"As the bulk of American troops departed... there was no plan for securing regional base access, for the contractors that maintain the Afghan military, for training that military after the U.S. departure, for evacuating interpreters and helpers."
Said Richard Fontaine, "head of the Center for a New American Security and former foreign policy adviser to Sen. John McCain," quoted in "1 big thing: Biden's stain" (Axios).
That word "stain" comes from Ryan Crocker, "a U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan under President Obama," who said, last weekend, "I think it is already an indelible stain on his presidency."
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69 comments:
It's a stain on four presidencies. Even if Biden is the one in charge when it's happening, and therefore worthy of the largest share of blame, we've needed an exit plan for 15 years. There is a lot of blame to go around for this debacle.
We did the same thing in Iraq just a couple of years ago. We left with no plan. ISIS filled the void and slaughtered thousands in hideous fashion. We become so inured to these things it's already forgotten. You remember that 'JV team'?
We are not led by the brightest bulbs in the drawer. A bad mix of degrees from prestigious universities heaped on mediocre people. I hate to say that, but I have to go with the evidence of my senses. Years of watching this CF is enough for this man. Our leaders are awful.
What do you mean 20 years to think it over???
History only began seven months ago, on January 20 of the Year Zero.
Biden threw away the wisdom of the past to embrace Progress! and reinvent a new order.
Of course there wasn’t a plan. If there had been a plan (or 2 or 3), then that would have made it easier for a President to order a pullout. Being able to say “But Mr. President there will be chaos if we withdraw, we can’t go until (insert unattainable goal here)”. This is the slow-walking guerilla resistance campaign that the deep state uses to work its will.
This occurred first, as farce in “Yes, Minister”, but later as tragedy in real life.
Shouldn't the Afghan government have done this planning? Fontaine apparently thinks they are children, incapable of planning, let alone undertaking, their own defense. Even after 20 years of help. So of course it's our job to defend them, since they apparently don't feel like doing it.
Afghanistan has the Taliban because they want them. The Taliban are not recruiting Indians, Chinese, Russians or Turks. Their recruits are Afghans. Thousands of people willing to risk their lives to put the Taliban in power. And very few willing to fight them. Sounds like democracy in action to me.
It's not about the collapse or the people (women and children) who are suffering or the people who will most assuredly lose their lives over the lack of planning - it's all about how it will make the poor sad loser democrat - look.
Quick - blame Trump and his supporters!
Perhaps the lack of a plan was the plan and a deal was made to that effect with somebody.
Outside of the 4 years Trump was President Joe Biden has been involved with Afghanistan and our involvement there since we went in to that country in 2001. There's no way this fiasco of a bug out just crept up on him and he couldn't have had sufficient information in a timely manner to handle it differently if he'd wanted to do that.
I've seen this coming ever since Bush Jr. sent them in. The British and Russian experiences in Afghanistan were exactly the same. It's not like this is a surprise.
It's as if our leaders don't care who gets killed and maimed in their pursuit for power.
Same as it ever was.
"the United States withdrew its forces without a plan for the aftermath."
It's as if no one cared. And they were right: no one is held accountable when "mistakes are made." For Dems, of course, no plan is a good plan anyway: they want us to be weak and appear weak. But perhaps in this case "Biden" miscalculated slightly: the stain may stick and therefore disrupt their domestic priorities.
Not saying we should have stayed in A. at all, of course.
Our "leaders," political and military, seem to be unable to grasp that the people in the Taliban really believe in their cause. That they are fighting for God and if they die they will go to heaven. This causes them to have a high amount of something that's called morale. When I was in the military I was told the morale of the men was extremely important and that it was important to keep it as high as possible. That good morale was necessary if the mission was to succeed and that if the soldiers had bad morale then the mission probably would not be successful. Perhaps they have stopped teaching that in the military since there probably isn't time considering all the new things that the political officers are tasked with indoctrinating the soldiers, sailors, marines, and guardians with. Or maybe they just are that incompetent.
To be fair, they hoped they wouldn't need a plan.
Milley had a plan all typed up, but his dog ate it.
