U.S. Embassy in Kabul Tells Staff to Destroy Sensitive Material and Evacuate
text.npr.org
text.npr.org
Unless Biden changes course, it's going to be another Saigon, whether the pictures show it or not (e.g. they may get the Americans out before the Taliban is too close, and avoid pictures of throngs of desperate allies mobbing the embassy hoping to get evacuated with the last Americans, but most of those allies will still be stranded).
Rest assured, there won't be another Saigon. The videos coming out of Afghan countryside and Kabul will be erased by BigTech under some corporate speak reason or another. The masses will never see them. 'Covid Misinformation' (TM) is just the dry run.
Sure the Taliban can wait, but the "mob" will be the people who were associated with the occupying forces, desperate to escape their deaths.
so the only option was pull out or continue with the sunk cost fallacy of thinking we can somehow fix Afghanistan by doubling down with another troop surge. I'm glad we are finally admitting it was a failure
Not saying Iraq and Afghanistan weren't unnecessary and expensive. The U.S. and the world would have been better off without them, probably. Saddam and the Taliban, Isis, Al Qaida don't look so dangerous in retrospect. But Islamic "extremism" was the big perceived threat back then, and you could argue that it is less of a threat today, so someones' version of a problem solved.
WW2 would also have failed if the military had tried to avoid civilian deaths. You simply can't win a war that way,
Example: The government never bothered to renew the authorization for the global war on terror given in 2001 until like last year.
Mil works best with a clear mission - nation building is not a clear mission.
What doesn't work is fighting while also trying to build up a country, After WW2 Germany and Japan only worked because there was basically no resistance and the occupying powers could focus completely on rebuilding civilian society.
What makes it even worse in countries like Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq is that the occupiers have no understanding of these societies and are trying to impose Western values on them.
The average Afghan has never looked at US society and culture aspirationally. They admire our wealth - that's it.
Exactly - and that is because the enemy in WW2 was a centrally led conventional army. Defeat it once, and it just stops, it's over.
Right now we are sending 3000 troops in for evacuations, and I don't think this is the last time we'll have troops in there. If the Taliban completes a significant enough takeover of Afghanistan then (in my opinion) it's just a matter of time before some action prompts US or some coalition of forces to return.
To what end? The security threat has been mitigated. The energy dynamic has changed with Aramco’s listing, fracking and bona fide renewable energy.
We are, first and foremost, a naval power. Afghanistan is a shitty buffer state. Our ports and coastal bases more than suffice for the foreseeable future in that region.
I'm just guessing here and I'm no expert but it just seems like maintaining the base would cost not much when compared to its usefulness in even just counter terror operations (not in the broad sense where innocents are hurt but like actual raids on specific leaders, baghdadi, bin laden, etc [though i dont think the baghdadi raid originated from bagram])
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Osama_bin_Laden#Ope...
These risk calculations of “not many personnel” have American boys and girls on the receiving end, who spend 18-20 months to do what, maintain presence?
Two notes then: - already been tried as a course of action in the last several years. The problem then and in this future hypothetical is that the mission creeps. If you watched American KIA in AFG the last few, youd start to notice deaths that come from patrolling and convoys. There is no scenario where Americans stay on Bagram only and ever. Even If Kabul is in fact surrounded, you’d have risks just the same but with a fighting force at Bagram completely unable to respond because it’s undermanned and without a clear mission (enter in: Somali 1992).
- let’s say it’s an accepted risk though. how that model works in reality is long term, sustained presence. The desire impact of a long term Bagram is achieved by lengthy relationships with locals. The army model is 18 month rotations. This doesn’t build that relationship. There is a reason the last instances the US had really succeeded at war was “go to Berlin, come back when the Nazis are gone.” This stuff takes a very sustained presence to achieve, including leadership not leaving every 18 months. So which unit gets to live in AFG full time, in this long term Bagram scenario? Bc if it’s not done that way, you get the life disrupting/ending shadow war of 2016-2021.
A lot of this has been in support of some questionable regimes and has probably exacerbated the dysfunction.
I think it is difficult to compare Germany and Afghanistan.
I am French and if we had a US base here people would not be happy but it ultimately would have been a topic during elections.
The soldiers wood blend in and the cultural difference between the US and Germany << US - Afghanistan.
South Corea is an exotic country for us, but this is many food, entertainment, on the surface at least.
I do not think that US soldiers wood blend in, or at least naturally incorporate into Afghanistan, there are too many differences.
