Afghan president flees the country as Taliban move on Kabul
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https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/07/news/rumsfeld-rejects-pla...
Regardless of your partisan status. This does not look good.
Even CNN is questioning the administration: https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2021/08/15/blinken-intv-...
What do you think?
That's not what Biden said. Just over a month ago, on July 8th, he actually argued that the Afghan army could win:
Q Is a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan now inevitable?
THE PRESIDENT: No, it is not.
Q Why?
THE PRESIDENT: Because you — the Afghan troops have 300,000 well-equipped — as well-equipped as any army in the world — and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban. It is not inevitable.
...
I trust the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped, and more re- — more competent in terms of conducting war.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/20...
And why tell a lie that will soon be disproven so spectacularly?
(To be clear, I'm not arguing whether he lied or really believed what he said. I'm responding to "even if he is relatively confident of an eventual Taliban victory")
Be the change you wish to see. If you think Biden was lying here, don't defend him for it.
Even in terms of realpolitik this was clearly a mistake. He obviously didn't think his words would be disproven so quickly; it would be foolish to lie about what's going to happen almost immediately.
Me criticizing Biden on an internet forum for offering comforting falsehoods will do nothing. He's responding to a tendency in human nature or perhaps American culture that is far too big to be moved significantly by so small an act, or even thousands or millions of such acts. So I'm happy to continue discussing this in realistic terms rather than idealistic ones.
Or the account of this former Army colonel who mentions how poorly managed Afghanistan was all this time, with basically no real attempt at establishing institutions over the last twenty years: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/how-americ...
Or the WSJ editorial board's suggestions to rescue Afghanistan from a few days ago: https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-rescue-plan-for-afghanistan-t...
There are plenty of ways this could have been handled better. It all comes down to having better leadership. The US hasn't had good leadership for a long time. Four different presidents came into office based on populist sentiments more than competence, and the result is they completely mismanaged all of this while we still incurred the immense expenses that a more successful plan would have required. Worst, they lied to the public and assured the public of how things were going well - this too came from multiple presidents.
Look at the southern US border. Another disaster.
Barack Obama himself said it: "Never underestimate Joe's ability to f** things up".
It's certainly a bad "look" for Biden, but the real error was going there in the first place. That was when this outcome was decided. Whoever finally pulled the plug was going to have a PR issue on their hands, but this is hardly Biden's defeat.
This is a failure. Don't downvote because of politics.
Obama's ambassador to Afghanistan mentioned that the Taliban's recent blitz was avoidable (https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2021/aug/14/a-self-inflict...). In the same interview he also says:
> “I’m left with some grave questions in my mind about his ability to lead our nation as commander-in-chief,” [the former ambassador] said. “To have read this so wrong – or, even worse, to have understood what was likely to happen and not care.”
Modern armies do it to their own hardware if it’s at risk of being captured by the enemy. I guess there are few secretive things the Afghans got, but even that isn’t for wider consumption.
However, I remember the chorus of opposition when the Bush administration decided to send half a million troops to Iraq instead of Afghanistan. Rumsfeld wanted to try invading Afghanistan on the cheap so the US could afford two wars, and because Iraq had a legitimate military and “all the good targets.” They were so delusional they thought both would be over in months. Here we are twenty years later, with the same problems and 10 trillion dollars missing from the treasury. We tortured people and imprisoned them without trial or due process. We debased ourselves on so many levels and we have nothing to show for it.
Dig into the origins of the Taliban, and you’ll find US and Saudi Arabian meddling in the 70s and the 80s exploiting that extremism to counter Russia and communism. Saudi Arabia needed a way to rid themselves of radical theocrats, and the US was looking for soldiers to counter Russian influence. So we helped them fund and train militants by building madrassas in Pakistan and Afghanistan. With haunting irony, Russia was trying to impose similar reforms by invading: gender equality, secularism, and their version of political freedom.
Do you want to know why the second Bush Administration never investigated Saudi Arabia after 9/11? They were all the same people from the first Bush and Reagan administrations, and they knew the paper trail would lead right back to themselves.