We seem to be taking as a given that the Trump administration had no plan. Perhaps they didn’t. However the way in which Biden and his administration shy away from anything that Trump proposed or did, no matter how much imbued with common sense, causes me to believe that if the Trump administration had a plan, the Biden administration would ignore it and implement no part of it.
OTOH I can also picture Trump directing Mattis and Pompeo to develop a withdrawal plan, and Mattis telling his subordinates not to bother. Ergo, perhaps there was no Trump administration plan after all.
"It's striking that, with 20 years to think it over, the United States withdrew its forces without a plan for the aftermath."
Oh, that line is just hilarious. So much like 1975 and the fall of Saigon. Everything old is new again.
The thing about Vietnam and Afghanistan being two generations apart is that the Afghan "collaborators" weren't around to see the fall of Saigon and didn't read up on it either. Americans are fickle allies who like quick results, which is why WWII and especially the 1991 Gulf War were so satisfying. Future "collaborators" should run like hell when Americans offer help.
Korea? Eisenhower shut down that debacle in a hurry after he took office. A huge American presence for decades is fine only if you don't take casualties. Nice travel opportunities for soldiers and sailors, too. Europe, the Far East...
Now we just wait for Afghan boat people to come ashore on California's beaches.
Well there will be more slings and arrows--and maybe the contents of a few chamberpots--coming Joe Biden's way over this. What's surprising in the qoutes our host selected is that you have a McCain minion, and an Obama official jumping on Joe. But then the Obamaites never thought much of Joe anyway.
If Trump had been re-elected he might have handled this bugout better than Biden. It's doubtful he would have done it any worse.
Our "leaders," political and military, seem to be unable to grasp that the people in the Taliban really believe in their cause.
Whoever has the superior will wins.
Coming at this with no real knowledge or understanding of the history or current situation in Afghanistan, I wondered if President Biden was similarly ignorant. Not so ...
Biden was a strong supporter of the War in Afghanistan, saying, "Whatever it takes, we should do it."
[ ... ]
"By late 2006, Biden's stance had shifted considerably. He opposed the troop surge of 2007, saying General David Petraeus was "dead, flat wrong" in believing the surge could work. Biden instead advocated dividing Iraq into a loose federation of three ethnic states. In November 2006, Biden and Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, released a comprehensive strategy to end sectarian violence in Iraq. Rather than continue the existing approach or withdrawing, the plan called for "a third way": federalizing Iraq and giving Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis "breathing room" in their own regions. In September 2007, a non-binding resolution endorsing the plan passed the Senate, but the idea was unfamiliar, had no political constituency, and failed to gain traction. Iraq's political leadership denounced the resolution as de facto partitioning of the country, and the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad issued a statement distancing itself from it. In May 2008, Biden sharply criticized President George W. Bush's speech to Israel's Knesset in which Bush compared some Democrats to Western leaders who appeased Hitler before World War II; Biden called the speech "bullshit", "malarkey", and "outrageous". He later apologized for his language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Biden#Senate_Foreign_Relations_Committee
(references at the link)
The US President is no foreign-policy babe in the woods.
I wonder what the plan is for Taiwan? If I was in Taiwanese leadership, my go-bag would loaded.
The collapse in Iraq after US military pulls out followed by the collapse in Afghanistan really undermines my confidence in US military and intelligence services. On top of the failures that got us in at the start. 2 decades. And after the Indochina precedent. 60 years.
Look forward to Congressional and academic post mortems.
Meanwhile the war on drugs proceeds apace.
There is nothing surprising about what is happening. Elections have consequences. Hello again Carter, we barely knew we.
Reuters is reporting that Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has fled the country as the Taliban enter the capital Kabul. Ghani is reportedly in Tajikistan.
So I wonder who the Biden administration thinks the Taliban is going to meet with?
Better get back to focusing on Joe's ice cream flavor of the day.
“Out damn spot! C,mon, man… will these hands ne'er be clean?"
—- Joe Biden
I guess I missed the campaign speech where Joe Biden announced that, "If elected, I will, within seven months, withdraw all US Military and Civilian personnel from Afghanistan."