Just compare how and where the youth spend their time. In France, Germany, SK out Japan this wood be tiktok, listening to pretty much the same music (we had the kpop wave here...). In Afghanistan this is probably vastly different
Tax enough to pay for the effort but not for a "profit". Build infrastructure by bringing outside expertise to train and build local business. Take control of schools, make them safe and required for all children. Respect the local culture but smash hard some cultural practices.
Would it be incredibly hard to do without abuse? Absolutely. Is it questionably moral? Absolutely. Could it even be done at all? Questionable.
We keep acting that the outcome of every military conflict is going to be like the liberation of France in WWII, kill the "bad guys" and then champagne and croissant parades with the locals.
The repeated failed attempts at just handing self-government to nations after we depose their governments shows that you can't just win wars and fix problems with force alone. War is awful, it should happen as infrequently as possible, but if you're going to do it, you better have a plan for winning the peace. Corrupt, half-assed nation building doesn't cut it.
These are not merely in tension, but actually completely incompatible. We can respect local culture or try to impose one that we like better, but you can't do the first and also the second.
> Would it be incredibly hard to do without abuse?
No, it would be abuse.
> Is it questionably moral?
No, again, it is unquestionably immoral.
> War is awful, it should happen as infrequently as possible, but if you're going to do it, you better have a plan for winning the peace.
Sometimes, you just need to accept winning the war. Disrupting al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and providing a deterrent for the Taliban letting a similar group base out of there in the future was a win. The fantasy of then forcibly-but-on-the-cheap implanting a pro-Western liberal democratic regime and society in Afghanistan was...insane. Unrealistic fantasies about “winning the peace” we could do with fewer of.
Japan and the Marshall plan are not a million miles from being an example of the change being proposed. A lot of differences though.
Edit: it used to say Martial plan. Sort of a funny error.
Neither the Marshall Plan nor the post-WWII occupations of Japan were within a million miles of “actual imperial rule for a couple of generations”. The post-war occupation of Germany on paper kind of resembles that, but that's largely a side effect of the subsequent Cold War.
We’ve tried an imposed system from an occupying US force in Afghanistan longer than we did i Japan. Or Germany, in any real way.
It might have worked if we had made the right decisions early on, but successful occupation is path-dependent, you screw it up and you don't get to start over with a clean slate, and the evidence is that we didn't do it right from the outset, if there was a “right” open in the particular circumstances.
You can very much respect the local culture while smashing out and cultural practices. For example, key to culture is language and so promoting local language is important. Likewise, the treatment of women in some middle East countries is oppressive and so promoting inclusion as an alternative (preferred) cultural norm is ideal. Same with child marriage.
Know, you can't “smashing cultural practices” is not respecting local culture, its imposing your preferred alternative.
I’m not saying its wrong in all cases, I’m saying you are engaging in doublethink of the highest order if you maintain that it is compatible with respecting the culture.
Literally killing minority groups while destroying century old or millennia old artifacts and museums.
It's doublethink to suggest that the Americans were in the wrong here. The Taliban are a powerful for with local support, but I hope that the temporary peace we offered the Afghani for the past few years will be remembered.
We probably pushed too many of our values. We shouldn't have made a democracy or pushed women's rights as much. The bar was set to high. We should have been happy with simply the removal of the Taliban and laser focused upon that goal.
Those rights that we believe in (but they don't) will be the first thing to fall. So pushing their morals in our image is just a mistake entirely.
--------
The Taliban are a group that literally bans females from reading or using smartphones, and they get popular support from the people. At some point, we have to just admit that it's what their population prefers. And we are coming in talking about democracy and giving their mostly illiterate women the right to vote. Of course they won't like us.
Admitting that you are merely “respecting” the elements of the culture that don't conflict strongly with your cultural values but not the ones that do clash isn’t doublethink.
Thinking that you are respecting the cultural as a whole while you campaign to eliminate the elements of it that offend your cultural values, however, is.
Well, we already decided a long time ago that we knew better than the Afghans how to run their own society. This would be an improvement in that we’d actually have the decency to do something about it.
If you want good self-government of a people, then you must eliminate tribal/clan structures so that advantages aren't given to uncles/cousins, but rather to people independent of their relations.
* https://ideas.repec.org/p/sfu/sfudps/dp17-17.html
* https://www.u4.no/publications/the-kinship-in-public-office-...
* https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=...
* https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055415000271
How much of a tribal/clan culture is present in Afghanistan?
The current GDP of Afghanistan is about 70 billion USD (Wikipedia).
So you would need to have taxed Afghanistan about 70% their yearly GDP for the last 20 years just to pay for the occupation.
