Franklin Foer has written a book about the first two years of the Biden administration. Part of the book is about Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan:
By the end of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, President Joe Biden was sure he made the right decision after watching the events unfold in the Situation Room.
“Biden didn’t have time to voraciously consume the news, but he was well aware of the coverage, and it infuriated him. It did little to change his mind, though,” Franklin Foer writes in his upcoming book, an excerpt of which was released Tuesday....“So much of the commentary felt overheated to him. He said to an aide: ‘Either the press is losing its mind, or I am,’” Foer writes.
Biden can sleep easy: it was indeed the press that had lost its mind. In fact, it was one of the most egregious examples of bandwagon journalism in recent memory, a farrago of frenzied reporting that insisted on pasting the word chaotic into every story regardless of whether there was any real chaos to report. But reporters on the ground never seemed to acknowledge the obvious: somehow, amidst all this "chaos," the State Department and the military managed to steadily evacuate 6,000 American citizens and more than 100,000 Afghans with minimal loss of life. Under the circumstances, it was about as courageous and well executed an airlift as anybody could have reasonably expected.
And good for Biden for never giving in to the sniping. He was right to pull out and he was right to stick to his guns.
Why, exactly, was it right to abandon our allies and throw away everything we had fought for for 20 years when the country was effectively pacified and we had under 10 combat deaths per year?
Perhaps you missed the part where we evacuated over 100,000 Afghans. But sure, why not just leave American troops in Afghanistan forever.
For that matter, why did we ever leave South Vietnam?
Plus ten.
My dude America had forgotten the war and it was doing minimal damage. It was absolutely nothing like Vietnam.
Trump set the date for the withdrawal, signed an agreement, and greatly reduced the number of US troops there (down to 2,500) before Biden became president. Blaming Biden for the US not wanting to make Afghanistan the 51st state is not a serious position. Why did we leave Germany after WWII? Or Japan? The US should not want to control the whole world (even though it has sometimes tried to do this). Occupying Afghanistan for 20 years cost the US $2.3 trillion. What benefit did we get for it? And it turns out "our allies" were greatly outnumbered by Taliban types. Should we have slaughtered millions to make Afghanistan safe for democracy?
Yes. Once we had comitted to being there after 2001 we should have put the women in charge and killed anyone who had a problem with it. I guarantee the country would be in much much better shape.
Because your ongoing military action in support of "allies" (otherwise known as client regime) was costing billions, killing thousands of Afghans, and the Westernised elites, however nicely speaking English, were a weak and rootless client state that could not stand on their own.
So, a country not "effectively pacified", a regime so rotten and hollow that the moment the imperial power started own forces draw down it began to collapse. It's own forces unwilling to die for it
Contrast with Ukraine.
Afghans continuing to die for the agendas of a foreign power with near zero understanding of the various Afghan cultures, was a waste of both American blood and treasure and Afghan blood.
A more competently managed but ultimately as futile foreign intervention as the Soviets with similar blindnesses and self-deception albeit from different ends oft the Western ideological spectrum
(now of course if one wished to go full kit Stalin and engage in genocidal repression, as the Stalinist rule of Central Asian Tajik and Uzbek republics showed -also see Ukraine of course - one can impose a certain level of cultural change, but one does condemn Stalin so adopted Stalinist near genocide to engage in one's White Knighting, well... )
Because Trump promised that we would.
Go fuck yourself MFer
I love Kevin's comment section. <3
Yup.
👍👍👍👍👍
Ask Trump why he unilaterally surrendered to the Taliban without even bothering to consult our Afghan allies—and wanted to do so at Camp David, before his appalled advisors finally talked him out of humiliating our nation.
Ask Trump why he then sat on his obese posterior for nearly a year, failing to lift even a finger to prepare for the withdrawal.
Ask Trump why he then criticized Biden for postponing the withdrawal.
Thank you. Note also that not only did the Defendant want to bring the Taliban leaders to Camp David, he wanted them there on 9/11 weekend.
And the massive troop drawdown came after he realized he had lost the elecition. Gotta leave the government in shambles before the new guy comes in! Break everything you can and steal the rest!
It wasn't "pacified" at all - we had a lull because of the withdrawal agreement with the Taliban, and even then it was still costing us over $30 billion/year. If we'd blown that off, we'd be back in open hostilities and probably spending closer to $100 billion a year again.
