Ben Friedman is unhappy about the Washington Post's deep dive into President Biden's influence during the runup to the Ukraine war:
The Post just can't keep this kind of credibility voodoo / domino theory out of news stories.https://t.co/lFdlv17ji6 pic.twitter.com/7p8DFO5DGo
— Ben Friedman (@BH_Friedman) August 16, 2022
It's worth noting first that the Post story clearly says it was multiple things that had hurt US credibility with its allies. With its allies. This is very different from the usual criticism that US "weakness" emboldens our enemies.
Nonetheless, the Post does mention the Afghanistan withdrawal as something that generally hurt America's reputation for sticking things out and being a reliable partner in war. And this is ridiculous. The United States spent 20 years in Afghanistan, the majority of them during a period in which it was obvious to everyone that we had little chance of winning or even doing any real good. This is the kind of thing that burnishes your reputation for sticking things out.
In fact, it shows that the US is practically a crackpot when it comes to never admitting defeat. 20 years! It's hard to imagine. If Biden's withdrawal showed anything, it was simply that there are occasional presidents who aren't completely insane over the idea of the US losing its mythical credibility by recognizing facts on the ground and ending a war. Bush couldn't do it, Obama couldn't do it, and Trump couldn't do it (he said he was going to do it, but we don't know if he would have held firm under pressure and actually left Afghanistan if he'd won a second term). But Biden finally did it.
The rest of the world doesn't believe in this alleged issue of credibility. They believe that the United States acts in its own self interest. We enter wars if we think they're in our interest. We leave wars if we think that's in our interest. And everyone knows we have the power to make our threats good if we feel like it. We hardly have to prove that more often than we already do.
Looks like the traditional, that is, mandatory, Republican slant. That's just Journo 101: The $pon$or$ are Republicans, and must be fluffed, even at the cost of the truth. (Just how much IS, "the truth" worth these days? In bucks? Euros?)
These days, the truth seems to be tracking Bitcoin.
FWD with Andrew Yang onto San Salvador.
This is a good time to point out that we killed a bad guy in Afghanistan in less than a year after leaving the country that managed to stay alive for the 20 years we were in the country. And, of course (and somehow), that shows how weakened we have been by leaving there.
+1
One advantage of teaming up with distasteful assholes in crappy countries: they’ll give up other distasteful assholes for the promise of cash (in this case cash that should be theirs that we froze, but still)
Stop making sense.
An alleged bad guy. Official government information regarding Afghanistan has been, at best, unreliable ever since the USSR invaded the place. Before that, of course, there was no official government information because nobody paid any attention to Afghanistan.
This is what Obama called "Blob logic", although he couldn't bring himself to really fight against it except on escalation in Syria. Just this endless obsession with proving "credibility" through the exercise of military force.
Russians flee Crimea:
https://www.newsweek.com/crimea-traffic-jam-explosion-air-base-russia-ukraine-1732845
Newsweek still exists.
Still on the job, catching those careless Russian smokers:
https://www.newsweek.com/video-russian-depot-crimea-fire-large-explosions-ukraine-1733913
(scroll down for videos)
Great video of the occupiers’ ammo stores cooking off!
There is also a report of a number of high-voltage towers blown up in Kursk Oblast, Russian Federation.
They do but I have noticed they have a lot of rightwing propagandists writing there.
US involvement in Afghanistan began with a benighted response to a benighted invasion as part of the benighted superpower struggle. Given those origins, whatever follows in US-Afghan relations will ultimately follow that benighted hysteresis.
This is a red herring argument you're trotting out to make it sound like "weakness" is the reason why many of us did not want US to just drop things and leave at an arbitrary date.
if only we had stayed another 6 months, right? then things would have been sunshine and roses.
What My Cabdriver Taught Me.
No. Such blithely simplistic statements of assumptions are not fitting of discussions about serious matters. Feel free to troll other people, if you must.
My statement and point is certainly simple. And also correct.