Needless to say, people don't typically appreciate having to pay their occupiers.
You are trying to breed out extremism? It's not like a fad... You can never breed it out. A couple generations? No. Not even 5 generations will be enough.
Look at it from the perspective of someone who has had their country invaded by a foreign power. In what way aren't those people traitors?
The group heading to Fort Lee includes 700 who qualify for the SIV program; the remaining 1,800 Afghans are their family members."
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/19/us-housing-afghan-r...
It seems there is somewhat of a plan in place that is what you describe.
The Germans are doing the same. They are leaving people that have helped them behind. Really shameful.
Germany grants 2,400 visas to Afghan employees, relatives
https://apnews.com/article/europe-germany-f6bacc58477cd0eb92...
It seems like the most prudent thing to have done was to adopt a kind of Fabian Strategy where we don't invade a nation halfway around the globe and hope to change a culture that has stubbornly been able to avoid being conquered by the major empires in world history. When you really look at it, no major act of terrorism of the same scale was going to happen anyways. I mean really, mass shootings end up killing more people. And it's not like the hijack an airliner strategy is going to work again.
But here we are, 2+ Trillion burned and nothing to show for it.
TSA (Thousands Standing Around) is much more effective as a jobs program than a security program in my estimation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_theater
Its visiblity and intrusiveness is precisely the point. Not its effectiveness.
A jobs program for the private screeners that the TSA replaced.
It’s main original purpose (at least, of federalizing screening) was an excuse to transfer liability for future risks away from the airlines, which the airlines explicitly lobbied for in the immediate wake of 9/11.
- Background checks cross-references with photo ID before flying (e.g. the do not fly list)
- Enhanced security screening (there’s YouTube footage of a totally incompetent pat down of one of the 9-11 hijackers)
- Locked and strengthened cockpit doors
- A chance of an Air Marshal on a flight
- The knowledge that passengers will fight back
- Strict no-fly zones around sensitive areas like DC
I’ve gotten cleared to land in the “DC-3” airports and have landed at College Park (inside the FRZ) and Fort Meade (inside the SFRA) many times in light aircraft.
There are restrictions, but they’re quite far from being “no-fly zones”.
Do you have a link? I can't find this.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_hijacking#1958–1979
The TSA checkpoint is mostly a security theater. It stops people who don't try to hide and people who are unable to think of a way to get past it. It also limit the amount of weapons that airline personal need to see so that when they see it they can assume ill intent.
The "random" checks and blacklists seem to have mixed quality. According to some they actually worked when good investigators identified high risk people. According to other it was mostly just racism and personal vendettas. Hard to give it a definitive grade.
Locked doors and strict policy against people getting access to the cockpit seems to have worked.
For starters... any group thinking about attacking the US on it's homeland will have to contemplate a 20+ year conflict afterwards.
We also did educate a lot of people there, many of which are leaving the country right now for obvious reasons - but still, we did help a lot of people there.
Lastly, the way we're throwing money around these days, $2 Trillion is practically nothing when spread out over a 20 year period anyway.
Maybe I'm just searching for the silver lining...
We also "canoed" a lot people there.
I don't know how true this is, but I heard that Bin Laden's goal was to get the US mired in an extremely expensive and prolonged war of attrition. It's the same strategy that helped bring down the Soviet Union. It makes sense, at face value, to get a vastly more powerful adversary bogged down in such a war.
>"Maybe I'm just searching for the silver lining..."
I feel you. It's pretty disheartening.
The US only momentarily devoted its attention to Afghanistan, until the Administration was able to redirect its energy to the preconceived war on Iraq it initially wanted to use the 9/11 attack to justify but was thwarted by the evidence leading elsewhere too clearly.
That's a big part of the reason the long occupation on Afghanistan was such a failure.
> plus local right wing people and parties were emboldened by an Islamophobic mindset in general
Uh, for the point of view of the right-wing party in America that launched that war and the next, that wasn't an unfortunate unintended consequence, its part of the reason many of the people in that Administration had been trying to get a war against Iraq off the ground since shortly after the previous one ended.
They seem like mutually incompatible motivations.
[1] source: St Louis Fed: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDP
The US didn't invade Saudi Arabia.
The US's big mistake was not trying to make a back room deal with them to the tune of "we'll make you more secure than any south American tin-pot dictator so long as you make the kind of example out of Al-Qaeda that we can't make"
If either of those things had went through it would have saved both parties 20yr of money, blood and associated bullshit.
