Afghan President Ghani relinquishes power, Taliban form interim gov't
dailysabah.com
dailysabah.com
Now we see why, China knew this will happen, and so did the United States, and likely also a lot of people who follow closely with the currents of that region.
It's not surprising. It's the expected result from the US' retraction. What surprised me is the reaction from the media, somehow the Taliban became a bigger enemy in the public discourse than the governments has declared it to be.
I suspect that the main objective could have been achieved quickly and we might be back to exactly that point (Taliban in power but with the understanding that they should not cross red lines).
But if the objective was to somehow change the country and make it more 'Westernized' then then that was rather arrogant and that did not end better than in Iran...
No conflict was about bringing western values to anyone...
That's a familiar pattern.
The US wasn't on the victorious side in World War I or World War II?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Front_(World_War_II)
USA accused Taliban of sheltering Bin Laden, and invaded afghanistan because Taliban was the government.
Now USA is leaving, and Taliban is again the government... to me this feels more like USA invaded, occupied for 20 years with the help of a puppet government, and now Afghanistan as it was before the invasion, won.
This isn't just a insurgency winning or terrorism, USA litearlly invaded a country, tried to conquer it, and failed, it is a country vs country war and USA lost.
At the time of the bombings, it was reported that they were overdone because it was old stock, as if disposing of it instead of strategically bombing Taliban bases. Some lucky contractors likely were very happy to replenish that stock.
https://newsthump.com/2021/08/14/war-on-terror-wakes-up-in-s...
I think Biden is a one term president but not for exiting Afghanistan, unless it becomes again the host for the sponsors of a new major terrorist attack on the US. And it is not clear to me that this is something the Talibans are really contemplating.
I think people are surprised by the speed of the outcome, not by the outcome.
Trump's plan was to be out by Christmas, which generals delayed to May. This is not Biden executing Trump's plan.
And all before the summer gave the Taliban time and mobility (as in no snow) to start gaining ground.
Yeah, I've read that the Taliban basically retreats during the winter, then returns for "fighting season." So it would have been much smarter to withdraw US troops during the winter. Withdraw them now ensured that the Taliban was in the best position possible to capitalize on it, which we are seeing now.
But I'd settle for getting US citizens and diplomats (and afghans who've earned a visa) out before having our military cut and run in the middle of the night.
The average Biden voter isn't losing sleep over having less presence in Afghanistan and knows that the mess was in place long before he stepped foot in the office.
Now it looks like being out before the summer fighting season started would have been the right call.
I didn't know there were seasons to fight. What impediment would winter/spring pose there?
Actually proposing a different plan ahead of time is a validated opinion/decision.
Can’t help people who don’t want to help themselves.
And he pointed out that we weren't in Afghanistan for oil. And then I realized I had no idea why we were ever over there.
20 years of desperate fighting for "regional stability" or the far more ridiculous "defending democracy"?
Maybe "regional stability in order to secure oil".
Kinda of embarrassing that as someone who considers themselves to stay fairly in the loop in international affairs I couldn't write the first paragraph on why we were in Afghanistan for 20 years.
Somehow the true answer seems to me like: some politicians said some stuff after 9/11 and then it just stumbled on for two more decades based on momentum and not wanting to lose.
The Taliban was considered, at the time, to provide safe harbor to Al-Qaeda and thus were driven out of power with force.
At the time, before the invasion Bush even demanded the Taliban hand over Bin Laden. But the Taliban refused and demanded "sufficient proof" of the 9/11 attacks.
It all went downhill from there though. Our money had Afghan's turning in their local enemies as terrorists. Taliban went into hiding but still had plenty of influence. And many villages, especially those that were super rural and away from the larger cities, didnt really want the infrastructure or modernization that the US tried to use as a bargaining chip.
Basically it was the US being really upset about 9/11 and vowing vengance, but losing their way once it became obvious that vengance was not really going to be...swift..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_invasion_of_Afgh...
