Serious Q: This is the worst possible scenario in terms of ending the war in Afghanistan?
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.
It is shameful the American populace dutifully paid their taxes for this waste.
I am honestly just hoping we don’t see Ukraine and Taiwan fall within the next 60-120 days.
The US still has the most fearsome military the world has ever seen, but Afghanistan has demonstrated that the people at the top are not anywhere near as smart and capable as they think they are. That's a dangerous combination.
Such an invasion would be a binary event. If China fails, it's game over for the CCP. Not the kind of risk they're known for taking.
If anything, I think Afghanistan will only increase Beijing's belief that America's decline is accelerating and it will eventually be able to get what it wants without a head-on kinetic conflict with the US.
I've always thought a more likely scenario would be for China to first take Kinmen, which is trivially easy. The US is not going to risk WW3 over Kinmen and it would only be a symbolic victory, but it would put the US and Taiwan leadership in a very tough place.
Granted strategic incompetence seems to be the flavor of the moment, so who knows?
11. Two servicewomen were killed.
Close to them, it look like right now we have most major deployments of several powerful military forces. Yellow Sea is currently Not The Place to frak it up.
I don't think China won't have this in mind when thinking "hey, we're taking Taiwan as of now".
Like salting passwords. https://cyberhoot.com/cybrary/password-salting/
Taliban has a lot of experience, and by now they are probably sure they got lots of disinformation in their hands, and they can't act on it without triple-checks, case-by-case.
This is a working example of 4th. gen warfare, and it looks like US+NATO folks there are running the ops flawlessly, bad guys can't go faster.
>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.
Would a protracted civil war between the Taliban and the US-backed puppet government, ultimately leading to the former’s victory (but with more bloodshed and bad feelings) have really been a better outcome for the people of Afghanistan?
They appear to be doing quite well.
Seems to me like a swift, relatively non-violent surrender and transfer of power is better for everyone, if the outcome was inevitable anyway.
That said, something happened out of sight of the public, accords of some kind, maybe something changed and the US President took a decision.
Speed was key it seems and the hardware left behind could be a bad thing, but clearly, the politics are sure that it doesn't really matter compared to other scenario (unknown for the public).
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.
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.
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”.
You really think this could not have gone worse?
It's like you're not understanding.
A journalist (Beau of the Fifth Column) I trust on topics such as this covers that, and other common questions regarding the last couple weeks. The equipment being left behind is the first couple minutes: https://youtu.be/KUMomGe4fjY
Aside from the gear, the loss of life is a glaring failure.
No. It doesn't. Your assertion that it was "left behind" is incorrect. The U.S. provided this equipment to the Afghan military as part of our long effort to prepare the Afghan government to defend itself.
Now, one can argue as to whether we should have entrusted such equipment to them in the first place. But, that entrustment was just one of many costly decisions made over our decades-long presence in Afghanistan that led up to this moment.
Also curious on your hot take of this—the unusually effective suicide bombings that took place last week, (y’know the ones that killed our servicemen and about a hundred innocent civilians?), were very likely composed of the very same high explosives that we left behind.
I don't know what you're defining as being "still in a position" or what your basis is for that determination, but we all witnessed that chaos ensued quickly upon the collapse of the Afghan govt/military. At that point, it seems the priority was on saving lives and extricating human beings which was meeting with significant difficulty to say the least.
That's a much more plausible explanation for why decommissioning the equipment was not prioritized.
The situation is bad. The 20-year occupation itself was horrible foreign policy. But just making unfounded allegations of "corruption" is FUD.
I found the "y'know..." bit a little flip, given the tragic circumstances.
In any case, my "hot take" on that narrow point is that it's another unfounded assertion that reads like more FUD.
On the broader point, there are many people politicizing this and working overtime to assign as much blame as possible to the current administration, including what you appear to be doing here.
And, my hot take on that broader point is that it's divisive and uses the tragic deaths of our fallen military and the grief of their families as political props.
The unbridled glee in their political attacks is palpable, even as our country and military are experiencing a significant setback that includes the loss of life. It's disgusting and, whatever they think they're rooting for, it's not America.
8 months in office and practically unlimited resources (human and material), and this is the best they could come up with. Joe Biden was a senator when Saigon was evacuated.
No there’s not enough work here to go into overtime.
Yet, here you are.
But, congratulations to you though. The fact that a 20-year foreign policy blunder culminated on the 8-month watch of a president you don't like clearly somehow seems like a personal victory for you, even if it comes at the expense of American and Afghan lives.
Those of us who are actually rooting for America are disappointed in some aspects of the withdrawal, as well as the fact that we'd been there for so long in the first place.
And, glad to finally have a president with the courage to get us out, thus finally ending the unfortunate expenditure of American blood and treasure going forward.
Trump negotiated the exit strategy to ‘get us out’, Biden just couldn’t execute it.