And for what? To back up a corrupt client regime that fell apart the instant we pulled out, its President literally fleeing the country with suitcases of cash?
The only real shame is that we didn't leave in 2013, after Bin Laden was dead and Al-Qaeda in chaos.
Exactly. On this point, Biden has shown himself to be a very strong president.
No, not to "back up a corrupt client regime", but rather to give the Afghan people the opportunity to have a much better life, especially the women and children.
That men with guns objected sounds a lot like the azzoles at Malheur Lake. Obviously these examples are many orders of magnitude apart in severity and the number of people involved. But it's the same sort of self-righteous, narcissistic jerks with guns.
We can’t police every backwater to ensure human rights. If we did decide to do that, then we should start at home with the red states. We have a far better chance of rescuing the millions in Florida from their authoritarian theocracy than we do in Afghanistan.
Seem like the Afghan people decided they didn't care for our idea of a better life.
So to you Afghanistan was either 1). A colony or 2). a territory like Puerto Rico or 3). the 51st state?
In none of these scenarios do you have 10 U.S. soldiers dying due to hostile fire every year.
You need to direct that question to President Trump, who surrendered to the Taliban and promised to withdraw all US troops.
The assertion that the country was "effectively pacified" is comically wrong. The Taliban was steadily reclaiming the countryside in 2020/21 after defeating the Afghan military supported by NATO airstrikes.
For 20 years our military kept claiming they were creating stable country that would stand up to the Taliban. That was never true. Unlike the people of Ukraine who are willing to fight for their freedom, far too many Afghanis, including those in the government, were not. Yes there were some who were but not nearly enough. As soon as the US started to withdraw even their government cut and run.
There is no way American soldiers should be risking their lives for a country whose people aren’t willing to fight for their freedom.
Ditto
"was effectively pacified" You're completely delusional. Trump signed the surrender document because we were losing. The final 18 months didn't have combat deaths only because we had agreed to total withdrawal by a fixed, and soon date. And NATO deaths before the surrender was double your 10 combat deaths a year. And 10 times the number wounded. At a cost of 10s of billion of dollars per year. With no hope of winning.
If we had bailed on the withdrawal the number of combat deaths would have gone up 10 fold. The Taliban were just waiting for us to go.
First ask yourself why Donald Trump worked as early as February 2020 to free 5,000 Taliban prisoners held by the Afghan government by September 2020. In fact, he was about to welcome the Taliban leadership to Camp David! "The deal said that the Taliban would not allow groups, including al-Qaida, in Afghanistan to threaten the security of the United States and its allies" [PolitiFact] which turned out to be either a Trump lie or a Taliban lie.
It's anyone's guess if any of those 5,000 Taliban released prisoners were part of the attack on the Kabul airport that killed >100 citizens and 13 US troops.
First, Afghanistan was lost long before when Bush and Party decided to invade Iraq, giving the Taliban and other Jihadist a huge propaganda win, and siphoning off resources needed then to stabilize and move the country forward, but oil you know, Iraq had it, Afghanistan did not.
That said, I wonder if the fathers, mothers, bothers, sisters husbands, wives and/or children of those, just ten, per year would agree with your formula for staying in a place just because not that many of theirs were being killed, which also leaves out the number that were coming home missing body parts, with traumatic brain injuries, PTSD. As demonstrated by how fast the “allies” folded when we pulled out, most were just allies of convenience, and with what are certainly exceptions, we likely got most of our real allies out
I love all the Biden voting twats simultaneously blaming Trump and praising Biden for the pullout. Don't hurt yourselves with all that stretching, you miserable dung heaps, lol.
It takes a lot of explaining to rationalize the likes of https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2021/08/16/kabul-clinging-to-airplane-taking-off-tarmac-afghanistan-ward-vpx.cnn
What needs to be explained or rationalized? For a few hours Afghani's panicked. Given how quickly their country collapsed and how little the US trained and equipped Afghan army resisted, it's no wonder. The evacuation proceeded deliberately and effectively after the first few hours.
But hey, "scenes of chaos".
Photographer and cameramen have all the power to decide whether something is working, by their choice of subject. Had that photographer simply taken a picture of people seated inside the plane, nobody would’ve thought anything was wrong.
Obviously, the answer is: Next time we should just leave everybody there. No photos of people trying to escape = successful plan? Just like photo of president holding Bible at church = holy man?