The US agreed to leave Afghanistan in February, 2020. The nominated departure completion date was April 30, 2021. Troop levels had dropped to a token level by the end of 2020. The Biden administration negotiated an extension of final departure to August 31, while issuing in April the first in a series of advisories that Americans should leave the country.
To characterise this as 'just dropping things and leaving at an arbitrary date' bears no relationship to reality.
What did they do in 2020? Set an arbitrary timeline. In fact, Trump explicitly abandoned his conditional withdrawal by August 2019. He fucking ran on the notion of picking dates out one's ass, letting the enemy know when you were leaving.
Lacking a conditions-based schedule, you're left picking a date out of one's ass (or negotiating for one) making it arbitrary; the act of simply picking a date does not make in un-arbitrary.
They literally left Bagram overnight without telling anyone -- https://bityl.co/DrK8
So what makes this timeline less arbitrary then
For a war which we didn’t win but wanted to be done with, the end will always be arbitrary. There was never going to be a VA day, and the Taliban could never drive us out by force, so what else were we hoping for?
No doubt if one of your proposed conditions was successful self-defense by the Afghan government, we would’ve had to stick around for another 20 years. Ditto if you wanted some political moderation by the Taliban. The condition we got was “the Taliban stop shooting at Americans” and we were lucky to have gotten that
We armed the Afghans to the teeth but they didn’t want to fight. So I’m my mind that validates our decision to leave abruptly. No point to staying
Yes. The enlisted men were just there for a paycheck, as it is now clear that Afghanistan has no economy to speak of. Many officers were there for the graft, apparently.
There is no "less arbitrary". That's a cynical artifice to justify the arbitrary. The specific date agreed-upon by Trump's team was irrelevant -- it could have been two months earlier or two weeks later.
Per KD:
The welfare of the people whose lives we'd upended, made promises to, and staked our reputation on, in the end, were no longer in America's self interest. We pretended to care, but we really didn't care.
We weren't winning. We weren't losing. US was at a standstill, creating an uneasy, difficult, standoff. We, the US, got weary of following through on the hardest of things because Americans didn't think it was worth it.
American doctrine is, cynically, exactly what KD stated: Whatever is in our self-interest; there is no moral obligation, no values-based credo, no nothing that can overcome the American's self-interest.
I agree that our pullout grievously hurt people who we'd made commitments to. But as we weren't willing to stay there indefinitely, I'm not sure how we could have done differently. KD has made a good argument about the infeasibility of a more gradual pullout. That would only have caused greater and more extended bloodletting, both among those working with us and among civilians in general.
I'd say we did a fair-to-middling job of handling an awful situation.
I would say that twenty years of putting American lives at risk to stave off a Taliban takeover and create the conditions in which a less illiberal government and society could develop, fulfilled our moral obligation*. It was and is clear that that objective never had strong or widespread support; it was only popular among educated, mostly urban Afghans. Everyone else was either indifferent, or passionately committed to restoring an authoritarian, illiberal theocracy.
The Trump administration should not have excluded the Ghani government from negotiations; it represented, however imperfectly, that group that is now at risk. But the truth is, neither it nor the Taliban are competent to govern the charity case that is Afghanistan.
*An obligation I never thought we should have taken on. The conventional wisdom in the 1990’s was, Afghans endured but didn’t favor the Taliban government because they were ‘tired of fighting’. Then we intervened and suddenly they were up to fighting again.
The war was at a standstill because the Taliban were holding off because we were leaving. The idea that it would remain that way if we declared we were going to stay "just a XXX months/weeks longer" is delusional. Also, isn't 20 years long enough? Or would you prefer 50?
It was at a standstill for half a year before that.
The question Trump asked re our involvement in South Korea was also, "how much longer?"