I think what you wrote is more about the narrative. And while I think there are grains of truth in the narrative I don't think it does a good job explaining what we were doing in Afghanistan.
For example, call me a conspiracy theorist, but I would argue our primary motive in Iraq was securing oil access. But this certainly wasn't the official narrative on why we were in Iraq
The narrative was definitely part of the reason. Dont forget we danced in the streets when OBL was finally killed decades later, which i found odd as an American..
However, Its been part of our foreign policy since WWII to always try and take any fight to the other homefront and not our own. And with this being, again, one of the larger attacks on our own soil..
But the ancillaries (having bases of operations on/near Pakistan and Iran and to some extent, Russia were probably also a heavy second. What with the Kashmir region largely considered a powder keg, and our weird love/hate relationship with Pakistan. Those definately werent a deterrent.
If you want to change that, you could do worse than read this:
https://www.amazon.com/Jawbreaker-Al-Qaeda-Personal-Account-...
Nicholas Kristof (an American journalist with possibly pro-American biases, but one who I think has a pretty good track record of honest reporting), has pointed out that Afghani women may enjoy less rights under the new administration, and there are many who have worked for pro-Western NGOs that are fearing for their lives. I'm not sure things will "just be life as usual" for all citizens, particularly women, under Taliban rule.
Source: https://twitter.com/NickKristof/status/1426546421906362368?s...
Very few things are ever what all people want, but when the overwhelming majority seems to be fine with something, it's fair to say they don't mind it. If e.g. an election is decided with a 80/20 split, the electorate "wanted that person to win", even though some didn't. On average, they do. Getting into semantic over it isn't achieving much.
https://inews.co.uk/news/world/afghanistans-first-female-may...
Likewise, don't assume you know what the natives, which aren't a homogeneous group at all, mind and don't mind.
I know Afghanistan isn't exactly middle east but the regime change wars were all identical. Libya is another example.
Taiwan is in a better position because it's technology makes it very valuable for the US.
For example, France is extremely involved in African affairs and likes to act as a King maker there, in such a blatantly colonial way that it puts US imperialism to shame. The only difference is the world wide focus on American affairs... and maybe also because of the ingrained belief in France that Africa ought to be their own backyard ("Francafrique"). so it's okay when they do it, meaning there's way less internal oppostion to French interventionism (in Africa). Contrast that with the huge, bi partisan anti foreign interventionism voting block that has emerged in the US.
I'm reading in some places that after deciding to pull out, the United States decided to not fulfill promises to emigrate many Afghan civilians who helped the US or the US-backed government by serving as translators and such. These "traitors" may find life particularly difficult under a reinstated Taliban government. If this is true, it is shameful and (for better or worse) may make attempts at finding local support for future regime-building adventures much more difficult.
Everything, all efforts, sacrifices, and losses are for absolutely nothing. The depth of this historic failure is mind-boggling.
It shouldn't be a surprise since you need a society that wants to actually break from the same continued cycle, unfortunately Afghanistan isn't it due to many reasons.
The cause of the failure was when, in 2003, the US decided to focus on an entirely unnecessary war of choice (aggression, really) in Iraq (and a whole bunch of propaganda own-goals scored in that war that affected the US particularly in the Islamic world reinforced that.) Nation building was always an element of fighting the Taliban, not mission drift, since having something stable and broadly supported in place was the key to prevent a resurgence.
If I were going to go about nation building, I would “export democratic values” some 20 years in advance of any military action by way of film, literature, etc. Cynics can think of this as propaganda, but really it’s just giving Afghans or whomever a more accurate taste of western life. When enough people had a good idea about what democracy was concretely and were ready to support it, I would then provide for military support with the expectation that the democrats would need sustained assistance for many decades.
Of course, there might be lots of reasons why this still isn’t a good idea, especially that we might be able to do more good per dollar elsewhere. But I don’t think “we tried it (poorly) for 20 years and it didn’t work out” is a good criticism—we shouldn’t expect the kind of requisite culture change to happen over a single generation.
