Althouse: "It’s just frustrating. We knew that this would happen. Now, all the people who went and served, are like, 'Why did my friend die?'"

August 14, 2021

"It’s just frustrating. We knew that this would happen. Now, all the people who went and served, are like, 'Why did my friend die?'"

Said Army veteran John Whalen, quoted in "‘Why did my friend get blown up? For what?’: Afghanistan war veterans horrified by Taliban gains" (WaPo).

33 comments:

Howard said...: The war was fought for military industrial complex profits and to make chickenhawk politicians feel macho.

Mission Accomplished; 8/14/21, 6:06 AM
gilbar said...: serious question: WHY did they all die?; 8/14/21, 6:14 AM
exhelodrvr1 said...: Praying that there won't be a jump in suicides from the veterans who served there.; 8/14/21, 6:35 AM
Harsh Pencil said...: I worry that across a variety of issues, (from our Covid public policy reactions to our foreign policy failures), we as a society are losing the ability to learn from out mistakes.

To me, the mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan were not in invading but in staying. We have plenty enough power to enforce the lesson "you f*ck with us, you die" throughout the world, both in terms of actual military power and the willingness of the American people to support it. We don't have either the power nor the patience to turn countries around. Japan and Germany were perhaps flukes that taught us the wrong lessons.

W. believed the lesson from 9/11 was that we had to reform the Islamic world, so that was our mission in Afghanistan - literally re-form the country. But that was never achievable. Our mission should have been a six month "kill as many Taliban as we can because you harbored Al Qaeda" which is not only feasible, but low cost enough in terms of blood and treasure that a threat to do it again and again is credible.; 8/14/21, 6:53 AM
wildswan said...: My brother died in Viet Nam and in the heated atmosphere of that time I was left wondering why he was there and what he died for. For me, that question was finally and permanently answered when the boat people began to flee Viet Nam. Communism, I realized, was a regime so terrible that the same people who remained in Viet Nam all through colonialism, and all through the US intervention got into leaky boats and headed out for elsewhere, anywhere. And, in my opinion, the Taliban, backed by Communist China, is going to be a similar regime. It will be terrible and we will see what the US troops were doing, what atrocities they were keeping out from the boundary they held. We will see also that Biden and Whoever-It-Really-Is (WIRE) are simply incompetent. When the situation changes, they can't respond. Not won't. Can't. And the situation always changes. It's like a virus - the thing mutates and you want someone in charge who can handle such changes. The person who actually led vaccine development would have handled the Delta and Lambda changes and the Taliban-China changes. Biden and WIRE can't.
Like the police in the big Dem cities those soldiers held a line in an imperfect world. Wokies and all liberals and all lefties always think that the imperfect world is caused by the boundary and those who hold it. They break the line and turn away from the screams of the victims of their policies to buy a new house to smoke dope and party in.; 8/14/21, 7:07 AM
Michael said...: Pat Tillman gave up a $ multimillion NFL career to fight in Afghanistan. By the time of his death (from "friendly" fire) he had already soured on the whole operation and bitched openly about invading Iraq before we had a handle on the Taliban.

This whole sh!t show had gone south by 2004...and yet we stayed another 17 years.; 8/14/21, 7:34 AM
Bob Boyd said...: "with its soldiers feeling abandoned by inept leaders"

Many, many Americans are feeling exactly the same way these days. And it's ultimately the same group of inept abandoners who have failed both these Afghan soldiers and the American people.

But the regime, won't be called to account for any of it. They've already awarded one another a fresh round of prestigious credentials and moved on to their next grand scheme, having deftly twisted each of their reprehensible and catastrophic failures into yet another reason to think well of themselves.; 8/14/21, 8:01 AM
Gilbert Pinfold said...: “Afghanistan is a place on the map where there are no other countries” about sums it up for me.; 8/14/21, 8:11 AM
David Begley said...: Tucker. Carlson made an excellent point last night: No one will be held accountable for this clusterfuck.

Tucker showed a video of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Mark Milley, saying just a few weeks ago that the Afghan forces could hold the country. The military has left behind billions of dollars of good military stuff. We built a $700m embassy. No word if there is a helicopter pad on top.

