This is a sad but inevitable development:
Taliban fighters overran three major cities in the north of Afghanistan on Sunday, the most significant territorial gains the militants have netted in a single day since the withdrawal of U.S. forces entered its final phase this year.
....The developments marked a sharp escalation in the pace of Taliban gains across Afghanistan. For months, Taliban fighters focused on taking control of districts and increasing pressure on urban areas, but that changed Friday when they overran a provincial capital for the first time since the withdrawal of foreign forces. The militants took a second city on Saturday, and by Sunday government-held territory in the north appeared to be collapsing quickly.
After 20 years of partnership with the United States, Afghanistan's central government still has virtually no real loyalty among its troops and no real fighting power. It's true that things will get harder for the Taliban when they swing south into the central part of the country, but probably only by a matter of degree. What's more, if the Taliban runs into real trouble taking Kabul and other major cities, there's a good chance that Pakistan will covertly help them out.
This is a tragedy, especially for the women of Afghanistan. I wish there were more we could do about it, but I can't think of what it could be. I'll be surprised if it takes the Taliban more than another six or nine months to fully conquer the country.
I believe that's where the Afghan Northern Alliance first got started. I thought that region of the country was most inherently opposed to the Taliban. Perhaps not.
It's been 20 years, the dynamics have changed quite considerably. In the 1990s the Taliban arose in the South - in the refugee camps in Pakistan - and attacked North backed by Pakistan. In the North an alliance of neighboring States who didn't want the Taliban on their border, propped up a rag-tag assortment of local tribal leaders and warlords - The Northern Alliance.
Now it's different. The Taliban, while still getting support from Pakistan, is indigenous. Their evangelist zeal was transferred to ISIS, which the Taliban fought against, and won mainly, this past decade. The States bordering Afghanistan to the North haven't done much propping up of warlords because the US was handling matters in A'stan. And now that the US is leaving those States are somewhat willing to deal with the new Taliban - as long as they stick to Afghanistan. See China's recent negotiations with the Taliban.
It's only a matter of time before the Afghan government falls in a Saigon type collapse, or the US gets back in with airstrikes and western/turkish ground forces.
Yup. The Taliban was never going to go away as long as they had Pakistan as a refuge and the assistance of the ISI.
All occupations end. We don’t have redcoats still patrolling the streets of Boston. The Soviets, British, and Russians all struggled in Afghanistan too. Our failure was one of mission creep: killing Bin Laden and dismantling Al Qaida and their Taliban enablers was complicated enough. Reordering Afghan society was a bridge too far.
Bush insisted he wasn't into nation building....
You mean, there isn't a thing that you're willing to do. We can do a lot of things, but certain people painted themselves in a corner and are now left to decrying the moral turpitude from afar, wagging fingers.
This is basically the same dynamic of Iraq vs ISIS. The US trained and equipped Iraqi army fell apart and was it not for tribal and sectarian militia units ISIS would have taken over all of Iraq.
The dynamic is roughly the same, but, we did not leave Iraq on its own to deal with ISIS.
Yes but Iraq had Oil, while A'stan does not.
Okay ... what are these things that the United States can do? I see this all the time, criticism of decisions like this and an insistence that there is something we can do, but never actual cold, hard "facts" regarding what it is we could do. So ... here's your chance.
We could stay for a thousand years and still there would be no guarantee. Maybe if we made it the 51st state.
Read my original comment carefully. You assume that I'm asserting that there is a flawless strategy; there is none and I did not suggest that there was one. There are many options. The one that the US chose to pursue under both Trump and Biden does not allow it to hypocritically bitch about the Taliban taking over and destroying the rights of women.
What would be the options? Just to stop lamenting the fate of women in Afghanistan?
As far as I can see, there was exactly one option the U.S. had to prevent the Taliban takeover: Stay in Afghanistan forever.
That would have worked--at least in the sense that it would have preserved the status quo. American casualties had dropped to vanishingly low levels, we could have sustained it another 20 years if we'd chosen to. In a vacuum, it might be preferable to what's happening now.
But military interventions are the least efficient form of humanitarian aid there is. As Eisenhower said, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." There are so many better ways for us to help people.
Still waiting to hear about these options. You appear stuck in the criticism phase of analysis. I'm asking you to move to the solution phase.
Why? So that you can be argumentative involving counterfactuals?
Since the point of my original comment has flown too far over your head, there is no point in this conversation.
Thanks for establishing my point.
The only option is withdrawal because nothing else has or will work.
Agreed.
The war lords, AKA Taliban, will fall to squabbling over looting the cities just like they did when the USSR left.
Can they govern???
define govern. Behead those who disagree with you seems to be an effective way to stay in power.
Sounds like the plan for the Hawley-Gabbard National Unity Regime in America.
I fully expect AG J.D. Vance to put Democrat voters in concentration camps.
But... Saddam Hussein is gone.
Time to make certain the embassy roof is clear and the choppers in good working order …
How feasible is a chopper evacuation anyway? Where is the nearest airbase they could be airlifted too?
If after 20 years of occupation and training of the Afghan military they can't defend themselves for a month past our leaving then how many decades would we have to spend there to them the in a position to defend themselves for a year, or a decade? I listened to a Fresh Air interview with Peter Bergen, who just wrote a biography of Osama bin Laden.