Supposedly the Taliban didn’t refuse to turn him over full stop but rather refused without evidence. I don’t know if that was them never planning to turn him over and just trying to buy time with a soft no, them -as a very young government with little international recognition- trying to demonstrate sovereignty with the intent to hand him over after an extradition trial, them genuinely not knowing he did it and really wanting evidence. Or given that organisations don’t make decisions but that individuals do, was it a combination of the above plus various other personal interests and biases.
Same with the US side. Did they suspect or know the Taliban wasn’t ever going to hand him over? Not willing to give them the political recognition and legitimacy that cooperating diplomatically would have? Was the resistance that the Taliban was fighting and that the US backed believed to be stronger and the Taliban weaker than in reality? Was Bush just getting information from his campaign team that if he didn’t retaliate militarily quickly then the electorate would see him as weak but if he did then they would rally behind him?
For all the people we "helped", a thousand more grew up to the sound of US drones shelling their extended family members.
The "War on Terror" dwarves Vietnam as the US's greatest military failure, and is singularly responsible for it's crippling presence on the world stage today.
Several groups attacked the US Capitol 8 months ago and they got away with it with only 500 carged with federal crimes. Which isn't nothing, but is a far cry from 20+ year conflict.
The lesson here is that you cannot help a Middle-east Muslim country to democracy, it is an impossible task.
Even Turkey seems to be heading in the wrong direction these years.
Afghanistan isn't in the Middle East.
You don't invade and occupy a country to “help” it, but to achieve some self-interested goal at its expense.
Why this is the case was a full court press on AQ across the globe by IC, and toppling the safety net in AFG was a (the) critical part of that occurring. It’s a fairly lengthy operation to succinctly cite, but starting with the CIA’a CTC activities between ‘97 and ‘03 will cover it.
It’s also important to keep in context that after the Embassy bombings in Tanzania/Kenya in ‘98 (200 dead) another attack of the same scale was never going to happen again. And after the USS Cole (17 KIA plus a decommissioned Naval Destroyer), another attack at that scale was deemed unlikely. 9/11 happened, and… all sourcing to a serious inability to directly target or gain Intel on AQ, which operated freely in AFG.
So, the initial invasion was critical in that narrow sense. AQ was toppled and never recovered globally. Should we have stayed, or instead given it to a United Front or heavily empowered/armed/funded Karzai? To your point - probably the latter was a good option, 20 years and a lot of dead Americans later.
Edit - downvote for over-acronym use makes sense, another user helpfully linked acronym <>wiki articles. That said, the above is well known history, but happened a very long time ago to a niche area of national security. If people are curious on “what the hell happened to Afghanistan for 20 years,” it’s important to know this part.
IC: Intelligence Community - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_community
AFG: Afghanistan - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghanistan
CIA: Central Intelligence Agency - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Intelligence_Agency
CTC: Counter Terrorism Center - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterterrorism_Center
KIA: Killed in Action - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killed_in_action
Aside from that, what does an embassy bombing in Tanzania/Kenya have to do with Afghanistan or 9/11? Was it done by Al-Qaeda? And could you clarify or expand on most of the rest of your comment?
Yes, the embassy bombings and the attack on the USS Cole were carried out by al-Qaeda.
But also see other user’s post below.
In short, Afghanistan and Al Qaeda were on the map for a very long time, but no one listened.
By the time 9/11 occurred, AQ was a global, well coordinated organization with a single underfunded agency (CIA) tracking it. The agency was largely forbidden from accessing the only spot Al Qaeda really aggregated: Afghanistan. If you can orient to a pre-Internet time, it makes sense how much (realized) risk this black box caused - embassy and US navy ship bombings, and 9/11. The United Front is another term for the Northern Alliance, a ~tribal group in northern AFG. It was the CIA’s main access and information flow into AFG until 9/12. The state dept and official policy largely forbade interacting with them though. The leader of the UF who the CIA linked with starting back in the late 90s, guy named Massood, was assassinated by the Taliban/AQ on like 9/10 iirc (so days before 9/11).
This all goes to say that the invasion of AFG was tremendously important, but staying there once AQ was gone maybe was not. There are fairly tragic records of July and early Sept 2001 briefings from the CIA to the President on the imminent threat actual.
One way to start reading about this history: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cofer_Black
Your theory while very intriguing is something I can't possibly see ever happening just due to the hubris that occurs when you think you are unbeatable.
That is exactly what the sentiment was going into the war.
I am reminded of this scene from 2004's Slacker Uprising. This woman reminds me of the MAGA people of today. That same hubris is what got us Trump and it probably won't go away until the country stops being the singular world superpower.