I agree. Trump is the one who initiated the withdrawal and set a date. Trump's people coordinated with the then-government of Afghanistan to manage a withdrawal. Then Biden was elected and had a fait accompli that he managed as well as possible given the sudden collapse of the Afghan government and the resurgence of the Taliban.
The press was mesmerized by the crowds of desperate Afghans who wanted to go to the US, many of them for very good reasons. The video of people hanging onto planes as they taxied down the runway and took off was undeniably mesmerizing. But to blame Biden for "chaos" when every withdrawal from Afghanistan including the Brits and the Russians has been chaotic was really bad journalism. In fact, the US military performed extremely well. The Taliban inspired suicide bomber who killed a dozen US soldiers and more civilians was just part of a large crowd, and there were no Afghan police or troops capable of managing the crowd.
And besides, if Afghanistan couldn't manage to hold onto its gains after TWENTY YEARS of US occupation, what was the US supposed to do? Declare Afghanistan the 51st state? It was a sinkhole for cash, much of it siphoned off to private offshore bank accounts. Bush Jr. and Cheney pere got us in there in 2001 and it was time to leave.
But of course the press is also mesmerized by Trump. His every cough and sneeze is reported. He plays them like a saxophone. Whatever absurd or vicious thing he says is reported instantly in banner headlines. This is what late-stage capitalism looks like, I guess, with making a buck more important than preserving democracy. The head of CBS was mocked for saying Trump was very good for the news business, but every news organization has shared in the bounty including supposedly left of center publications like the NY Times and the WA Post.
Maybe this just means that the news types would prefer a Trump dictatorship because it would fatten their bank accounts--until, of course, Trump found a way to steal it.
+1
The news media today is a thoroughly corrupt institution.
I'm sure there are some good people that work there (though fewer than you might think), but the algorithms that dictate what's news and how it's covered work against the interests of the public and a free and open democratic society.
The algos play up conflict, play agnostic with truth, and play one group against another. Any problem gets blown out of proportion. Any good news or success gets "but on the other hand" treatment. Coverage of politics is one case after another of malpractice. The journalism factories in this country are an utter shame.
The most repulsive response was a thuggish Republican Party that had applauded a Muslim travel ban and practically shut down the resettlement of Muslim refugees shrieking hysterically that we had left Muslim refugees behind in Afghanistan.
The hateful cynicism of the Republican Party is disgraceful.
+1
>> the press is also mesmerized by Trump<<
You know, I’ve realized this for a long time but I still didn’t get the full extent of it until he went to New York for his arrest there and the cameras trained on his baggage going down the conveyor from his plane. If Trump’s fans are a cult then the MSM is a part of that cult.
"the cameras trained on his baggage going down the conveyor from his plane"
It's a cargo cult! Our world turned upside down.
The news media across the board -- and TV news, in particular -- are easy marks for Trump.
In September 2016, Trump hosted a press conference for a "major announcement." All the media were there, and all were expecting (as promised) that Trump would be reversing his birther lie and admit Obama was born in the US after all. Instead, the entire press conference was an announcement about Trump's new hotel in Washington, DC. He scammed the media into national, wall-to-wall coverage about a hotel opening. The only mention of Obama's birth certificate was a brief note at the end, when he blamed Hillary for the birther lie that he now, at last, was fixing. (That was a new lie about Hillary, of course.)
One of the reporters was on the air talking about being conned later that day. (I think it was on MSNBC, but maybe CNN.) She wasn't really mad. She was marveling at Trump's chutzpah for being able to pull it off and his incredible talent to draw attention when he wanted. She seemed to be gushing about it.
He was a TV celebrity. She was a TV celebrity (or hoped to be, at least). She, like her colleagues, understood how hard it is to get attention, which is the coin of the realm in the TV biz. He was a master giving a master class, and she & her club were mere wannabes taking lessons while giving him billions of dollars of unpaid publicity, the republic be damned.
Actually, that's precisely NOT what "Trump's people" did from what I recall.
The then US backed government of Afghanistan was completely cut out of negotiations. As I recall, the first notice they got was when US soldiers started disappearing from various forward bases without even notifying their Afghan counterparts. And TFG freed around 5000 Taliban fighters without any conditions. The Taliban almost immediately started cutting deals with the abandoned Afghan government troops - who were eager to take what they could get.