Germany and Japan were occupied (excluding the post-1955 nominal occupation of Germany because the Cold War prevented agreement on a formal end) for less time than Afghanistan when you add them together. To the extent something worked there but not in Afghanistan, it had nothing to do with it taking “generations”.
Germany and Japan were also quite a bit more successful at actually ending the organizations occupying troops found unacceptable.
Kuomintang' China, South Korea, South Vietnam, Iraq, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. You name it! Every single local government supported by the U.S. was and is being accused of being corrupt. You know what? They are all corrupt judged by the western standard. Corruption is the norm in the countries need U.S. support. If, for God's sake, they can build a government which is not corrupt (like a consituational republic???), what kind of society would that be? Why would they even need U.S. support in the first place?
And you know what? Corruption is not a choice of the central government. It is not like the central government can choose being corrupt or not. It is a reflection of the society it is in.
It is just shameful that because of this extremely naive accusation, the U.S. government made countless foreign police mistakes.
Often, it is.
> It is not like the central government can choose being corrupt or not.
Sure it is. It can also choose how much energy to devote to rooting out corruption at lower levels, but in many of the cases at issue it was the very top leaders that were deeply corrupt, so corruption was, in fact, a very direct choice of the central government.
You must mean "installing puppet government". The Taliban were before, the puppet government lasted two decades, and now the Taliban are back. If it had been done with more diplomacy it might have succeded, but after the Twin Towers attack there was a push to overreact, and to profit from the sudden political capital.
https://instagram.com/p/CSj-3bgsxKQ
this is absolutely astonishing to me. im honestly surprised the us didn't conduct airstrikes on the vacated armories and hangars. they just got a leg up from antique firearms and fertilizer bombs into modern weaponry and air force.
i expect all of this to show up in Iraq, Syria, etc
I don't even know what to say. My country helped by sending support troops, some of them died there.
Why is it so hard for you and people to see?
All was there to make profit from the war for certain people? It was never about the peace and it can't be.
War profiteering is really really old proffession, isn't it? older than so many nations?
I can still remember Jon Stewart saying "hey, afghanistan was good. we should have another one of those." A year or two later. That was the peacenik end of the political spectrum.
If somebody want give some advice that can prevent the next 2-trillion dollar mistake here in HN what will happen? The advice will be down voted heavily and maybe it will been seen as a bot from repressive regime. So most of people know the ground truth but also understand this collective bias choose keep silent.
In machine learning the trainer want to select the data from different sources to avoid over fitting. In real world there's no role acting as a god to feed different types of data. The human brain train their own neural networks. The consequence is people select the data that reinforce their existing belief because of impact from million of years evolution, even ignore the facts that can not add up. (Does any body suspect something wrong with all our perception due Taliban take control of power so quickly, I ask HNers think about it for intellectual challenge, not about or beyond politics )
Don't start wars half around the world for made up / weak reasons with a country that is not anyhow threatening you, the amount of evil that is 'inserted' into mankind doesn't dissipate but all of us have to deal with it for generations to come. On top of all the destruction and death/murders/rape/torture/etc.
This is valid for any country, I may be bashing chinese in 10 years (and would be bashing colonizing west european states 100+ years ago), but for now its clear on whom this is aimed.
I can't imagine how all the patriotic US veterans must feel now - all the things they went through and lost friends, physical and mental health meant much less than nothing. Nothing would mean there wasn't 20 years of war and death, that would be a damn fine thing compared to current situation.
Oh and one final one, that one is also easy - don't start war in Afghanistan. Graveyard of empires they called it.
Afghanistan did harbor Al-Qaeda, which executed an attack on US soil.
I have no evidence of this, so just speculating on the actual motives.
Why didn't the US State Department see the failure of the fledgling and corrupt democratic Afghanistan government? The US should have pulled out 10 years ago, or if it was actually interested in the strategic nature of Afghanistan, it could have arranged to purchase permanent bases independent of the Afghan government, fortify them, install missiles, occupy the Khyber Pass, block China/Russia, shore up rare earths, etc.
