The Afghan mess
I don't fault Biden for the disaster that has become Afghanistan, but how did we not know things would get this bad this quickly?
I’m of two minds, watching the awful news about Afghanistan. Actually, four.
First, it’s horrific. Especially, thinking about the women and little girls in that country, and what they’re in for — again.
Second, I don’t like that President Biden clearly got caught by surprise by the rapid pace of the Taliban onslaught. Clearly, the intelligence community told Biden that the Taliban wouldn’t take back the country for a good year or more. They were clearly wrong. Big time. But still, it makes Biden look bad. It makes Biden look like he didn’t anticipate a potential threat to our embassy staff. And even if it’s not Biden’s fault, it just doesn’t look good.
Third, it “feels” like our withdrawal is handing Afghanistan to the Taliban. But….
Fourth, the Afghans handed Afghanistan to the Taliban. The US spent twenty years and a trillion (or two, depending who you ask) dollars, and we lost more than 2,300 Americans, trying to build a real democracy in Afghanistan, and a REAL military. The Afghan military ended up being a joke. If after twenty years, the Afghans still couldn’t find the gumption to defend their own country against a known threat — surely, they know what’s coming — what more could the US have done to forestall the inevitable?
And there’s the rub. It feels like a question of when, not if, the US utlimately had to withdraw and leave the Afghans to their own fate. Do we stay there forever, as caretakers of a failed state?
As for GOP attempts to blame all this on Biden, every single president since Bush II owns this disaster:
Biden didn’t lose the war, he inherited a lost war. And while she’s clearly not happy with Biden, journalist Susan Glasser explains in the New Yorker that there’s more than enough blame to go around:
Over two decades, there have been many, many rounds of this: George W. Bush botching Afghanistan because he decided to invade Iraq instead. Barack Obama botching Afghanistan because he decided to surge troops but then told the Taliban exactly when he would pull them back out. By the time Trump, eager to end the war but endlessly equivocating about how to do so, made what by most accounts was a terrible deal with the Taliban, in February of 2020, the multiple crises inside the United States meant that the deal received little to no attention in a capital consumed by impeachment, a pandemic, and economic collapse.
And Glasser raises a good point about the Afghan interpreters — will they all get out before the Taliban surely hunts them all down? How did we not at least prepare for that?
In April, overriding the Pentagon recommendations and the fears of some of his advisers, Biden took the politically expedient course of declaring the “Forever War” ended on his watch. It is surely on Biden as much as on Trump how the pullout appears to have been organized: so rapidly that there were no plans in place to evacuate the twenty thousand Afghan interpreters who worked for the U.S., and without agreements secured in advance for regional bases from which to conduct the counterterrorism mission that the U.S. says it will continue.
I dug a little deeper on the interpreters, and lord have we failed them. According to CNN, the more than 10,000 Afghan interpreters (the BBC says there are 20,000) are still — as of today — stuck in the application process for their visas to America, and they can “reasonably expect to wait four years for their visa.” By then, many will surely be dead.
Also, CNN just reported on the air, moments ago, that the US is prioritizing Americans for evacuation over Afghans. Which makes sense, but at the same time, that means we yet again totally screwed over the Afghans who we had promised we’d get out. Had the withdrawal not been so precipitous, we could have gotten all the Afghans out who we had promised we’d help. Again, how did the intelligence get this all so wrong?
Also, Glasser and other experts are claiming that the sudden collapse of the Afghan army wasn’t a surprise. If that’s true, then why did we precipitously withdraw our troops without at least securing our non-military personnel, and the Afghan interpreters? I simply can’t believe that Biden was told that THIS EXACT THING would happen, and he ordered DOD to do it anyway. No way.
(I suspect there’s a middle-ground here. Biden wouldn’t have withdrawn our troops this quickly unless some senior intelligence official or general had told him that the Taliban would never take Kabul this quickly. So, while “everyone” may have known that the Taliban would eventually win, I’m not sure everyone knew it would only take a few weeks.)