"Trump's people coordinated with the then-government of Afghanistan to manage a withdrawal." That's a bald face lie. Trump's people opposed the withdrawal. And since Trump didn't order them to do anything to prepare for the withdrawal, they did precisely nothing in the hopes that they could prevent it. " and the resurgence of the Taliban" There was no resurgence of the taliban. Trump's surrender document permitted the taliban to continue warfare against the Afghan government and that had naturally being going on continuously since it's signing. "The Taliban inspired suicide bomber" The bomber was from ISIS and hated the Taliban.
Franklin Foer wrote a detailed extraction from his book specifically on the whole withdrawal, in The Atlantic.
From Foer's piece:
Your QOTD is Biden's false narrative and binary choice. The press was reminding him that leaving Afghanistan couldn't be viewed in a detached abstraction.
Also, I am an unapologetic bleeding-heart liberal.
What specifically is false?
Your narrative is.....a bit light on facts snd heavy on personal opinions of outsiders.
Read Foer's piece in the Atlantic.
[...]
[...]
If advocacy of those whose voice would otherwise be ignored isn't central to the fourth estate, what's the point? Like I said, I'm an unapologetic bleeding-heart liberal.
So Foer is saying a more compassionate man than President Biden would have sent 50,000 or 100,000 troops back into Afghanistan, there to suffer a few thousand casualties per year and several hundred deaths? This force tasked with killing and maiming a few ten thousands of Afghans per year, the vast majority innocents.
While doing this compassionate act, we'd be running up our war spending there to perhaps $4T from the $2T sunk. A sum that might well pay for the whole world to escape the worst of the looming greenhouse climate disaster.
And then of course, after a few more presidencies, we'd finally get an uncompassionate president who would finally pull the plug on this war always destined to be a failure.
Or is he saying he should keep it going too?
No, I don't think he was implying any of that.
I think he's saying that there are dangers -- waiting 2 days to declare NEO, for instance -- if you have difficulty dealing with cognitive dissonance.
The enemy is me, not thee.
Foer is mainly reporting what happened. Although he offers an interpretation here and there, he doesn't take a position on whether we should have left. Even though D_Ohrk_E1 quotes Foer for support, I think your argument is with D_Ohrk_E1, not Foer.
"For a man vaunted for his empathy, he could be detached, even icy, when confronted with the prospect of human suffering."That's actually a both necessary and vital quality in a war time leader. Cen you imagine being the US ambassador to vietnam during that withdrawal and having to ask for americans to volunteer to be left behind. Or the commander of the dunkirk withdrawal and having to assign the troops to the last line of defense knowing they were going to be intentionally abandoned. Empathy when giving those orders would have disastrous consequences.
I have a younger brother who is retired military, including eight years in special forces and served in Afghanistan.
My brother's perspective, the US could have held Bagram Air Base (its the size of a small city) until the end. This would have made for a safer exit from Afghanistan.
To be clear, one never knows if the outcome would have been different....
Would your brother like to analyze what would happen to the thousands of US civilians and tens of thousands of Afghans trying to cross the forty miles between Kabul and Bagram most walking and subject to the wishes of the Taliban?
The Taliban weren't the problem. They actual made the decision to do everything in their power to assist the evacuation. Remember the guy who killed the 13 american soldiers hated the taliban.
I've yet to read a coherent explanation of how it would have been safer to try to organise road transport from Kabul to Bagram for 120,000 people than to fly them straight out of Kabul. The main obstacles people trying to leave lay in getting to the airport, not in being flown out.
I'm sure Trump's vague intention was to withdraw all NATO staff to Bagram, fly them out from there, and let the Afghans make their own arrangements.
With the exception of Embassy guards, the US military was entirely evacuated by late July.
100% false. Attempts to get the evacuees the 65km to Bagram would have resulted in a much larger loss of life. Even with 100s of thousands of troops on the ground, the route to bagram was never secured and USA personal were forbidden to access that airport from Kabul by anything other than helicopter. Further, during the entire occupation, Bagram was subject to routine rocket fire from the hills completely surrounding it.
Anybody who wants to relitigate Afghanistan, our longest war ever, please start with the invasion, the aborted search for Bin Laden, the deluded attempt to install democracy, the corruption, the costs (strategic, human, financial), and the futility of never achieving a more positive outcome. The withdrawal was one of the first things we did right since we got there.