What the US can do is project power with precision (if not always accuracy), where that's politically and strategically possible, though bouncing rocks with cruise missiles and JDAMS may not actually achieve much after the nightly-news phosphers fade. The US is rather more hamstrung dealing with larger, or nuclear-armed, threats: Russia, China, North Korea. Iran have been taking notes.
Maybe? But the Boomers emerged from those conflicts to be the most prosperous generation in world history so I don't buy your argument.
Millennials and Gen Z didn't really live through the events you described and from their point of view, all they saw was optimism...until they grew up and saw the fire at their doorstep in the form of the events I mentioned.
>The US is rather more hamstrung dealing with larger, or nuclear-armed, threats: Russia, China, North Korea. Iran have been taking notes.
We will see. I think it is too early to tell. I don't disagree but this may just be a symptom of a fading US superpower but the underlying causes are unrelated to these countries and anything specific they have done.
It's fair to say that in major conflicts since 1992, and perhaps going back earlier (1980s, Grenada invasion), the US was generally more successful, though even that's somewhat conditioned. During the 1990s especially, it picked its fights and especially in Gulf War I didn't fight to occupation.
At the same time, it did see several notable failures. GWI was prompted by a failure to respond in an appropriate or timely nature to Iraq's beligerance toward Kuwait, despite a very obvious intent. There was the Blackhawk Down incident in Mogadishu, Somalia (1993), a largely successful though not unmarred campaign in the Bosnian-Kosovo civil war, the failure to intervene in Rawanda.
And then there was 9/11. The single deadliest attack by a foreign power on US soil in history, and against which the entirety of the US defence and intelligence establishment proved utterly ineffective. (A gay rugby player and a few civillians provided a more effective protective force.)
Since 9/11 the US has been engaged in a legitimate though ultimately futile conflict in Afghanistan, as well as the utterly illegitimate and disasterous Iraq campaign, as its principle boots-on-the-ground conflicts.
There've been numerous other engagements (Nepal, horn of Africa, Syria, Maghreb, Pakistan, Indian Ocean / Somali pirates, Somalia, Libya, Uganda, Yemen, and subsequent actions in Iraq, but all have been limited engagements, most strongly reliant on airpower (manned and unmanned) or advisory roles, geared more at suppression than conquest and control.
The conflicts in which the US walked in and kicked ass are largely limited to the Spanish-American War (1898), WWI (as a late and limited participant), and WWII (as a major and decisive participant). Unless you'd like to count numerous labour disputes in which US armed forces attacked labour on behalf of industrial and investment interests.
On nuclear / WMD adversaries, "MAD" is in fact the principle doctrine of the atomic-weapons era: mutual assurred destruction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction
I'm not making any arguments of ascendency or decline. I'm stating the historical military record.
(I did in fact study some of this in school, for what it's worth.)
Was reading Moby Dick the other day and came across this excerpt...
'Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States.
WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL.
BLOODY BATTLE IN AFGHANISTAN.'
The more things change...
> But here we are, 2+ Trillion burned and nothing to show for it.
Other than another grateful nation basking in the glow of the democracy we've bestowed upon them. Mission accomplished.
I would expect that a group that has been hunted for 2 decades to be only just barely managing to survive - how do they have weapons, transportation, logistics etc to be able to basically get their act together like the past 20 years never happened?
I'm not really sure I can make Russia funding the Taliban work. Do you have any actual evidence because this would be like the CIA funding Al queda, in many ways..
There are a few enough Russians in Afghanistan, but afaik, the Taliban are mostly ambivalent to them now. The Taliban mostly targets 3 types of folks - US and NATO people, Afghan government people, and open allies of the Afghan government (countries like India). Uzbekistan and Iran maintain very tight borders with Afghanistan so that the fighting doesn't spill over.
For a very interesting tidbit, even very recently, Taliban was fighting ISIS near Badakhshan and Nuristan.
every major war since WWII has been a proxy war between the US and Russia/China. Korea, Vietnam, Middle East, Latin America stuff, etc.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-14/afghanistan-taliban-s...
The rest of the population just isn't strong enough and coordinated enough to beat a highly motivated and organized minority.
While I didn't support continuation of the war because I don't see how it benefits the USA, it wasn't an unjust war. Quite the opposite. We were allies of the democratically elected Afghan government, fighting against the tyranny of a small group of religious fanatics.
2. The Taliban come in and promise a return back to old times, and no drone strikes any more, which means they at least don't get resistance any more.
3. The government is corrupt as hell, the army soldiers don't see anything worth fighting for, and they don't have working heavy arms (planes, tanks). That drastically reduces how much resources the Taliban need to take over.
