US special operations vets carry out daring mission to save Afghan allies

It isn't like this level of failure is a sudden and radical surprise when it comes to Afghanistan. It is clear at this point that the US hasn't been doing anything useful there for the last 20 years.

Not only was this the worst case scenario, it was also the most likely scenario. And it does not take a geopolitical expert to foresee it playing out.

The shit show that has been happening there for the past couple weeks was completely unnecessary. At best it was incompetence on the part of the US leadership and at worst malicious with a goal of destroying what little international foreign policy capital we had left.

Politics has limits, you can see it in this case. For cases like this, you need warriors to step in.

They're trained to handle themselves in the battlefield, you just left them go into danger, they'll manage to get out with the mission accomplished.

Again, they are - good, brave - warriors.

If I had to make a guess though, they're likely people disgruntled at the administration and see this as a way with potentially low consequences to get out of the military. Hopefully, there will be serious consequences for them.

Like, we seriously have a major story going on about active US military troops, in one of the most serious missions in the past ten years, actively going against orders... to do the bidding of current civilians? That sounds like court martial material.

We spent 20 years nation building and the Taliban is back in charge, so...yeah?

Uh, yeah, we lost the war and signed a surrender agreement to the enemy leader who we freed from prison for that express purpose last year. What do you expect it to smell like?

The fact that they did not listen to the government, months ago, how can that be the fault of anyone but themselves?

I'll admit I'm not as well versed in the Vietnam war, but I don't think anything close to that happened during Saigon.

While we also lost in Vietnam, there actually was meaningful local capacity; the ARVN fought on (losing, sure, but it didn't collapse) for years after the general US withdrawal from Vietnam, and even right up to and during the PAVN push into Saigon.

This is a much bigger catastrophe than the fall of Saigon because the Afghan war has been a much more complete failure than Vietnam.

We stranded children and likely tens of thousands of citizens and our allies.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-08-24/students...

That’s not including our Afghan allies. Who we also gave up (addresses, biometric data, etc)

https://nypost.com/2021/08/27/taliban-kill-squad-hunting-afg...

Emboldened our enemies, provided tens of billions in weapons, were also flying tens of thousands of unvetted afghans to random places throughout the country.

Frankly, I think we will see mass casualties in the next few days. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a few US planes with marines shot down. I hope I’m wrong.

At the very least, after we leave I suspect there will be tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands killed. Many will be US citizens unless we have some agreement.

This war went on for 20 years because nobody knew wtf victory meant, and nobody had the cohones to take the press hit for “losing”.

>But it’s too expensive to exfiltrate those things Well, then dip into the thousands of pounds of explosives you’re leaving behind to render them inert. The way the Taliban dipped into those same explosives to kill 100 people this week.

I mean there are always outcomes that were never on the table like invasion and occupation of the US by the Taliban followed by unconditional US surrender that you could consider "worst possible scenario" but as far as things that could have actually happened go? Complete failure to achieve objective and visual symbolic reminders of nations previous most notable defeat is right up there.

I think it doesn't take a lot of imagination to think of things that could get added on to the current scenario to make it even worse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rout

The US forced itself into a disorderly retreat, where our troops are trapped in a small urban airport surrounded by the enemy. The perimeter is barely defensible, and the approaches are controlled by the Taliban, who are only marginally in control of their own fighters, let alone worse actors like ISIS. The entire airport is within mortar range, and most if not all of the landing air space is within RPG range.

The strangest and most damaging move we made was to give up Bagram Air Base outside of Kabul. Bagram was home to the US military for twenty years, and as such it was already set up to facilitate any sort of withdrawal on any desired timeline. It had a defensible perimeter, and enough space to shuttle and buffer the people we needed to get out of the country. We abandoned it before even starting the withdrawal, for no good reason that I can discern.

As a result, we and our European allies may now be forced to abandon hundred or thousands of our citizens, and tens or hundreds of thousands of our Afgan allies who are now prey to the Taliban. And as another commenter pointed out, both the US and the British handed the Taliban detailed lists of these Afghan allies, which may help ensure their slaughter.

Biden and the military leadership put the military into a position where there are no good options. Maybe not deliberately, but the incompetence is stunning in the truest sense of the word.

Note that Trump did a similar thing in Syria in 2019, and may very well have done worse if he was still President. The biggest difference is probably that he wouldn't have allowed as many of our Afghan allies into the US, as his immigration advisor Stephen Miller helpfully pointed out last week. And he certainly would have blamed the Afghans for their own plight; this again is what Trump did in 2019, saying that our Syrian Kurdish allies didn't deserve our help because they didn't help us on D-Day in World War Two, whatever that means. Beyond idiotic.

So that's what the US has to offer recently in terms of foreign policy. Two vain, incompetent presidents helping to set up the next Middle East crisis.

Taliban isn't executing hundreds of persons as of now.

You can read they're apparently targeting specific persons by now, more accurately, people with skills and motivations to keep working against them (not a reason to not go and save your allies and friends from a certain death).

The situation could degrade further into the take over, but for now it doesn't go too bad as it could be.

And a nation without sovereignty is very different from a bunch of Taliban members in Texas, as least as far as most of the world's geopolitical dealings are concerned.

e.g. look at how the world just kinda let China obliterate Hong Kong's freedom – HK was never a sovereign nation state separate from China so there never was going to be much anyone could do.