Yes, we did it right -- not perfect, but right enough.
Biden has every right to complain about the press. He could say that every day of his presidency. News media's job is to inform the public, and take any poll and it'll show you the American public doesn't know shit. Why is our media failing us? It's a hell of a lot bigger problem than any missteps in the military's withdrawal from Afghanistan. It's bigger than any problem in our education or criminal justice systems. News media has helped take our democracy to the brink, and it doesn't show any sign that it even understands it's a major contributing factor to the problems it pretends to cover. To answer Biden's question: Yes, the press has lost its mind. Isn't it obvious?
Yes. About a decade ago, a study (sorry; I have no cites or even general details) concluded that the United States no longer had enough journalism to support a democracy.
I'm guessing the election of The Defendant proved their point.
"News media has helped take our democracy to the brink, and it doesn't show any sign that it even understands it's a major contributing factor to the problems it pretends to cover."
Oh, it understands all right.
They understand the payoff, and for that they work overtime to convince us (if not themselves) that it's all normal. If you don't like it, remember there are extremists on both sides. Media's hands are clean.
NY Times' stock price gained 300% from Trump's election till his departure. It was flat for years before and is down 10% to 15% since Biden took office. Cable ratings have done likewise. Crisis sells.
It was a shit show and was always going to be a shit show now matter how it was done. Did anyone actually think that the Afghan defense forces, that the US trained and equipped, would actually stand and fight?
Yes. The entire gov't including all of Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon.
Great. That’s not Biden's fault.
And from when he was VP?
My recollection is that Biden did everything he could to talk Obama out of the troop surge. He told him that the State Department and military chiefs would always lie about the real situation so that things didn't fall to pieces until they were out of the picture.
Then, of course, they can write books about how their successors and the politicians screwed up. These are the same kind of people who bamboozled LBJ into Vietnam.
That's how I remember it. In effect, as far as I could see, Obama was a true believer in the Afghanistan mission, to the point that his biggest objection to invading and occupying Iraq was that it diverted attention and resources that should have gone to Afghanistan.
Read Foer.
Austin asked Biden to order an emergency evacuation. Biden waited two days to make the order.
We've already demonstrated that Foer is an ass. Why should I read him?
Why do you think he's an ass?
And Biden was right. The evacuation you're talking about (a US evacuation) came off without a hitch. The evacuation of afghan allies was the problem and would have been much worse without that 2 day delay.
If we knew they wouldn’t fight, should we have stayed another 20 years to do it for them?
Nobody ever says stay for 20 years or stay forever.
It's always, we can't leave yet, things still need to be done, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
So I guess this means you're defending Trump.
My guess is that Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon knew exactly what was going to happen and that there was no way to prevent it.
The Taliban didn't have to fight the Afghan military. They just bribed the Afghan commanders to lay down arms, and it worked: most of the commanders just took the money and ran.
A year later Vladimir Putin tried the same thing with Ukrainian commanders, but Ukraine turned out not to be corrupt enough for that to work.
Since it was obvious that the Taliban was going to take over, there was always going to be some civilian panic at the end. But the press couldn't prepare the public for that. It would go against the myth of American Exceptionalism, and make the press look unpatriotic and "partisan." So they made the narrative fit what made sense to your average ignorant American. Dems are bad at wars and economics, dontcha know! Plus, controversy breeds engagement. Telling everyone that Afganistan is unwinnable and that the withdrawal of US forces will be followed by the Taliban racing in is not the sort of thing that gets more clicks or subscribers!
A lot of people dislike CNN, but the answer as to why we needed to get out of Afghanistan (and why we never should have stayed so long), is in Jake Tapper's book The Outpost, which does great honor to the men who served and their families back home. Afghanistan was so backwards, so corrupt, so insular, and so warlord dominated that whatever our motives, and many of our soldiers motives were exeptionally honorable, they never stood a chance.
One little-discussed facet of what went wrong is the simple fact that we let women have responsibility in Afghanistan. For example, we had some female CEC officers running construction projects over there. They served honorably, but in a backwards, corrupt, insular, and warlord-dominated society, the Afghan men who had to work for those women found it humiliating.
I'm not sure there is any hope for Afghanistan. It's too far gone.
