Comment by MichaelGroves | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MichaelGroves | Hacker News Reader

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I guess my response was prompted mostly by this:

> Leaving Afghanistan (to fail) has been a long time coming. Obama wanted to do it, Trump wanted to do it, Biden decided to pull/had to pull/tripped over the cord.

I don't think blaming the failure on Obama, Trump, or Biden is fair. Even blaming the failure on the way Bush handled the invasion after it began is unfair, since I think it was doomed to fail from the very moment of conception. I don't think it ever stood a chance of working in the first place.

Anyway, if you'd like to know more, there are interesting parallels between the Taliban's resurgence in the past few days, and the rise of the Saqqawists during the Afghan Civil War in the 1920s. Amanullah Khan's government and armed forces were struggling against a rebellion of tribal forces (the Shinwari) who opposed Amanullah's attempts at reform, particularly wrt the status of women. When Amanullah's forces were preoccupied with fighting the Shinwari, the Saqqawists used that opportunity to attack Kabul, which Amanullah's forces surrendered to the Saqqawists with almost no fight (sound familiar?)

My point is that I / other people / mainstream media are not blaming the failure of the invasion on anyone. That's a massive strawman. We all agree that the idea was doomed from the start, a war fought under false pretenses, which would have failed in its nominal goal even if it succeeded (terrorists would have just moved from Afghanistan to e.g. Syria, which they did anyways).

The retreat itself was a massive failure, and that's to (at least partially) blame on the current leadership.

Ah fair enough, I think we agree in these regards. America's departure from Afghanistan was ungraceful to say the least. I think it was doomed to end up that way from the very beginning, but even so, America might have done more to evacuate western sympathizers before letting control of the country fall back under the Taliban.

My original point is similar to your response, in that the very myopia that led us to invade is also preventing us from planning the exit better.

The Military wanted us to believe that "just a few more years" would prop up the regime, so they cannot come clean saying we cannot pull out without a proper evacuation because that would undermine the "just a few more years" argument.

> My point is that I / other people / mainstream media are not blaming the failure of the invasion on anyone

Yes, that's the problem.

> The retreat itself was a massive failure

The retreat was a massive failure as a direct consequence of the occupation being so massive of a failure that the previous administration freed a Taliban leader for the express purpose of signing a surrender to the Taliban, and that the Afghan government and Army, unlike their South Vietnamese equivalents that stood and fought for years after the general US withdrawal and even as the PAVN fought into Saigon, collapsed swiftly, with the President fleeing the country and the army offering no resistance to the Taliban.

The idea that you can separate them is nonsense propagated by people still in denial about the totality of the failure of the occupation.

Again, I'm not condoning the War, I was against it from the start (IIRC... I was still a kid!) but I'm definitely not going to blame Obama/Trump/Biden on a war they did not start.

I do blame them for being too afraid of the flak Biden is getting now to call a spade a spade and end the charade.

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