Scores of people should be fired, but won’t be. The entire government is full of Hunter Biden types: screwups.; 8/14/21, 8:22 AM
D.D. Driver said...: I often counsel clients that "we have no good options here, so we need to select the least shittiest option." This is completely fucked up situation with only shitty options. I don't know what the least shittiest outcome is, but I know that there are less shitty outcomes then sending more young men and women to die in an unwinnable war.

I have a 16 year old son who will be service eligible in two years. When we invaded Afghanistan, I had not even met his mother yet! How is sending ANOTHER GENERATION of children to die in Afghanistan going to move the needle?; 8/14/21, 8:26 AM
Temujin said...: It's gut-wrenching to think about. Especially given that we offered up 56,000 of our sons to Viet Nam (plus hundreds of thousands wounded physically and mentally). We had a giant lesson there and we still allowed this. I count myself as one of the idiots who wanted to believe my government was telling me the truth when we invaded Iraq and blew the Middle East apart. I feel so stupid that I felt it was the right thing to do. It never was.

Who are we anymore? As a young man I learned to not trust my government. I weakened in middle age and started to fall in line, wanting to believe our government was mostly good, and did things for the good of our citizens. After watching the last 15 or so years, I'm back to full disgust at my government- at all levels. It is clear they hate us- their citizens. And if they could, they'd replace us. So they have opened up the borders to do exactly that. But in the meantime, they have no compunction about sending our sons and daughters, husbands and wives to war in foreign lands to try out theories developed in think tanks by people who don't do the fighting. And offer up lives so that arms manufacturers get large contracts, military consultants keep getting paid, and we lose another generation of our own.

And at home they divide us with bullshit so that we don't notice how corrupt they are. Except that a lot of people are noticing. And I know that I am not alone in my disgust.; 8/14/21, 8:38 AM
Anon said...: "It’s just frustrating. We knew that this would happen. Now, all the people who went and served, are like, 'Why did my friend die?'"

Of course, part of the fiasco is down to incompetence, inevitable, etc. etc., but the debacle is also part of the Dem demoralization plan for the military. See? We just pull out. Let the place go to hell. Sacrifice is meaningless. Service for what? Why die, indeed?; 8/14/21, 8:54 AM
Big Mike said...: In the early days of the Afghanistan conflict the US was having considerable success with small numbers of Special Operations forces working closely with Northern Alliance leaders such as Abdul Rashid Dostum. This, of course, was utterly intolerable to the Pentagon bureaucracy, who elbowed the “snake eaters” aside in favor of conventional troops. Twenty years later, here we are.; 8/14/21, 8:55 AM
Birches said...: I would assume that anyone deployed to Afghanistan has wondered why long before yesterday.; 8/14/21, 8:55 AM
Birches said...: Why did they die?

A couple of posts earlier, one of our intellectual betters alluded to freedom for women and girls in Afghanistan as the reason to fight.

After 9/11, many men fought to get the bad guys who attacked us.

It's evident from watching recruiting videos like this that the Army wants people to fight to spread LGBT and woke rights across the globe.

The first and last reasons compliment each other, but the second doesn't fit as easily. I'm guessing the why's would have been asked even if there were still 5k troops in Afghanistan.; 8/14/21, 9:08 AM
WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...: For what?

The Military Industrial Complex.

It's worth it to root out the Tailban. The world lost interest in helping.; 8/14/21, 9:09 AM
WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...: Dear Temujin -
You are not alone with those thoughts.; 8/14/21, 9:12 AM
Chuck said...: I did not read any of the Afghan veterans saying, "This was a stupid war and we never should have gone over there." They think the withdrawal is what is stupid:

Afghanistan “has never had a clean solution. But now that it’s gotten hard, we’re just going to bounce? It doesn’t make it right,” he said in a phone interview.

Is there any doubt about the fact that the Trump Wing of the Republican Party as well as the entire Democratic Party are responsible for this catastrophic pullout?

It would never happen under a Liz Cheney presidency.; 8/14/21, 9:12 AM
Big Mike said...: What Temujin wrote (8.38). Except that by living in and around Washington, DC, and making a living as a government contractor for most of my career, there never was a period of my life where I regarded the government as existing for any reason other than to facilitate empire-building by bureaucrats. And nearly all of those bureaucrats were and still are contemptuous of the American people. The primary exception to that rule are young, starry-eyed idealists fresh out of college, who become disillusioned within their first 18 months and either quit the government in disgust or join the “dark side” and start climbing the bureaucratic ladder with its attendant backstabbing and infighting.; 8/14/21, 9:19 AM
Gerda Sprinchorn said...: "Why did my friend die?"

