Honestly where are you at on withdrawal? From my viewpoint the US messed up twice.
First when trump negotiated with just the Taliban and didn’t include the Afghan government. How would that negotiation do anything except undermine Afghan legitimacy? No matter what came out of that agreement it would be doom the Afghan government. To me that would be an unequivocal error. No gray area. Maybe too simplistic a view?
Second, this withdrawal. Biden owns the last 7 months. The Taliban was able to hide their time since February 2020 when the trump agreement was in place and unleash their forces across the nation when Allied withdrawal was imminent. The lack of confidence in the Afghan government from a combination of factors led to many provincial governments and military outposts feeling as though their government wasn’t worth fighting for. The massive surrender speaks more to the lack of trust in the central government than a lack of ability of the Afghan military. A nation that has been at war basically non stop for 40 years knows how to fight. The perception is that there wasn’t much coordination or preparation between the Allies and the Afghan government.
Once the chaos of the evacuation began a few weeks ago, the Allies have done a good job under the circumstances . From what we know it seems that tens of thousands have been evacuated under relatively little chaos (Thursdays bombing an obvious glaring exception). The major problem is who is going to be left behind. This is an issue that will haunt us for decades. The at risk afghans should have been evacuated in much higher numbers for months leading up to now. This was hampered by trump not wanting to increase refugees admissions in general, but also by Biden not addressing the issue until it was almost too late. Only time will tell how in danger the remaining Afghans really are.
I feel like all of this was subsidiary to the original quagmire.
I dislike the notion that Biden "owns the last 7 months". That's a very narrow perspective. It's like saying Napoleon, 7 months into his emperorship, was the chief "owner" of whatever happened in those 7 months. Of course not! He was consolidating power out of the chaos of the French Revolution! French society had been turned upside-down in the short space of a decade, with the nobility abolished, mass unemployment, instability, the works. Napoleon worked with what he had.
The one thing Biden could do the single most good, is probably the one thing he won't actually do because of the domestic politics around it - increase the refugee caps. If he let in 100k refugees/year, then we'd probably rescue everyone we needed to. Another billion dollars a year in aid to various Afghan civil society groups would probably also help soften the blow to women's rights and whatever-else-have-you - along with a promise to the new Head Jackass that he'll be getting a Hellfire up the asshole if he reinstitutes the brutality of the 90's regime.
Everything else, IMO, is just the Foreign Policy Establishment Blob trying to slop mud on Biden for being the only guy in the room willing to shut down their failed experiment. The Blob want to pin as much as they can on Biden, because if they admit that he's not actually failing, that he's done about as good as anyone could be expected given the information available throughout this process, then the question of "why did Afghanistan fail?" inconveniently turns back to them, the architects of the failure.
This is a Blob that for years insisted we dump more and more money and lives into the quagmire, while refusing to prioritize Afghanistan over any other regional constraint - Pakistan, China, Russia, Iran, etc. You can't act all shocked when the red-headed stepchild gets pregnant and drops out of school after you've spent years helping all your other children with their homework first, and THEN complain about how much money you wasted on babysitters over the years, as if the babysitter had ever been enough to fix the problem in the first place.
Afghans know perfectly well how to fight, and they don't need the US military to tell them how to do it. But they had no confidence in the deeply corrupt govt. Once surrenders start, they gather their own momentum.
I wish Biden would process the paperwork faster, but I've read that Ghani asked him not to evacuate people quickly or at least do it very quietly, because that on its own would project the lack of US confidence in the Afghan govt. And given how fast it collapsed even without those early evacuations, I'm inclined to think Ghani was right.
Ghani was "right", but that doesn't make him the good guy here. Nor does it mean that Biden's decisions were wrong, nor even that there was a "better way" to do it.
Honestly where are you at on withdrawal? From my viewpoint the US messed up twice.
First when trump negotiated with just the Taliban and didn’t include the Afghan government. How would that negotiation do anything except undermine Afghan legitimacy? No matter what came out of that agreement it would be doom the Afghan government. To me that would be an unequivocal error. No gray area. Maybe too simplistic a view?
Second, this withdrawal. Biden owns the last 7 months. The Taliban was able to hide their time since February 2020 when the trump agreement was in place and unleash their forces across the nation when Allied withdrawal was imminent. The lack of confidence in the Afghan government from a combination of factors led to many provincial governments and military outposts feeling as though their government wasn’t worth fighting for. The massive surrender speaks more to the lack of trust in the central government than a lack of ability of the Afghan military. A nation that has been at war basically non stop for 40 years knows how to fight. The perception is that there wasn’t much coordination or preparation between the Allies and the Afghan government.
Once the chaos of the evacuation began a few weeks ago, the Allies have done a good job under the circumstances . From what we know it seems that tens of thousands have been evacuated under relatively little chaos (Thursdays bombing an obvious glaring exception). The major problem is who is going to be left behind. This is an issue that will haunt us for decades. The at risk afghans should have been evacuated in much higher numbers for months leading up to now. This was hampered by trump not wanting to increase refugees admissions in general, but also by Biden not addressing the issue until it was almost too late. Only time will tell how in danger the remaining Afghans really are.
I feel like all of this was subsidiary to the original quagmire.
I dislike the notion that Biden "owns the last 7 months". That's a very narrow perspective. It's like saying Napoleon, 7 months into his emperorship, was the chief "owner" of whatever happened in those 7 months. Of course not! He was consolidating power out of the chaos of the French Revolution! French society had been turned upside-down in the short space of a decade, with the nobility abolished, mass unemployment, instability, the works. Napoleon worked with what he had.
The one thing Biden could do the single most good, is probably the one thing he won't actually do because of the domestic politics around it - increase the refugee caps. If he let in 100k refugees/year, then we'd probably rescue everyone we needed to. Another billion dollars a year in aid to various Afghan civil society groups would probably also help soften the blow to women's rights and whatever-else-have-you - along with a promise to the new Head Jackass that he'll be getting a Hellfire up the asshole if he reinstitutes the brutality of the 90's regime.
Everything else, IMO, is just the Foreign Policy Establishment Blob trying to slop mud on Biden for being the only guy in the room willing to shut down their failed experiment. The Blob want to pin as much as they can on Biden, because if they admit that he's not actually failing, that he's done about as good as anyone could be expected given the information available throughout this process, then the question of "why did Afghanistan fail?" inconveniently turns back to them, the architects of the failure.
This is a Blob that for years insisted we dump more and more money and lives into the quagmire, while refusing to prioritize Afghanistan over any other regional constraint - Pakistan, China, Russia, Iran, etc. You can't act all shocked when the red-headed stepchild gets pregnant and drops out of school after you've spent years helping all your other children with their homework first, and THEN complain about how much money you wasted on babysitters over the years, as if the babysitter had ever been enough to fix the problem in the first place.
Afghans know perfectly well how to fight, and they don't need the US military to tell them how to do it. But they had no confidence in the deeply corrupt govt. Once surrenders start, they gather their own momentum.
I wish Biden would process the paperwork faster, but I've read that Ghani asked him not to evacuate people quickly or at least do it very quietly, because that on its own would project the lack of US confidence in the Afghan govt. And given how fast it collapsed even without those early evacuations, I'm inclined to think Ghani was right.
I don't know.
Ghani was "right", but that doesn't make him the good guy here. Nor does it mean that Biden's decisions were wrong, nor even that there was a "better way" to do it.
Except it’s ISIS-K instead of Al Qaeda?
I *isisk* you show your work here…