> But, congratulations to you though. The fact that a 20-year foreign policy blunder culminated on the 8-month watch of a president you don't like clearly somehow seems like a personal victory for you, even if it comes at the expense of American and Afghan lives.
There is no victory here for anyone, except America’s enemies. You know, there are people in the world, that are able to criticize terrible leadership, without relishing said leaderships failures. It’s binary thinking like yours that keep us in this two-party partisan nightmare.
If you want to continue making this a partisan thing, then at least be consistent.
If Trump wanted the political credit for actually executing the plan, then he should have executed it. After all, he ran on that as a promise and had 4 years to execute it, whereas Biden was only there for 8 months, as you've pointed out.
A negotiated date is not an exit plan in any case, and many believe only served to box in the incoming administration.
>There is no victory here for anyone, except America’s enemies.
Glad to hear you say that. But, if you want people to believe that you actually believe it, then you should temper your obvious hyper-partisan glee and stop with the politicization of our service-members' deaths; to include peddling unfounded conspiracy theories regarding imagined "corruption" yielding the materials used to attack our troops.
This is exactly the kind of disinformation that our enemies use to diminish our standing on the world stage, demoralize our military and citizenry, and divide us further.
Criticizing our leadership is one thing, and I've expressed my disappointment in some of the execution here as well. But, peddling propaganda and conspiracy theories against your own country is taking up the role of useful idiot, at best.
Everyone who says this us deluded about the depth of failure that led to the withdrawal and the constraints that placed on the execution of the withdrawal. We couldn't make the Afghan government forces not collapse instantly, nor could we (productively, at least) reinvade to replace them and provide the capacity to operate more broadly during the withdrawal.
You’d get much better insight from asking historians or the like.
Sounds like the powers that be read the most optimistic projections of what the Afghan Army could do on paper and ignored or suppressed any information to the contrary. Simply a lack of integrity and not hearing what they didn't want to hear.
And violating the agreements with the Taliban about withdrawal of forces to do that would make it easier or harder for people to get to Kabul to be evacuated?
> Sounds like the powers that be read the most optimistic projections of what the Afghan Army could do on paper and ignored or suppressed any information to the contrary
Given the already-executed surrender, the options were:
(1) throw it out and start a new war,
(2) rely on the Afghan Army providing security,
(3) rely on minimizing offense/provocation to the Taliban in the course of the evacuation.
I don't think there was much optimism about #2; there was projecting the right public image to avoid sabotaging what chances that held, but the fallback was #3, because #1 not only isn't viable for the withdrawal itself, but also is the worst possible thing to attempt for the post-withdrawal political situation.
It wasn't the U.S. retreat that turned these over to the Taliban. It was the unexpected, near-immediate dissolution of the Afghan military that did.
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.
Biden essentially blamed them too during his recent White House speech
Trump's barely coherent babbling was an insult to the Syrian Kurds that had no purpose but to save face.
Keep in mind the Syrian Kurds are probably our best allies in the ME, with the possibly exception of the Israelis. And the Kurds are, as warriors, about as far as you can get from the Afghan regular army and police. They fight ferociously. They have no natural allies in the region, only lethal enemies. They have no nation, so a lot of them wear the American flag into battle.
Trump yanked support with no warning and left them to be killed by the Turks. No thanks, no attempt at evac, no thought toward organized retreat or security. Just insults.
Biden fucked up, but at least our military is scrambling to evac as many of our allies as possible. Trump would have pulled out just as recklessly as he did before, but Stephen Miller made it clear that Trump wouldn't even try to evac our Afghan allies.
Sorry for the rant. I'm pissed at everyone right now.
https://www.theblaze.com/news/retiring-never-trump-diplomat-...
It’s common knowledge the entire establishment hated trump and was going to do what they could to make him look bad. I’m not 100% who to blame on that front. But I personally didn’t vote for Trump in 2020 specifically because of that withdrawal.
In the case of Afghanistan, this is 100% top generals & Biden. Until there are hearings we won’t know who holds more blame. One thing trump would have done is fired the generals immediately.
They had a plan to withdrawal in may under trump - why? Because the local religious festivities would allow the US to retreat without being pursued. Instead, we pulled logistics and air support. Told all our citizens it’ll be fine (and didn’t inform them of the pending collapse) and then abandoned our best route out. This was... idk what to call it.
The Blaze isn't typical reading material for me, but I'll note that the article you posted doesn't support the notion that the establishment hid the troop numbers from Trump just to make him look bad. Rather, they were desperate to protect our positions, our troops, and our allies in Syria and Western Iraq.
And Trump wouldn't have fired anyone. He's too much of a coward for that. He didn't fire Mattis. Mattis resigned, and then Trump tried to save face by claiming that he fired Mattis. Sort of the way a six year old might.
Biden doesn't have abject stupidity as an excuse. He smart, experienced, and not prone to recklessly disregarding the advice of his charges. And yet he fucked this up about as hard as something can be fucked.