This is where a president with dementia who has been "on the wrong side of every foreign policy issue over the past 20 years" really hurts. Has there been one single issue, in domestic as well as foreign policy, where Biden has led and not been led by either the Obama policy or his radical advisers? The best Biden has to offer is that he inherited an Afghanistan deal from the Trump administration. But that deal called for a conditions-based withdrawal which explicitly sought to prevent the deplorable cut and run of the Biden Administration. Besides, Biden has not let past deals or even laws stop him when he wanted to do something different in energy policy or immigration, just to name a couple of obvious cases.
The bottom line is that Biden has such a limited band width mentally, that he is allowing the worst outcome in Afghanistan. I wouldn't be surprised if the water hawks are letting it happen in order to show America what happens if we don't continue to fight endless wars. So two bad actors - Biden and the war hawks - will create a humanitarian disaster with a potential to upset stability throughout the Middle East. Of course, such instability only adds to the war hawk case for going back into battle.
Personally, I applaud Biden for taking the heat. It's the first really good decision he's made, at least that I am aware of, since coming into office. This ending was always in the cards.
There are nearly 40 million people in Afghanistan who are being abandon to live a brutal primitive life with misogynistic rulers, and our Democratic politicians are upset because this will be a "stain" on Biden's presidency.
What can I say?
The excuse is his hands were tied by Trump! BS, he was certain willing to renounce Trump's policies when he wanted to. The administration can pretend that they didn't have a choice or "no one could have predicted." The fact is they wanted out and refused to listen to dissenting voices, like Gen. Petraeus. https://www.npr.org/2021/08/13/1027537415/former-cia-director-gen-petraeus-discusses-the-talibans-resurgence-in-afghanista
Whoever was providing Biden with the intelligence reports and analysis should be shown the door. But they won't be. Has anyone at all been held accountable at any point for our 20 year travesty in the Middle.East?
Spend trillions on infrastructure and defund the police. What could go wrong?
Temujin said...
"We are not led by the brightest bulbs in the drawer"
Well, Yeah; BUT! At Least there's No Mean Tweets!
i mean; would you rather live in a world, with cheap oil, lots of jobs, hope for the future...
or, No Mean Tweets?
According to hundreds of thousands of unfolded mail in ballots... We picked No Mean Tweets!
It was striking how fast ISIS filled the void in Iraq and Syria and equally striking how fast they themselves collapsed when faced with disciplined opposition. Is it possible that someday all those refugees fleeing the Taliban will find a way to coalesce and take a stand against the people they're running away from?.....The Taliban have the edge because there's no real opposition and, at present, no one wants to die protecting anarchy and kleptocrats. Maybe this will change. It only took 72 years for the people of Russia to realize that the Bolsheviks were not the solution to their problems. Maybe the people of Afghanistan, given sufficient time, will someday be less supportive of the Taliban.....In any event, although Biden has screwed this up, I think most of the blame should lie with the Afghan people.
Who here wants their kids or grandkids to die or worse for a more smooth and telegenic transfer of power from our corrupt client puppet to the Taliban?
In two months, no one will remember this shitshow. No impact on the midterm elections.
Americans come and go (vote in with their feet vote out with their feet)
Afghanis are the sons of their soil with feet planted firmly and rooted.
what else to expect except some Afghanis grifting on gullible Americans
Americans in turn /culturally appropriating/fine tuning/ own corruption techniques for military-industrial-congressional complex
The cousin marriage rate in Afghanistan is 46%. It's not a country that's spontaneously going to blossom into a robust Western democracy She's All That style when the Taliban glasses come off.
@ Ron Winkleheimer-
In war, the moral is to the physical as three is to one.
"In war, three-quarters turns on personal character and relations; the balance of manpower and materials counts only for the remaining quarter." Napoleon Bonaparte
The army of the Mayor of Kabul (I will not dignify him with the title President of Afghanistan) is certainly materially and logistically superior to the Taliban. But they have not loyalty to the government in Kabul, and are unwilling to waste their lives fighting to defend the kleptocratic regime.
It's PoliSci 101. Those to whom an issue is most salient will win over the long term.
What goes on in Shitholistan is SALIENT to the people there; it is NOT SALIENT to Americans.
We have to relearn this simple lesson every few decades.