So why didn't we take these actions sooner if we knew the government couldn't handle it? Incompetence? Too many cooks?
My guess is that we were still interested in Afghanistan, but that this is a new shift in geopolitics. It's a chess move, and not one originated by the Trump or the Biden administration directly. My guess is that this is being done to appease Putin.
The US is softening up on its approach to Russia as a regional counter against China. This is more important than having forces on the ground in Afghanistan (which have to fly in over Pakistan anyway). And of course it's more important than building and propping up democracies. If it weren't, we'd still be there.
The story to look at now is China. This is a chess move in that story.
Just my thoughts. I could be wrong.
They almost certainly did, but they serve the foreign policy directives of the executive-at-the-time.
> The US should have pulled out 10 years ago,
Of course, but there's nearly no upside to breaking this status quo. It's all downside. Biden will take this hit because it looks embarrassing to withdraw and leave people worse off than when we found them. I agree with you: his predecessors should have done it.
> vanished literally overnight.
This is not a very intellectually honest comment. What about Saudi Arabia? What about women and girls there? Why raise issue about women rights in Afghanistan but be silent about Saudi Arabia, Emirates, etc. For god sake they are going to host World Cup.
The Taliban don't allow women to get any sort of education or work, which is worse than the situation in SA, UAE and Qatar ( the ones who are going to host a World Cup)
The biggest one is that the Taliban overtook the country far, far faster than anticipated. The Afghan military crumbled and lost ground about as fast as the Taliban could move its army.
So while there were and are plans to evacuate those who helped the US military, the visa process—tens of thousands of which are in process and which began in the sprint—they weren’t expecting for the situation to change in a matter of days. In June, the US intelligence community was predicting they could have six months post-leaving before the Afghan government collapsed.
Instead, the past week did it.
The US won’t be able to get everyone out, but they are making a good faith effort. They are adapting by, for example, asking allied countries to temporarily take people whose visas are in progress but not fully finished.
It’s a horrible situation. Thousands if not tens of thousands will be left behind. They and their families will be in danger.
But we also have to be careful of who we let into the country And the embassy and in-country forces have other priories as well like destroying sensitive documents—which will itself save lives of people who worked with us—and extracting allied diplomats, their families, etc.
The Afghani military and government collapsed far faster than anyone anticipated. We knew they would fail—our estimates (that were wrong) were still a question of _when_ the state collapses, not _if_.
Did we ever have enough helicopters in the country? Sure, probably. But part of leaving the country involves taking our stuff out of the country. We left Bagram a week or two ago.
Now the situation in the ground has changed. Yes, in retrospect, with information we didn’t have then, it would be nice to have more helicopters. But even though we have more in the US military, you can’t Amazon Prime overnight ship a helicopter. We are sending more troops.
The comment about locks checking visas is snarky, but also uninteresting. We’re talking about an emergency evacuation in a failed state that’s a hotbed for terrorism. Of course we should know who we’re bringing into aircraft and prioritize people we know and who have been vetted for visas.
I'm not sure, but it doesn't matter.
a) say you gonna retreat by date X
b) say local helpers will get the opportunity to get to your home country
c) organise your troop withdrawal, without any thoughts on how fast the Taliban will take over
d) pull your troops, sans local support staff and their families, out. Be surprised that your locals are now stuck
e) expect that next time your army goes somewhere you'll still find reliable local help
How difficult would it have been to evacuate your supporting locals along your troops before the country is taken over by your opponent. But then the German Army is unable to tell how many soldiers the deployed there since the war started... Mark me surprised, I am way beyond being shocked by stuff like that so.
Not sure how the French do with this?
It's quite frankly dishonourable to leave them in the lurch like is happening. I do appreciate the advance has been swift but it should not have been hard to simply put everyone on a plane and process their claims someplace less dangerous.
This is such a regularly recurrent kind of thing at the end of US interventions that the n+1st instance probably won't noticeably change the total effect from what is there from the first n instances.