Until the day we withdrew, I actually thought we were doing well according to the press reports. The quick collapse of the Afghani government disabused me of that notion. It also highlighted to me how errant (intentionally or not) the press and the military have been about that country. I would like to see an autopsy as why so many got so much wrong for so long.
Our people weren't wrong. They all knew the Taliban would take over within minutes of our exit. Obama's people knew it. And Trump's people knew it, which is why they set the exit date after the election. And both administrations knew exactly how the media would cover it. They chose to kick the can down the road because they just didn't want their reputations to take that hit.
If we knew they would take over so quickly how come we left so much equipment. I suspect that you are onto something, that at least some knew things were no so rosy but did they know the Afghan government was going to capitulate instantly? You are almost saying that military officials were ok with the graft and corruption at the expense of a few dead and maimed soldiers since permanent occupation was never going to be an option. Like I said, one way or another, the military comes across poorly. Also, I’m sure there must be members of the press who knew things were bad, but apart from a few left of center outlets, where were they? A lot of people in the press and the military need to introspect themselves, and frankly, they come across as sociopaths.
When the US took over Baghdad, we flew in $12 Billion in pallets of shrink wrapped $100 dollar bills. No one knows where it went.
You and I may think the waste of expensive equipment to be a crime. The people in charge do not.
It isn't the military that comes across poorly here. They gave three consecutive presidents honest assessments of what would happen if we pulled out. Two of those presidents decided to kick it down the road.
That's not the military's fault.
Did they give honest assessments if we continued to stay? I think not, at least from what I read in the press, it seemed to be that the military officers kept saying that tomorrow would be better-in retrospect, there was no tomorrow nor will there ever be. Also, I do remember reading that the DOD thought the government could hold for a little while - that also proved wrong. Sorry, the military assessment by higher up officers seemed to be off, partly at the expense of the grunts.
According to SIGAR (Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, it was pretty much all BS from beginning to end. (sigar.mil)
Hundreds of reports, no real progress (kind of obviously). Lather, rinse, repeat. Starting in 2008, and still issuing reports in July 2023.
We didn't leave any american equipement. All of the claims of equipment being left behind is with respect to the arms of our afghan allies. And we weren't going to declare war on our allies to steal and then remove that equipment.
Bingo. They watched W. Bush surrender in Iraq and Obama take the blame.
Republicans may be cynical, cowardly, and disgraceful, but they do have a feral, cunning understanding of how to shift blame to others.
I disagree. Most people thought it would be like vietnam where the south held out for two years before the fall of saigon.
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” - Yeats
Those who wanted to regain the right to beat their wives and miseducate their children were more willing to fight for control of Afghanistan than those who saw some good in the last seven centuries …
It would have been a much better political option for Biden to leave the Afghans to their fate and concentrate on an orderly withdrawal of NATO personnel via Bagram. It's to his credit that he didn't take it.
With exception of embassy guards, NATO personal were fully out of the country by late July. We had to put back into the country thousands of US personel to extract the 100k afghan allies. And note, Congress had made it illegal for a significant number of US's afghan allies to be brought to the US prior to the evacuation. For example the SIV program was originally capped at 500 a year.
I love all the Biden voting twats simultaneously blaming Trump and praising Biden for the pullout. Don't hurt yourselves with all that stretching, you miserable dung heaps, lol.
The last day of the Dunkirk evacuation the plan was for the French troops who actually held the perimeter for the duration to be evacuated, leaving behind a small force to simulate a larger one. They marched through the town and to the Mole . . .
And found it jammed with men who'd been hiding in the town all that time, who now rushed to the ships and filled them and left the brave men who'd fought all that time left behind to surrender.
I know, it didn't turn up in the movies.
Evacuations are never pretty.
And evacuations from Afghanistan are usually hideous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1842_retreat_from_Kabul#/media/File:The_Last_Stand,_by_William_Barnes_Wollen_(1898).jpg
Two things I remember about the aftermath of the Afghan War; tell me if I'm wrong.
1. We had the opportunity to kill or capture Osama bin Laden and many of his people as they escaped thru tunnels and valleys into Pakistan. For fear of American casualties we turned the fight over to Warlord militia who didn't see any reason to die for our cause. They negotiated al Qaeda's escape instead.