That's true if you don't think adding the female half of the nation to the pool of available talent helps build a nation.
There is more to sustainably help women than just building schools.
This is a truly historic fuck-up. It's not about it being right to withdraw (it is), but how it's done. We've wasted unfathomable money and time, not to mention lives. Now we have truly nothing gained, we're embarrassed and humiliated, and our enemies emboldened. It's pathetic.
1. https://www.usnews.com/news/world-report/articles/2021-08-12...
2. https://nationworldnews.com/china-has-taken-new-steps-with-a...
My pet theory is Russia is playing both sides of this. The SCO has been around for 20 some odd years. But recently China and Russia have been fucking with each other and it primarily involves inviting India and Pakistan to join the pact. Anyhow, I imagine Putin is arming and possibly coordinating funding to the Taliban. Once in power the Taliban will become China’s problem in the region and may very well have some excursions past their border with China. So Putin will be able to swoop in to assist with additional military might. It may even become a showcase for the SCO as a NATO-like coalition.
It’ll achieve two objectives: showing that China now is a regional military influence in a former US sphere of influence, and that Russia is still itself a military power that can throw its weight around. And just like the US in Afghanistan and the Soviets before it, this will become China’s problem to deal with long term.
Every soldier is also 100% certain their government is unbelievably corrupt, which can't help. If you read about Castro and his men taking over Cuba, they got people to give up military outposts just by firing at them few times. They had no real interest in fighting for their leadership.
* Because everybody can see which way the balance of power is tipping. The US is too weak to stay, and unlikely to ever come back. The Talibans are right there, hungry for blood.
* Because many would rather have Sharia law than US backed corruption. Mullah Omar was publicly executing bacha bazi perpetrators. 'One of the original factors mobilizing the rise of the Taliban was their opposition to the practice.' The US was turning a blind eye if not actively protecting them. In an infamous case, they pushed out a SOF captain and almost fired a decorated SOF sergeant for doing something about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacha_bazi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_Omar#Forming_the_Tali...
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/30/us/green-beret-who-beat-u...
They got their asses kicked in 2001-02, retreated to relatively safe territory in Pakistan. And then have been fighting for the past 20 years. They've occupied territory in Afghanistan for over a decade. It's just never included cities before now.
While their land in Pakistan isn't totally safe, it's their refuge. They have to worry about drone strikes and hush-hush raids, but they are relatively safe there.
Aid from Pakistani Pashtuns. Different country, same tribe.
No one in the US agencies who planned the pull-out and advised the Biden administration, apparently.
You don't have to convince the other guy to die for his.
The easiest way to win is to convince the other guy not to die for his country.
Very loosely paraphrasing Sun Tzu.
-----
> Afghanistan's opium poppy harvest produces more than 90% of illicit heroin globally, and more than 95% of the European supply. As of 2017, opium production provides about 400,000 jobs in Afghanistan, more than the Afghan National Security Forces [0]
> In 2020, the area under opium cultivation expanded to 224,000 hectares from 163,000 hectares - overwhelmingly in areas under Taliban control. [1] [2]
> Meth is even more profitable than heroin—and is turbocharging the insurgency.
> The officials described the Taliban as the world’s biggest drug cartel and said the group is using heroin transshipment routes to push methamphetamine into new markets in Australia, Asia, North America, Europe and Africa.[4]
> Later, a NATO report, accessed by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, claimed that Taliban's annual budget had increased to USD 1.6 billion in the financial year 2019-20. It said that the militant group had increased its profits through illicit drug trade, illegal mining, and exports. [3]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_production_in_Afghanista...
[1] https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/trends/current-affairs-tre...
[2] https://theconversation.com/afghanistan-what-the-conflict-me...
[3] https://english.jagran.com/world/explained-how-do-the-taliba...
[4] https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/07/19/taliban-expanding-drug-...
I think the "What are we going to do about it" is implied by not having a conclusion attached to all the "bad" news. But isn't the rapid Taliban takeover 100% proof that we didn't build any sort of sustainable alternative while we were there?
IIRC, the US pulled too much of the rug out from under the Afghani government too quickly. For instance, I've read the US long ago evacuated the maintenance contractors that maintained the Afghan Air Force, which means they can't fly even if they have the pilots.
Overthrowing governments is awful foreign policy. This was never going to work, just like it didn't in Iraq, Iran, Vietnam, the Congo, Guatemala, Syria and elsewhere.