Meddling in the affairs of foreign nations always has unintended consequences. Democracy spreads through attraction, not enforcement. I sincerely hope the lesson we learn is not to blame the people who finally accept it, but the people who always think that this time will be different.
Each war is initially “won” very quickly, then the occupant struggles to find allies, reliable new political elites, and frankly purpose. It all turns sour, things go from awkward to deadly, and there is a disastrous and embarrassing retreat and that’s that.
I'm not taking any position here, but I think the nuance is helpful.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/robert-fisk-os...
4 days ago, US intelligence officials revised their estimate for the fall of Kabul from 12 to 3 months.
AUG 13: “Kabul is not in an imminent threat.” - John Kirby, Pentagon Spokesman
AUG 15: Kabul taken by Taliban.
Looks like that was a bad assumption.
I hope history doesn’t repeat itself completely :(
Bernard Woolley : What if the Prime Minister insists we help them?
Sir Humphrey Appleby : Then we follow the four-stage strategy.
Bernard Woolley : What's that?
Sir Richard Wharton : Standard Foreign Office response in a time of crisis.
Sir Richard Wharton : In stage one we say nothing is going to happen.
Sir Humphrey Appleby : Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.
Sir Richard Wharton : In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we can do.
Sir Humphrey Appleby : Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now.
Nothing to see here since nothing has happened yet, after it happens it's too late to do anything about it. Oops!
Sad I guess, but not unexpected any more.
https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Agreement-F...
Pretty much every point in section 2 pre-supposes that the Taliban will control all of Afghanistan, from domestic security to issuing visas.
This gives us some interesting observations:
Someone must have aided the Taliban buildup. Logistics, intel, control and communication for such a wide-spread campaign ain't trivial. Taliban have no industrial base.
US and, to a certain extend, Afghan officials must have known what was coming. They must have seen the buildup, intercepted communication, etc.
The ANA was unable or unwilling to fight. The obvious counter to this offensive would have been to bolster the defense of a couple of important locations, let them be besieged and smash the local Taliban detachment with superior forces. Even four weeks ago such a strategy could have produced a stalemate. The Taliban likely cannot afford a long-lasting campaign. It looks like the ANA was completely corrupt and was out of the fight before it even began.
What really troubles me is that the Afghan people want the Taliban back. No one seems to protest, let alone resist. There are no volunteers rushing to defend Kabul from the conquerors. No women in arms defending their way of life. It makes me think that the Afghan society as a whole demands and deserves the Taliban rule.
Finally, I wonder why neither China or Russia seem very concerned. Yes, of course they will be happy when US helicopters evacuate burning embassies, but both have their own issues with radical islamists. So maybe they think they can use the Taliban to counter the IS?
I've long thought that we should have done more to arm the women of Afghanistan. They stand to lose a lot more from the return of the Taliban than the men do. Some of the men might even welcome the Taliban's return.
I doubt 300k women in the ANA would have surrendered to the Taliban so quickly.
"The enemy of my enemy is my ally".
Shouldn't they have left some part of Afghanistan, see what happens, go back and fix it, repeat until they know how to leave the country in a stable situation?
Decades. The US already did this in the 1980s.
[1] https://time.com/3648055/united-states-afghanistan-war-end/
[2] https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/1...
[3] https://www.npr.org/2016/07/06/484979294/chart-how-the-u-s-t...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_War_in_Afghanis...
The U.S. military carried out at least a dozen operations, including commando raids and airstrikes,
in early March 2017, American and Afghan forces launched Operation Hamza to "flush" ISIS-K from its stronghold in eastern Afghanistan, engaging in regular ground battles.
"In January 2015, United States Forces began conducting drone strikes in Afghanistan under the direction of the administration of the United States President Barack Obama against Taliban militants".
American forces have increased raids against "Islamist militants"
Throughout 2015, the US launched about one thousand bombs and missiles at targets in Afghanistan
"Despite US airstrikes"
"U.S. forces have been carrying out operations with Afghan forces"
"According to Defense Department statistics 9 U.S. service members were killed in action"
"US aircraft conducted around 30 air strikes in Helmand Province"
You get the point.
Further, your link also explains that in 2015 began the NATO-led Resolute Support Mission whose purview was solely training, advising, and assisting the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces.