In hindsight I'm not sure why but it felt liked it was indeed a rushed effort, obviously started by the Trump admin and now Biden's admin, either way I think everyone is tired of the situation in general since it's not a society or place anyone will ever change unless we decide to stay there for a few centuries.
And The Great Game continues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Game
https://www.loc.gov/ghe/cascade/index.html?appid=a0930b1f4e4... is also certainly looking at for the context too (nicely done presentation from the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division)
Maintaining it will be an issue, but it’s quite an upgrade for them.
If Wikipedia[1] is to be believed, the Afghan Air Force consisted mostly of utility and light attack helicopters, primarily designs from the 1970's. That's unfortunate, but they're no match for any modern air force.
The "US Afghanistan" govt has collapsed and the Taliban are the new chiefs in town.
I hope this time CCP can teach Taliban some lessons of how to manage a country after conquering her.
There is a simple solution that does not require indefinite occupation:
Hold the country for a year or two longer, and sponsor free flights to the US for Afghan women. Obviously, also provide expedited US residency.
Imagine what the US government could do with a large fleet of cargo aircraft.
For that year or two, the US could maintain a network of fortified franchises, throughout the country, to which women could go. These would be advertised widely.
It could also conduct periodic "door-kicking" raids of Afghan homes, in order to rescue any women who may be held there under patriarchal conditions. Logistically, the easiest way to do this would be to bring all the women encountered to US military bases. There, outside of earshot of their "husbands", they could be offered the choice of free transportation back home (if they really are happy with their marriages), or transportation to the United States (if they are not).
In addition to the usual "tough guys" employed by the US military, this would also create useful employment for American women, who we can expect would be better able to relate to the Afghan women than the dudes-with-guns would be. Essentially, they'd be working in Human Resources.
A successful program would uplift the rights of women, bring millions of new workers to America, and destroy Taliban biopower, all with a single stroke.
And America has no shortage of cargo aircraft to do this.
Of course, this is always allowed. Chinatown, Little Italy, strip malls throughout America... Why would Afghans be any different?
But, now that you mention the language difficulties, well, that's actually a good idea. Hook women up with English lessons, maybe at local libraries. There'd probably be no shortage of English-speaking volunteers who'd help for free, but some government funding couldn't hurt. Surely it's cheaper than funding a war.
> Would the women refugees be able to bring their children too?
Sure, if they want. Not sure what the age threshold should be for male children. Maybe 16.
> Would they be protected from the hate against Arabs the media has fanned for two decades?
Not completely, but you can't compare the occasional racist in America to enslavement by the Taliban.
> This reads like the plot of a B movie.
I do my best.
It's also very HN (e.g. overconfident software engineer wondering far outside their area of knowledge with some harebrained idea/analysis that's full of holes).
These wars weren't fought because women were treated badly and some "hot-head grunt purging the patriarchy" is not helpful at all.
> Essentially, they'd be working in Human Resources.
Contrary to popular belief, you have to be qualified for that. Especially you need to know the culture and the law...
This is just all around a bad idea.
edit: Another comment said it better: "This reads like the plot of a B movie."
Originally, sure, it was about 9/11, but that was a long time ago. That's not what we talk about any more.
> many of them don't want to leave their families behind.
I was careful to construct my solution in a way that gave each woman a choice about that. Don't you think many would choose America over their "families"?
> There is no weekend course for integrating in western societies
The proven way to turn someone into an American, is for them to choose to come to America. That's all you need.
> Contrary to popular belief, you have to be qualified [to work in HR]
I wasn't commenting on the qualifications of HR professionals, but about the nature of the human resources themselves.
> What would you do with those girl and women? You have to educate them
The Transportation Safety Administration could be expanded. Starbucks and Lyft also both have famously inclusive work cultures, and Starbucks offers free college education.
> you would probably have large difficulties integrating them into the job market.
Supply and demand will find an equilibrium.
> This is just all around a bad idea.
It's a lot more likely to succeed that the original Bush/Cheney fantasy.