Keep in mind that it was Donald Trump who signed the agreement committing the US to withdraw all troops by May, 2021. And while Biden is loathe to break a commitment made by the US, if it was a bad deal, we shouldn’t have kept it — or at least, we could have bent the terms a bit, and had a lengthier, slower withdrawal. (Also, it’s not like the Taliban kept all it promises.)
Here’s video of Trump just one month ago bragging that this withdrawal was HIS idea, and there was no way Biden could get out of it. I’m not saying the buck doesn’t stop with Biden. I’m saying that if Republican Trump supporters, and Donald Trump himself, are going to try to hang this Afghan mess on Biden, then they need to hang it on Trump too — Biden simply upheld Trump’s treaty.
In the end, I’ve never seen a plausible explanation as to how the US could have won this war without committing a lot more troops, and no one had the political backing for that. But at least we could have withdrawn at a pace that permitted us to safely evacuate those dear to us. That part still sticks in my craw.
PS I did a 3-part series of TikTok videos today explaining what’s going on in Afghanistan. It might be a bit basic for some of you, but the folks on TikTok are liking it. Here’s part 1, part 2, and part 3.
Here are a few other articles on the Afghan debacle
Here’s All Pessin in Defense One:
Which brings us back to fact No. 1. Even if we had fully committed to the conflict, could we have convinced a majority of the Afghan people to pivot their culture in any reasonable timeframe to be self-sustaining as an American-style democracy, or anything close to it, with security forces strong enough to protect it? To say yes is more hubris. To say no is to admit the effort was doomed from the start and the withdrawal is long overdue.
There are no grand lessons here, only ones we should have known: be very wary of foreign wars, don’t expect them to be easy, match the resources to the goals, account for the local culture, get out as soon as you can. As obvious as those lessons are, they are equally difficult for the United States to follow.
Tony Cordesman at the Center for Strategic and International Studies is an old foreign-policy hand, and well-respected:
“This effort should examine the full range of civil lessons as well as the military lessons that emerged from the entire history of the war — and not simply focus on its end. It should address the fact that the losses in the war were driven as much by failures in nation building and the civil sectors as from the failures in combat. It should acknowledge that the Afghan War — like Vietnam and the two sequential wars the U.S. fought after 2003 in Iraq — were counterinsurgency campaigns and not wars against international terrorism.”
….
“The U.S. played a critical role in two decades worth of failures in aid efforts and in shaping failures in Afghan civil governance that did as much to lose the war as from the flaws of outside military support and the erratic and ill-formed efforts to build effective Afghan forces.”
Cordesman concludes:
The key issue is not why the war was lost, it is whether letting it escalate and prolonging it was worth its cost. The examination of the civil and military challenges as well as the mistakes is the central focus of this analysis and, to some extent, a warning that the United States needs a far more realistic approach to “strategic triage.” Like the Iraq War, the U.S. needs to be far more careful in deciding if a conflict is worth fighting, escalating, and continuing.
I almost didn’t share the fun stuff this time, because of the awful news, but maybe today, in particular, we need some diversions.
Other stuff
Really neat performative art:
A neat old image of San Francisco:
Vaccines work:
Vaccines work, bis:
I don’t think that means what you think it means:
Doctor rebuts Covid disinfo:
Where are all the dead that the right-wing trolls claim were killed by the vaccine? No one can find them, not even Fox News, Newsmax and OAN.
Young Skywalker weighs in on masks:
I love this guy:
Off to another week. Stay safe.
JOHN
Great piece. I'm of one mind: the mess we're seeing, the complete collapse of the gov't just underlines how right we are to get out pronto. After 20 years and trillions of dollars the gov't we put in power couldn't last a week? That makes a mockery of anyone claiming we "left too soon." And I'm not sure we should be labeling the Taliban the enemy of Afghanistan. It was the enemy of the US. It was the enemy of the corrupt, ineffective patsies we put into power. But of Afghanistan? Not sure how many Afghanis would agree with that.