraw or 100k troops.
"We gave them our word and we broke it. " It is a bald face lie that we ever told them we would get them out of the country if we surrendered. In fact, the SIV program to take Afghan interpreters out of the country was initially capped at 500 families a year. At that rate, it would have taken centuries to get them all out. So most would have died of old age (assuming they lived that long) before it occurred. I bet you dollars to donuts that she never mentioned that it was Trump policy that none should be gotten out. Or that Biden reversed that policy immediately upon entering the whitehouse but was still capped at 2000 families by congress. Now he also started lobbying congress to increase that cap right away. And congress did increase that cap by 6000 right before the summer break. But there was no chance for the executive to do anything with that increase before the afghan army collapsed.
Here's an odd thing: Read that piece at NR, and ask yourself: Is this person aware that the United States lost the war?
Because it kind of sounds like they aren't. There's talk of honor, and obligation, and so on, but it lacks force because it's not grounded in reality.
At bottom, he seems to have no grasp of the grim reality that the loser of a war has very little control over the denouement.
And, I mean, I get where that rejection of reality comes from. It may be too awful to bear for many people. The war was a colossal waste of lives, The Taliban's victory is a calamity for the survivors and a humiliation for the army they defeated. The loved ones of those lost in the fight may reasonably ask what the point was, and won't receive a good answer because there isn't one.
So one possibly therapeutic response is simple denial, like Otto in A Fish Called Wanda, angrily insisting that Vietnam was a tie.
But. If you're going to retreat into denial to preserve your mental health, there's a cost, and that cost is that your analysis is going to suffer. Good analysis always begins with a clear view of the facts. To begin from denial is to fail before you've even begun.
He represents the school of thoguht that claims we didn;t lose the war in Vietnman. We had in fact won and then liberals made the US pull out.
+1
There's a documentary series on Netflix called Spy Ops where a bunch of old US government agents get to reminisce about their many adventures. Honestly the doc is interesting in some ways, but there is just the pervasive pro-Bush, pro-War sentiment that underlies the whole thing. Most of the operations discussed are Bush 1 or Bush 2 operations. I only watched the 1st one, which is about Afghanistan and all the old dudes get to go off at the end about how they feel that we betrayed everything they did by withdrawing from Afghanistan after 20 freakin' years.
I've made a comment along these lines about Afghanistan before: I remember right after the Taliban was driven down, seeing the old King show up and call a loya jirga where all the powerful men from around the country met to talk about problems and resolve their issues with each other.
Wow!, I thought. We can get out and avoid Vietnam. Go let the assembly know that there will be a few hundred million dollars to spread around if they keep the Taliban down. More if they embrace some progressive ideas like education for girls.
Next thing I heard the Bush administration had gone wild getting that old king out of the country. No!. Afghanistan was going to be a modern liberal democracy. Bizarre to think it was a Republican administration pushing this. After all, they're against both democracy and education in the US now.
Pretty sure his lifetime includes Donald Trump throwing the Kurds to Assad and Putin.
Mine includes Vietnam.
The winning move was not to play.
Quiet knives in the night...
How about a nice game of chess?
Two points:
- This was not an exclusively American operation. The invasion of Afghanistan was a NATO operation from start to finish, with help from other countries like mine. The Australian Air Force evacuated more than 800 people from Kabul in the final days. And as one more dark consequence of the whole shambolic project, some Australian special forces have been investigated and charged with war crimes for their conduct while deployed there.
- The whole terminology of "Afghan allies" who "helped Americans" is absurdly emotive and inaccurate. They were never "allies". Many no doubt sincerely wanted to build a more democratic Afghanistan. Many others cooperated because there was a lot of money to be made (and green cards obtained), not always honestly. But I doubt there was one soldier in the Ghani army who volunteered because of an overwhelming urge to help the Americans. Help America do what, exactly? NATO was there to help them.
There is an afghan refugee where I work. Everyone who has to work with him thinks he's an asshole. Useless. Oh well.