Here's the kicker: the invasion of Iraq was based on a convenient lie by hawks who had been keen to overthrow Saddam Hussein ever since the First Gulf War. This convenient lie was easily debunked to. It's really simple.
If Saddam Hussein had WMD, why wouldn't he give them up to save himself and his regime? Invasion clearly wasn't an empty threat and that would not end well for him. Hussein was never a religious ideologue. He didn't dream of martyrdom or jihad. He was a self-serving dictator (creates by the US I might add as a tool against Iran in the 1980s in a war that resulted from a revolution against the Shah, a government created by the US; are you beginning to see the pattern?). The only explanation was that Iraq did not in fact have WMDs.
People pointed out in the early days after 9/11 so this isn't some kind of historical revisionism. None of this ever made sense.
No, earlier than that as a tool against Communism in Iraq. Later, the US rushed to support him (including in his use of chemical weapons) when he got bogged down in war with Iran that he launched expecting a quick territorial gain, but that's not where US involvement with him started.
It worked perfectly for the people who implemented the policies and their patrons. The point was never to make average Westerners more secure. It was to hand billions to contractors and oil companies, practice new forms of counterinsurgency and drone warfare, and make token moves against the latest bogeyman used to distract from the empire's exploitation and subjugation of its own people.
All the examples you cite similarly benefitted the elites calling the shots in one way or another.
IIRC, the US didn't overthrow any government Vietnam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Vietnam#Founding_of_Sout....
There's probably some parallels that can be drawn between US support of South Vietnam and US support of South Korea.
It was a CIA puppet state.
The United States will not attack a country that can actually deploy a WMD on it's forces and especially not on its homeland. Even back in the day it was obvious Saddam didnt have WMDs because he didnt use them when America invaded.
They also destroyed a device for encrypted communications. That part must be the easy part these days.
In a morbid way, I enjoyed these photos of “savages” capturing advanced military equipment: https://twitter.com/oryxspioenkop/status/1426101381363027969...
It reminds me of Civ series where you could destroy advanced armies with large enough primitive ones. I used to dismiss it as unrealistic but apparently it wasn’t that unrealistic.
Edit: Of course "everything" is encrypted. You still destroy stuff anyway because of defense in depth.
If they have time they're wiping things first.
You can also just burn them. It's not the Taliban they're worried about, it's the Russian and Chinese spies who will sneak in and pocket stuff, but that's mostly dealt with with policies that keep the kind of info those people would want off of hard drives in an unrelated nation.
As a result there's tons of videos that the public will never see of the world's heaviest presses, shears and brakes being used to decimate lines of hard drives. When you run a shipyard it's cheaper to just bend hard drives than it is to ship them back to HQ and have infosec deal with them.
One of my jobs as an intern was to take a list of serial numbers and watch the video walk-through and confirm the list matched the drives.
There are shredders and V-shaped vice/press devices built for this purpose and such facilities will have them ready and waiting to be used.
Although digital is replacing a lot of paperwork, many things are still printed these days.
The NSA has a recipe for that: https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/news-features/decla... I really hope to see a video of it in action one day.
>if the drum is tipped over at this point, a greenish liquid slag flows out. This quickly hardens to a cement-like mass.
Knocking the drum over with the forklift was probably the highlight of that private's month.
It's a lot easier to instruct a rack of servers, or even a set of (centrally managed) desktop machines, to wipe itself than it is to physically destroy it, let alone the equivalent amount of information on paper.
Moreover, assuming encryption is in place, destroying the keys without touching the actual data is generally sufficient.
You will probably want to wipe the data then destroy the hardware as defense in depth, but in a dire emergency, taking the one thermite charge to the central key management server and its backup and cutting the power feed to the rest of the infrastructure is going to be good enough.
With human readable information on paper, you simply have no other option than physical destruction, which is an extremely slow and labor-intensive and manual process. Even with preparation, you can't really accelerate it much, whereas with digital information prepared for the possibility of needing emergency destruction, it's a matter of pushing a button and the data is gone less than a second later.
The flipside of that is that the worst crimes of a future surveillance state will likely stay hidden even after it gets toppled, unlike the East German Stasi that failed to destroy many of its documents in time.
This does help tell us something about what went wrong: For all its faults, the Iraq war was better politically conceived than the Afghanistan war - note that I do not say justified. Getting rid of the Sunni Ba'ath and giving power to Iraqi Shiites was a coherent and realistic political objective*, and once the new order was stabilized there was no real chance of going back (no, ISIS could never have realistically threatened Baghdad).