2. I vividly remember the old, old king of Afghanistan showing up and calling a loya jirga, which is a council of the powerful men in the country. As I understood it, the king was always sort of a figurehead whose job was to negotiate between the warlords and other powerful men to minimize actual conflict.
Well, I thought, this is great. We can leave these people to their own devices and get out. We can offer a few hundred million a year if they will suppress the crazies and cause us no trouble. Maybe for a couple of hundred million more we can convince them to somewhat liberalize the country so the women and girls have half a chance.
'Shit no' the Bush State Department declared, 'Get the king out pronto. We're turning this into a Western style democracy.' Something the Bush administration was always kind of opposed to in the USA.
I feel like Bush made the same fateful mistake twice: declaring "mission accomplished" in moving on from Afghanistan to Iraq, then again on an aircraft carrier after Saddam was removed.
Obviously, he was no bleeding-heart liberal; he only stayed in Iraq and Afghanistan because he didn't want to be known as the guy who lost two wars, though he effectively lost both wars.
GWBush will go down in the history books as the American president who started and lost two wars.
"on pasting the word chaotic into every story "
It's a journalistic tic. They speak in tropes. Sportscasters catch the brunt of criticism, and deservedly so (they've got to really want it, give 110%, are they going to threepeat? do you think they'll threepeat? I think they're going to threepeat). But they all do it. Just be on the lookout for how many stories there are about hurricanes "churning" toward the coast.
No, Georgia won't three-peat.
Should have armed the women, would give them a 50/50 chance....
I agree. Seems like they were the only Afghans willing to fight for their freedom.
Bottom line is every mistake that was made in Vietnam: military-diplomatic-political was made in Afghanistan as if though someone had one of those old-fashioned projector screens with the plastic overlays. Each mistake almost similar in the same degree. Thus, no one learned anything from Vietnam except to try and avoid such a scenario ever again. Unfortunately 9-11 would not allow them to do so and here we were off nation building again, only this time for 20 years and even more billions wasted.
They did arm the women. Don't you recall all of the stories about female special forces units.
Does "the press" include MSNBC? How about Mother Jones? The Intercept? Your local news? PBS? Amanpour & Company?
Are bleeding liberals the enemy?
No doubt, some of the left of center press was superior in coverage than the rest. I think they needed to be more aggressive- calling it the forgotten war seemed like a back handed rationalization. I mean Vietnam was in the front page every day for 8 years, it seems that Afghan disappeared (partly because of Iraq) after one year.
I continue to tell anyone who will listen (which to be fair, is pretty much nobody) that I consider ending the "forever war" of America's commitment to Afghanistan to be President Biden's greatest single achievement -- even though it is rarely mentioned even by the White House, because of the media's unholy pro-war bias detailed above.
We had been there 20 years and accomplished nothing resembling a lasting impact, as the swift resurgence of the Taliban demonstrated. We could have remained for another 20 years and made equally small progress. As much as I would like for America to protect the people of foreign lands from their own oppressive governments, it's not a realistic goal -- and right now we have the threat of an equally oppressive regime here at home to focus our attention.
" the swift resurgence of the Taliban demonstrated. : What resurgence. Trump signed the surrender agreement with the Taliban because they were beating us.
I agree 100% with this.
The fact though is that Afghans have had to suffer from this war, especially the ones who helped US troops. But: This is all on the people who started the war. It is not Biden's fault that we found ourselves occupying a country that no power has ever managed to occupy for a long time. It is the Bush/Cheney people who are responsible for all consequences of the wars they started, from US casualties to victims of Taliban reprisals to the people who did not manage to leave Afghanistan in time. They set the events in motion. To a somewhat lesser degree a Democratic president who had 8 years to do something about it and never did is also responsible as is the Orange Menace.
Alexander the great began a greek occupation of 250 years.
Was it really the right decision if his poll numbers cratered and never recovered? Because now fascist takeover of thr US is more likely.
“Either the press is losing its mind or I am.”
The press lost its mind.
Biden did the right thing in getting us out of Afghanistan, and he stuck with it despite the disapproval from his military advisors, the hysterically over-the-top and astonishingly one-sided opposition from almost every corner of what appeared to be - across the board - a shamelessly pro-war news media, and the inevitable drop in support he suffered as a result of the relentlessly propagandistic attacks he experienced from all sides. His determination to get us out of our endless war despite all these headwinds was downright noble. And he deserves some well-earned praise for his actions.