Proving (yet again) that TFG is an idiot - and nothing else. Over the years since the war, South Korea has transitioned from a military dictatorship to a multiparty democracy with protection of human rights, and has developed an advanced economy, 30th in the world in GDP per capita. Afghanistan is an authoritarian theocracy dependent on foreign aid, ranking 181st in GDP per capita, which abuses the rights of women, LGBTQ people, political and religious dissidents, beardless men, children …
American doctrine is, cynically, exactly what KD stated: Whatever is in our self-interest;
That's not the "American" doctrine. But it should be. We constantly do stuff that's not in our own interest. What do we get out of the several billion we gift to Israel, for instance?
But if we ever do decide to start doing only things that are genuinely in the national interest of the US, it wouldn't be "cynical" it would be "sensible."
It probably sounds paranoid but am convinced that the media deliberately misreported this story just to make Biden look bad. Most of our political media is enamored of people they see as heroes and the military is top of that list so they avoid criticizing the military as much as they can. They know the blame for the “surprising” sudden collapse of the Afghan government should fall on military leaders because they were the ones who had spent 20 years falsely claiming they had been making a lot of progress helping that country establish a stable government with a well organized military. The media chose to ignore that well established fact, putting the blame squarely on Biden.
In the media’s determination to make Biden look as bad a possible the media also mostly ignored the fact that it was Trump and Steven Miller who had badly damaged the visa program for Afghan — and Iraqi — citizens who had helped the US and that was a major reason getting them out quickly was so complicated. Most also ignored the fact that the evacuation was made even more dangerous because Trump had negotiated his deal solely with the Taliban, not the Afghan government, and that deal included the release of thousands of dangerousTaliban prisoners who made the evacuation even more dangerous.
Then there was the fact that most of the mainstream “liberal” media falsely claimed that the Biden administration had had no plan to evacuate all those American citizens and Afghanis who had helped the US. In fact that US embassy had mounted an extraordinary effort to get those people out and worked with our allies to do so:
“…from the earliest days of this operation, an extraordinary effort to identify Americans and others who needed to get out took place. Every American in Afghanistan was identified and directly contacted, often repeatedly. According to State Department estimates, over 55,000 calls were made and over 33,000 texts were sent as part of this effort. U.S. embassies in Mexico, India and other places far from the action set up call centers to enable this complex coordination. Through this process, almost all the Americans in Afghanistan who sought to leave have been able to do so.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-real-story-of-the-state-departments-afghanistan-evacuation?ref=scroll
That Daily Beast article gives a detailed description of the well-planned, internationally coordinated evacuation efforts and is well worth reading.
It is clear that reporters were aware of this effort. The WaPo’s Jennifer Rubin reported that the State Department had shown reporters documents of that effort. Starting several months before the evacuation date the US embassy had repeatedly sent messages telling eople to book airline flights out and that the US would pay for their flights. (The US did the evacuation this way because the Afghan government did not want an obvious US evacuation effort. ) The people that the Biden administration “callously left behind” were people who had wanted to stay in the country and had misjudged the danger they would face. It was those people who later panicked and rushed to Bagram to be evacuated.
For the last few days the media has revived this “Biden is incompetent” story using the anniversary of our withdrawal from Afghanistan as their excuse. It really feels like reporters can’t stand the fact that recently they have had to report on Biden’s successes and feel compelled to hype any negative news about him that they can find. This is the same media that is constantly agonizing about the possibility that extremist Republicans will retake control of our government and crow about their pro-democracy agendas. The WaPo’s motto is “democracy dies in darkness”. Maybe they should stop spreading the darkness with dishonest stories.
Thanks for this! The 1 year anniversary wave of recriminations, coincidentally (?) a few months before the mid-term election has been disgustingly one sided. And that side is the Republican side. Of course.
+1
Half the national media is wingnut comfort news, if they don't hear it they'll cry.
+1
"...We enter wars if we think they're in our interest...."