Commenters are overlooking the things unseen here. What was prevented because we fought in Afghanistan? To put it another way, what would have happened if we hadn't fought? Because those are things unseen, it is easy to implicitly assume no bad things were prevented because we fought.

Let's make the things unseen explicit. Let's think about what the world might have been like if we hadn't fought. Might Osama have been hailed as a hero because he stood up to the US and won? What other bad people might have been encouraged by this? Would ISIS have been more successful? Would a bad person have gotten frisky with nukes or anthrax?

The US went batshit crazy, over-reacted, and spent trillions lashing out at enemies real and imagined. Did that discourage any evil-doers in any way? It would certainly discourage me from ticking off the US in any way. Sometimes being perceived as crazy can be a good defense: it discourages people from bothering you. The US has not been seriously attacked since 9/11; perhaps that was BECAUSE the US went nuts after 9/11. Many people seem to be taking this relative tranquility as evidence that there was no threat in the first place. But that is lazy thinking. Until you know what would have happened if we hadn't fought, you really don't know if fighting was worth it.

Another way to think about this is to ask, how could the US have NOT fought back when attacked as it was on 9/11.; 8/14/21, 9:22 AM
Amadeus 48 said...: "It would never happen under a Liz Cheney presidency."

Absolutely agree. That is why she needs to be sent back to Wyoming (before her inevitable relocation to Bel Aire or Malibu).; 8/14/21, 9:48 AM
GatorNavy said...: Chuck said

I did not read any of the Afghan veterans saying, "This was a stupid war and we never should have gone over there." They think the withdrawal is what is stupid:

Afghanistan “has never had a clean solution. But now that it’s gotten hard, we’re just going to bounce? It doesn’t make it right,” he said in a phone interview.

Is there any doubt about the fact that the Trump Wing of the Republican Party as well as the entire Democratic Party are responsible for this catastrophic pullout?

It would never happen under a Liz Cheney presidency.

Chuck hasn’t been to a legion/VFW hall since 2002. In 2002 we (veterans) were already arguing about why we were still in Afghanistan. Most of us Gulf War vets were against going back to Iraq.

Since Bush, we have had multiple changes in leadership in the house, senate and presidency. All of those people are responsible. Liz Cheney, former President Obama, Trump, Bush and now President Biden are responsible Democrat, Republican, whatever. The only thing that has changed is the generals and admirals got stupider and the pentagon got even more bloated and stupider. And the bloat will continue until it can’t. Then the real fun begins; 8/14/21, 9:59 AM
Yancey Ward said...: Harsh Pencil wrote:

"We don't have either the power nor the patience to turn countries around. Japan and Germany were perhaps flukes that taught us the wrong lessons."

They are the exceptions that prove the rule, not flukes. You can't go in and turn a barbarian subsistance culture into a modern, functioning non-barbarian, non-subsistance culture- they have to get there all on their own through cultural evolution, and that process takes hundreds of years at a minimum. The point is that the Germans and the Japanese were already high-functioning, technically competent cultures when the Allies defeated them.; 8/14/21, 10:47 AM
Chris Lopes said...: It's the "no one who is responsible will be held accountable" part that really ticks me off. Going after Bin Laden and his folks (and the Taliban assholes protecting them) made sense. Trying to nation build in a place not even Alexander the Great could handle, didn't. But the oh so clever elites thought they knew better. Now we get to watch the total shit show about to happen, while the folks who created it look on with appropriate disinterest.; 8/14/21, 10:55 AM
Lucien said...: Presidents always disappoint me, but the first big disappointment of the Trump Presidency was his allowing the military to talk him out of an immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan. I rationalized it by thinking they were about the only friends he had in the government. If the Democrats and the media organs of their party had not gone full-batshit crazy with Trump hatred from the get-go, they might have been able to cut some deals with him, and he might have followed his instincts to get us out of our various endless war commitments in Iraq and Syria too.