He, like so many before, apologized our occupation to South Korea and pointed out we stayed there for over 60 years, and they're now incredibly prosperous. And yet we just helped to defend South Korea from an outside existential threat that the whole population was on board with it. We did not have to mediate in a civil war between warring factions within the country, we had to defend a border against a threatening army that the whole population wanted to defend against. The analogy is completely worthless. Same with the occupation of Germany after WWII.
I just can't see, if 20 years has gotten us zero Afghan government ability to defend themselves and get the population on their side, what another 20 years will do. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Our military endeavors there have become pure lunacy.
Morale is king in Afghanistan. Everyone likes to back a winner, and will abandon a loser. Remember how fast the Taliban collapsed in 2001? They had been winning the war in early September, capturing towns and localities from the Norther Alliance, but then within a few weeks of the US intervention they just collapsed. Seeing defeat on the horizon the Taliban lost the will to fight and simply melted away while the Alliance forces rallied.
Now the opositte dynamic is at play. Morale is low to non existent on the Afghan National military side while the Taliban are riding high.
The question is why is that morale low to non-existent? Why is there no support for the whatever it is that we call the government of Kabul?
This has not been explored or explained.
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Pakistan is getting a bit nervous that the Afghanistan Taliban are going to supportvthe Pakistan Taliban once they win.
Nuclear clash on the Subcontinent!
Modi going to drop the bomb on Karachi before the Nuclear-armed PakTalib can hit Delhi. & China will respond with (non-atomic?) force against India.
These cities were already abandoned
Just my opinion: There is nothing we can do other than pull out and stop financing the current government of Afghanistan. I'm largely influenced by a book, which I will reference at the end of the post, and by a long held belief that corruption is a deadly corrosive force in any society. I believe the population of Afghanistan, the normal everyday people, are caught between two major warring factions, neither of which has any interest in the well-being of the population. Those two forces are: a) a completely corrupt "official" Afghan government, and b) the Taliban.
The corrupt government is basically an organized crime operation whose primary purpose is to protect an entire network of bribery down to the lowest level local official. This keeps the bribery money flowing to the top. For the ordinary citizen, the government does nothing to help them, and they know that then network of corruption will continue to steal from them forever. And because the US has to work with the "legitimate" government in order to have military bases in-country, the US ends up just funneling lots of money into this corrupt operation. The US is, in effect heling the corrupt government fight the Taliban.
On the other side is the Taliban, which is an extremist religious militant faction, running around the country, murdering people suspected of being the enemy (without any judicial system to determine actual guilt). The Taliban uses terrorism to achieve power.
Ordinary people, just trying to have a decent life, are caught in the middle. They don't trust either side. And they are not hopeful of a solution.
I don't really have a handle on Pakistan's role, if it continues to have one.
The only way the US could contribute positively would be if there were a realistic way to eliminate the corruption from the government. I don't know how you do that.
ref: "Thieves of State" (a book. you can find it)
Who knows what's going on over there? Certainly I don't, but weren't our generals assuring us that the U.S. military wasn't "abandoning" the Afghan people, but intended to continue support from a distance, with things like air cover and intelligence? Maybe that is not enough, as it appears to me that the regular Afghan army is not a very effective force. In fact, it seems they sometimes surrender to Taliban fighters when they don't need to, almost as if they don't care which side comes out on top and takes over control of the country. Given that behavior, I can't say I mind "deserting" them after 20 years of trying to stand them up.
Please note, I feel terrible about the likely fate of Afghan women and girls under fanatic Taliban Islamic rule, but short of in-person monitoring it looks like an impossible situation for them. Maybe we should just accept all of them who want to emigrate.
It isn't that they don't care; but they also have no faith that the Kabul government will come out on top. Why risk putting yourself on the wrong side of the Taliban, if they're going to win anyway? Better to live under the Taliban than to die for nothing. The Taliban are helping this along by publicly embracing the deserters and sending them home, even giving them money for the trip.
And of course that logic feeds on itself. The more you hear about Afghan forces deserting and defecting, the more certain Taliban victory looks, and the worse Afghan morale becomes.
We can be concerned about the women all we want
Muslim beliefs, like Christianity, and many other religions hold females in lower regard then the males are held. As such they are not a protected class
Add in to that the kill he infidels outlook and you can see that wars in this area are not nice, have never been nice with will never be nice.
We go to extremes to prevent or reduce the collateral damage whereas the Taliban never has, nor did Saddam Hussein.
We need to admit this was a mistake, we could not nation build and just leave.
There are some parts of the world we just cannot change societal outlooks for.
"This is a tragedy, especially for the women of Afghanistan. I wish there were more we could do about it, but I can't think of what it could be. "
Hugely disingenuous, almost mocking. It's simply a matter of priorities, and you've decided that this is a necessary evil. I'm not even arguing the point, just that saying "Wow, what could possibly be done" is fairly dishonest of you.
We've stayed S Korea for 68 years, and it's worked out. So it's not like we can't stay places for a long time if we think it's important.
With Americans no longer getting killed in Afghanistan while fighting, and with us being able to afford to stay, the only valid reason to leave is that we are convinced it's hopeless.
If we instead thought in 20 years the Taliban would be routed - and a real, working democracy would take root - then it would be hard to argue we should leave. But apparently no ones thinks this is possible.
It’s terrible that many will suffer as a result of U.S. troop withdrawals but we can’t stay forever. We shouldn’t have stayed as long as we did.