Ummm...not exactly. This is where Ledeenism comes in, as defined by the notorious quote from Michael Ledeen: "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." Ledeen's Wikipedia page says this was "tongue-in-cheek": like Hell it was. It is the nearest thing to a foreign policy that the U. S. can have, given that there are not a thousand persons coast to coast who could find any given country on a globe if you gave them forty minutes and a jeweller's loupe. It is all performance for a domestic audience; but it is also what the rest of the world will most durably and bitterly hold against us.
Grenada was a great triumph!
I knew some medical students there at the time, and they were grateful to be rescued. But like all military missions, there was foul ups and loss of life on all sides.
We owe the Vatican reparations for the noise pollution endured at their Panamanian embassy during the standoff with Noriega, too.
An annual budgetary tithe would do the trick I;m sure
Yes, according to certain military and foreign policy wonks doing the same thing over and over again for twenty years, setting trillions of dollars on fire, and expecting it to finally get better next year isn't the very definition of insanity, but "showing resolve." I don't know why these people get to be on tv and paid to write columns.
I'll also add that I don't think it's true that we did no good in Afghanistan. A generation of young women got to go to school, people were opening new businesses, media was relatively free. But those gains simply weren't sustainable without a reasonably competent government that could guarantee security and show they had their shit together better than the Taliban. They couldn't do anything without it immediately devolving into a clusterfuck of tribalism and corruption, all subsidized by the American taxpayer. It was time to pull the plug.
The gains you mentioned were real, but they were limited to Kabul. 70% of Afghans live in the countryside and they saw none of that. Instead, they got the "Global War on Terror."
Because of Bush's Folly in Iraq, we didn't have the troops to do it ourselves so we turned to our old friends -- the Mujahideen -- to hunt down terrorists in the countryside. The Muj are religious fanatics, just like the Taliban, but they were far more brutal and far more corrupt.
Basically, we turned the Muj into bounty hunters and they used the opportunity to settle scores and to make money by randomly grabbing people and turning them over to the Americans. As bad as the Taliban are, the Muj are worse. Rural Afghans turned to the Taliban for protection.
+1
I think the damage to America's reputation was not that America was not adequately committed or willing to stick things out, but that America's war effort against the Taliban was completely ineffectual. We spent 20 years and more than $2 trillion and the end result was that the Taliban controlled more territory than they did when we invaded. Whether we withdrew in 2002 or 2032, the end result would have been the same because nothing we did actually worked. Bottom line, our record of successfully using military force to achieve strategic objectives is spotty at best.
We won the battles early on, but lost the peace.
If Bush kept his eye on the ball and went after Bin Laden, we could have left early on too and let the Afghans sort it out. Yes, callous, especially after "Charlie Wilson's War", we owed them.
Well, in theory, the United States and a few allies went into Afghanistan to wipe out al-Qaida, NOT the Taliban. So it could be said that the last 18 years has been unnecessary as well as ineffective.
On the other hand, a whole generation of city-bound Afghans has had increased educational opportunities, got to see a somewhat democratic albeit grossly corrupt government, and see competent women in positions of responsibility. It's not impossible that the city-bound Afghans can build on this knowledge and eventually move beyond/throw off their Taliban occupiers.
But having US soldiers and drones occupying the place was not furthering this goal.
The Soviet-backed government in Kabul had a pretty good record on women's rights, too. They banned child marriage and gave women the right to choose their husbands. The percentage of women in their national assembly was higher than the percentage of women in the US Congress at the time.
But they were godless commies, so we allied ourselves with a group of religious fanatics known as the Mujahideen. The Muj got their start when the Soviets tried to institute female education in the countryside; in some cases they herded girls to school at gunpoint. In one of their first operations, the Muj kidnapped all the schoolteachers in Sangin Valley and slit their throats. These are the people we allied ourselves with.
It's strange but I don't recall any concern over Afghan women's rights during that period.
And in spite of it the Soviets still lost. Their Afghan allies were eventually eliminated as well.
No the war effort was fairly successful: https://fddvisuals.github.io/vicious-cycle-afghanistan/
What failed was trying to install a competent, less corrupt government, and training an army that would defend that government.