Oddly, despite his instincts, he liked the chest-thumping "Our military is the biggest and best in the world" swagger, too, and delighted in having a Defense Secretary he could call "Mad Dog". Strange guy.; 8/14/21, 10:57 AM
Yancey Ward said...: Chris Lopes wrote:

"Now we get to watch the total shit show about to happen, while the folks who created it look on with appropriate disinterest."

Oh, were this true! No, they won't look on in disinterest, they will blame the people who warned about the ultimate outcome all along. They will blame the people who warned us we would never build a stable government in Afghanistan that would stand on its own, and that would crumble the moment we departed. And all of those people doing the lying never once said forthrightly that Afghanistan was a permanent occupation if it was ever going to succeed on its own terms- a task that could never be laid down- had they done so, it never would have happened in the first place. Like I wrote the other day, I only give Trump credit for initiating the return to reality, and to Biden for, so far, following through. We should have been out of Afghanistan by 2002-2003, and we never should have invaded Iraq, or actively destabilized countries in North Africa, Syria, and Yemem. These were all catastrophic mistakes that the Western world is going to be paying for for the next hundred years or more. What we did is literally the definition of hubris.; 8/14/21, 11:13 AM
hombre said...: “We will bury you!” Nikita Kruschev, 1956. This was never about a military victory, but an ideological one.

It has taken more than half a century and we have seen the division of the USSR, but Nikita’s time has finally come — aided and abetted by legions of useful idiots and educated morons in the US.; 8/14/21, 11:22 AM
Bob Boyd said...: Gerda Sprinchorn said:
"The US went batshit crazy, over-reacted, and spent trillions lashing out at enemies real and imagined."
"Sometimes being perceived as crazy can be a good defense"

"the US went nuts after 9/11."

The US did not go "batshit crazy" after 9/11 nor were we perceived as crazy by our adversaries. On the contrary, we were perceived as defeatable in the long term. The Afghanis had a saying, "You have the watches, but we have the time."
The US did not spend trillions of dollars "lashing out at enemies real and imagined" It spent trillions of dollars trying to build a modern functioning, western style democracy while following strict ROE.

Having said that, I understand your larger point and you're right. But I don't know anyone who has ever advocated that we should have done nothing after 9/11. It's not a binary, i.e. do nothing or do exactly what we did.
The problem wasn't the first decisions, it was so many of the subsequent decisions.; 8/14/21, 11:48 AM
Howard said...: Bob Boyd: "It spent trillions of dollars trying to build a modern functioning, western style democracy while following strict ROE."

IOW, batshit crazy on PCP, Meth and Steroids.; 8/14/21, 12:54 PM
Skippy Tisdale said...: "Blogger Howard said...
The war was fought for military industrial complex profits and to make chickenhawk politicians feel macho.

Mission Accomplished"

As in, I'm done ejaculating now?; 8/14/21, 2:26 PM
Richard Aubrey said...: Kipling had some views of such matters. In his "Ballad of Boh Da Thone", about a Burmese brigand, he has these lines:
"He crucified rich, he scarified mean
He filled old ladies with kerosene
While over the water the papers cried,
'The patriot fights for his countryside'"

"Frontier Arithmetic" has some overtones seen again in Fall's "Street Without Joy".

It's bookended with "The Grave of The Hundred Head".

How you fight wars these days which aren't WW II.; 8/14/21, 3:39 PM
hombre said...: This is classic Obama/Biden foreign policy: Abandon Iraq with no plan; bring down Qaddafi with no plan; draw a line in Syria with no plan; open the door to a nuclear Iran with no plan; abandon Afghanistan with no plan, soft pedal the ChiComs about the virus; beg Putin not to exploit us; beg Iran to take us back; beg the Taliban not to hit our embassy.

The Obots are a stupid, cowardly lot and they aren’t doing the dying, only courting it with their dithering and weakness.

If the Taliban hit the embassy, Biden will blame Trump. If they don’t, he will declare victory. Normal people will shake their heads. Either way his cheering section will fake an orgasm.; 8/14/21, 7:04 PM
Bunkypotatohead said...: How will that soldier feel when his next assignment is to track down his fellow white supremacists here in the US. Uncle Joe has deemed them "the greatest threat to our democracy".; 8/14/21, 10:57 PM