So yes, pretty much what I said above.
But if we can't create a stable Afghanistan in 20 years, would we have any success in 40?
As for retaking areas, it takes a much larger force to take a defended region than to hold it. The same force holding that area doesn't have the strength or supplies to retake it once it's lost. The only reason the Taliban has moved in so easily is the ANA has folded at every encounter leaving regions effectively undefended once the US pulls troops out.
[0] https://media.nationalgeographic.org/assets/photos/000/329/3...
This applies to USA and it's a single country
Having your country constantly occupied by invading forces is a great way to breed religious extremism. The Taliban win because they have a lot of support in Afghanistan, and this isn’t likely to change anytime soon. From what I’ve read, it’s a minority of the population who support them, but the support of around 20-30% of the population, with many, many of those willing to fight and die for the Taliban, is still formidable. I believe the Taliban has more soldiers now than at any other point in their history?
Also, it seems that in a massive number of cases, the Afghan National Army just quickly surrendered without even giving up a fight. They were bigger and better funded, but so many either wanted the Taliban to win, or at least felt that being ruled by the Taliban was acceptable and/or inevitable.
The US had to pull out eventually. When you leave, you no longer control what happens … and in Afghanistan right now, this means the Taliban take over. Really, the US should never have invaded in the first place, so many lives lost so pointlessly.
And now it's going to end in a humanitarian failure because of a superpower's incredibly poor decisionmaking.
Letting 12 year old girls go to school instead of being forced into a marriage is good intentions.
If our intentions were ever fully or even mostly pure anywhere else that’s a whole different can of worms.
In the case of Afghanistan, you got yourself with Iran, Russia, China, Pakistan, and the US (and its allies). Afghanistan is a great place to yield control over the region. So it was a war of attrition. Of course, the biggest losers were the Afghan themselves but they had little say in this conflict.
Now that the US left, there is a tab to pay to the Taliban. That, or they'll look for a new sponsor. Leaving at this point (where Taliban are quite powerful) is not that stupid (might actually be smart). Pakistan and Iran (and maybe China?) have created a monster that is quite hard to control than a traditional army. Now, they are all living near this monster.
Sure looks like it.
It sublimates the incredible devastation our government wrought, the brutal corrupt colonial puppet government they propped up and the multilateral atrocities committed beneath a made for TV venere of lost American glory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Saigon#Operation_Frequ...
I guess these days, it'd be done by a smartphone app (some sort of secure Telegram group or emergency broadcast type message).
At the end of the day there just are the factions of a country which are better organized, better funded or more popular and they arw going to rise to power once external involvement has ceased to be the driving power.
The key is to be aspirational, which the current cultural fervour is decidedly not.
https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/newshour/episodes/august-13-2...
When she mentioned air support being pulled back, I wondered if the U.S. could have still kept some order through that alone. It made me think of how the Americans maintained no-fly zones over Iraq for a dozen years after the Gulf War.
I don't really consider this a policy failure for the Biden administration; this outcome was a foregone conclusion once we decided to try to build a nation in a place where no nation-building was possible, and three administrations kicked the can down the road at a cost of trillions of dollars and thousands of lives because nobody wanted to be the one with the loss on their record.
But the way we've treated the people who risked their lives to help and support us is absolutely criminal; we offered them protection, and instead we screwed around for years with bureaucratic bullshit while time ran out, and now a bunch of people are going to die because of it. Heads should roll over this monumental failure.
Do you have a link for this?
Maybe focusing on preaching about "White Fragility" wasn't the best use of their time.
I'm sure we'll see desperate propaganda attempts in the US news trying to spin it, but it's only going to work on people with absolutely no awareness of history. And as others here have already noted, on top of that it's probably the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on the American, or possibly any, people ever.
In other news, China already informally recognized the Taliban[3] and the Russian embassy is not being evacuated[4]. We are witnessing the first stages of the collapse of the US led "international order"[5]. Fascinating stuff, although as a US citizen it may not be so great for me personally.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2016/04/28/politics/green-beret-afghan-p...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Days#Return_to_France
[3] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/china-prepared-to-recog...
[4] https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/08/15/blinken-says-...
[5] Read: "empire"