The rest of the world doesn't believe in this alleged issue of credibility. They believe that the United States acts in its own self interest. We enter wars if we think they're in our interest. We leave wars if we think that's in our interest. And everyone knows we have the power to make our threats good if we feel like it. We hardly have to prove that more often than we already do.
Amen to that. And every country in the world would act in the same fashion.
Trump is as incoherent and irrational about Afghanistan as he is about most foreign policy issues more complicated than whether he likes another country's leader. Having first praised Biden's decision to withdraw, adding only that it should happen faster, he later claimed that he would have kept Bagram airbase. Needless to say this would have been completely unacceptable to the Taliban and ensured that hostilities resumed.
The withdrawal was not coordinated with NATO partners. That is what caused damage to our allies. Also it caused massive morale damage to the actual troops many veterans got out and urging people against enlisting because their friends deaths meant nothing due to leaving. Dont argue about that with me, argue with the vets. Anyhow we now have massive shortfalls in recruiting that cannot be explained by the job market.
Err...why can't they be explained by the job market? Seems like a reasonable explanation to me. Can you point me towards any evidence that recruitment shortfalls are being caused by unhappy veterans (which we never had in the past! ) and not by a historically low unemployment rate?
Yeah, possible recruits spend a lot of time reading about Afghanistan and listening to vets. Sure.
The argument that America had to keep getting people killed so earlier deaths of US troops would "have meaning" is the most grotesquely perverted version of the sunk cost fallacy ever. I've yet to read a plausible explanation of what the "meaning" would be.
Yep. The loss of purpose for being there occurred years ago.
We are a far more credible nation having finally left Afghanistan than we were while we stayed there.
70,000 Afghans who risked their lives to work with US troops still there- with families.
Biden is undoubtedly pleased with the most recent show of strength: the latest Minuteman III ICBM.
I suspect it's also partly because the United States is an absurdly rich country, which makes it *affordable* for us to occasionally do dumb shit with our absurdly expensive military.
The kind of country in which blowing two trillion over a 20-year period amounts to chump change
... But is too, too much to spend at home on infrastructure repair, the social safety net, mitigation of climate change...
In a few months, the American version of the Taliban will take control of the government. I guess no one will be coming to rescue me either.
https://www.politico.com/2022-election/race-forecasts-ratings-and-predictions/
538 has the Senate leaning Dem, but House still looks bad...
https://fivethirtyeight.com/
At this point, the only good thing about the Senate is that it isn't re-gerrymandered every 10 years.
The United States spent 20 years in Afghanistan, the majority of them during a period in which it was obvious to everyone that we had little chance of winning or even doing any real good. This is the kind of thing that burnishes your reputation for sticking things out.
This is exactly right, and was made abundantly clear after the fall of the USSR, when Soviet archives became available: The Kremlin was greatly troubled by America's long, bloody, bullheaded and massive-in-scale effort in Vietnam. In their eyes it confirmed the fact that they were dealing with a determined and grimly stubborn adversary drenched in a fanatical anti-communist worldview and possessing seemingly endless resources.
Like +10!
Obviously Putin ignored that lesson. If there there is anything we have been ‘determined and grimly stubborn’ about since the end of the last world war, it is that borders in Europe should not be changed by force. The Balkans sort of got a pass, because, well, ‘Balkanization’ is a thing. In fact, the Yugoslav constituent republics were already semi-autonomous under Tito, and they attempted to separate peacefully. It was the Serbs who tried to restore the federation by force.
The Afghanistan record is one of the data points that makes me laugh when people talk about the West losing interest in Ukraine. There was also the forty year Cold War, the fifteen year Vietnam project, and seventy years' support for Israel, South Korea, and Taiwan, all of which suggest that grim, sometimes irrational, persistence is just about the defining feature of the Western, especially American, approach to military confrontation.
If I were a Russian I certainly wouldn't count on the Western countries losing interest in Ukraine any time in the foreseeable future.