The Afghanistan war never had a coherent political objective, or a realistic idea of the new order it meant to instill. Also, the US never bothered with cutting off the Taliban's support, but instead funded their main sponsor... Add in a spiteful withdrawal almost as if designed to maximize Taliban power and you get this.
In general, political objectives are what decides if you can win these kinds of wars or whether they last forever, but the US let its generals run the war, and generals are bad at political and cultural understanding.
P.S. Did I mention the USSR also did better? Its local flunkies actually held well after the USSR's withdrawal[0], it was only the USSR itself collapsing that eventually did them in.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_Civil_War_(1989%E2%80%9...
* Yeah, yeah, America went in for democracy. Right. What do you think democracy means where the country had a Shiite majority? Besides, there's no other way to explain getting rid of all Ba'ath military officers on day 1.
1) you can still edit the original to add this remark if you really want to, although it's frowned upon
2) initial downvotes mean nothing, I've had comments go to -10 before jumping back up to +30 few hours later. Why would you complain about it within 3 minutes of posting is beyond me.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/9994/public-opinion-war-afghani...
sounds like victim blaming the public
What an interesting word for a bloodthirsty mob. I’m sure the real victims, the Afghans, appreciate that you have no agency.
people wonder why today so many people are skeptical when it comes to the pandemic and anything else the government says, the government constantly lying to them is the primary cause
[1] https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/human-and-b...
It's a message.
For the next several hundred years every warlord and extremist groups that's about to consolidate power over a nation is going to point at the Taliban and say "we want to run this nation, we don't want our sons to be running it" when kicking out particularly odious house guests who have dreams of attacking the 1st world.
Was it worth it? IDK, doubt it. But that's what we bought at the end of the day. We bought a precedent.
Secondly, we gave an entire generation of orphaned children (now adults at this point) all the more reason to focus their rage and frustration at the United States.
I'm not sure what the net effect of all this is down the road, but I don't think it will be a case of these nations fearing the first world. Quite the opposite I think.
One suicide attack - one major war. Mission accomplished for the extremists/terrorists.
And as for the Taliban ... well, they sort of won, didn't they?
Citizen may even too aware of this, as half melt into guilt of what the USA has done, the other half still have hope but also cynicism, even despair.
As for other nations, if I were Iran, Irak, the Talibans, the Afghans, I’d fund efforts to destabilize USA. If I were China, I’d even organize it to ensure it weakens them without weakening the commercial exchanges. If I were Russia I’d tip into the jar too. USA made many enemies, it may be the target of coordinated spy work.
And I say this as a staunch partisan of the USA. We should spend more on looking benevolent.
I can only hope that the next generation learned not to trust government as quickly, but Vietnam wasn't that long ago so I don't know how realistic that hope is.
Nonetheless A terrible situation for Afghanistan; I wish the world could help them but I'm not sure what else could be done after trying for two decades.
3000 staff is tiny percentage of the staff of an international airport, even a small one.
> The troops, consisting of two Marine battalions and one Army battalion, will be based at the Kabul airport. They will provide security for an airlift that will fly out U.S. diplomats, as well as Afghans who have worked with the U.S., and the family members of those Afghans.
> the embassy is currently down to 1,400 U.S. citizens and about 4,000 staff working inside the compound the size of a small town.
It's a huge complex and those are the reduced staff numbers. Granted they may or may not actually be evacuating all the local staff (the US has been... not great about getting people who risked their lives to help the US in Afghanistan).
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-kabul-445f33e7bba08c382...
"Victory will not be claimed by Pakistan, but tacitly the Taliban will owe it to Pakistan", says Nazir, a retired brigadier and defense analyst in Islamabad.
Pakistan has been allowing Taliban leaders free movement into and out of the country and continues to serve as a safe haven where fighters and their families can receive medical care. With the U.S. intention to leave publicly declared, Pakistan did away with any semblance of denial that the Taliban leadership was sheltering there.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/15/world/asia/pakistan-afgha...
The US really needs to reverse the pull out and think about what it means to cooperate with a people and nation build. Yes, there have been numerous past missteps and money wasted with little accountability - but nation building, particularly after a war, was always going to be expensive and time-consuming. Leaving the project halfway after all these sunk costs feels like a hasty PR move that is now going to turn into an absolutely disastrous legacy for Biden and for America. I'm glad to see the decision to send 3000 troops into Afghanistan (https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-middle-east-evacuations...), but am concerned that the US's commitment ends at evacuating embassies rather than supporting a nation that clearly needs help if we want a future ally in the region, instead of a future adversary. Let's not return to square one.
The real solution would had been "do not invade"