The administration seems to have bungled this badly. But in fairness to the political class, the foreign policy and intelligence experts who were feeding them data appear to have been caught completely by surprise by the rapidity of the Taliban blitzkrieg. I assume that when they were saying that it would take at least 90 days for the Taliban to take Kabul, that they weren't lying about their assessment, and told the political branches the same thing behind closed doors. A 90 day evacuation would have left a lot more time to process asylum applications from interpreters and local allies whom we are now abandoning.
More time for the Afghan government (such as it is) to prepare defenses. You could do that in 90 days. Not in a week. It's impossible to develop and implement good contingency plans when your exprts keep feeding you garbage data.
I predict we are about 1 month away from the democraticals and their faux "republican" lap poodles impeaching Trump for Biden's disastrous failure in Afghanistan.
I have a friend who served in Mogadishu, Iran and Iraq. When the UN and Congress made his highly specialized troops pull out of Mogadishu because the U.N. Forces didn't allow them there, his commander said: 'Don't get too comfortable in Israel. We'll be back there in a week tops.'
They were, with body bags to get the untrained callow youths we sacrificed to that shit show.
He is maimed and crippled, inside and out. He wants neither recognition nor praise. He hates the men and women in Washington from both parties who sacrificed his life so casually while profiting off it and the American public who pretended all of this wasn't happening.
We should all be ashamed. Not that it would make a damn bit of difference to him. We have made him our scapegoat, in every Greek and Hebrew iteration of the word. His role is to never seen again as he wanders wounded in the desert.
Sally 327 is absolutely right. Biden is the most culpable, though we are all culpable.
We spend so much money and employ so many (far too many) people in government, that I would hope we'd have a solid plan for invading both Canada and the moon just in case.
It doesn't seem like having plans to withdraw troops from a foreign country you've occupied for twenty years would be too much to ask.
I'm beginning to think, with overwhelming evidence, that our diplomatic corps and intelligence arms are staffed by politically-minded morons with really fancy degrees from schools that can't teach 2 + 2.
"I wonder what the plan is for Taiwan? If I was in Taiwanese leadership, my go-bag would loaded."
Good point.
I predicted the Chicoms would invade Taiwan within 6 months of Biden being in office. I was wrong. But seeing how things are going in Afghanistan, I have to believe that they are dusting off their plans.
Why wouldn't they? Who will stop them?
“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” (Chuck Schumer Jan 3, 2017)
Aimed at Trump, inadvertently circled back and bagged Slo Joe.
People today have striking memories of 1975. Yet we are told (sold) here that folks won't remember in two months.
Certainly, Joe Biden won't remember in two months. Everyone else will.
History is difficult for the american ruling class. The british empire, the soviet union, and now america have all tried and failed in Afghanistan.
Alexander was a bit more successful, but in the end failed. Alexander and the British had some success, when they payed off Afghanistan in exchange for support.
Yet, early on, a few motivated special forces, allied with Afghani rebels, chased the taliban into Pakistan.
that was the time to leave. Trying to bring democracy to a culture rooted in the 8th or 9th century is a fools errand.
this has been a tragic waste of American lives. Both the left and the right are to blame, since that seems to be the game here. who to blame, not let's learn from history.
No one has clean hands in all this. Again, history is hard for our ruling class.
Mark: "People today have striking memories of 1975. Yet we are told (sold) here that folks won't remember in two months."
Our Howard and his LLR pals actually believe they can pull another "antifa is just a myth" out of their hat and make it all go away.
They actually believe that.
On top of "there is no inflation" and the "economy is booming" and "gas prices are not getting higher" and "there is no border crisis" and................(you knew this was coming)..."the 2020 election was the most cleanest and mostest wonderfully innocent and fraud-free election evah!!".
Will the nation react sanely against these lunatics in time to avert the seemingly inevitable Cloward-Piven final result?
We are going to find out pretty soon.
And then there is Jon Podhoritz (a neocon's neocon) in Commentary: all Biden had to do in Afghanistan was nothing. The last US military fatality in Afghanistan had occurred in March 2020.
We had a network of military personnel, special operators, and military contractors who were maintaining the status quo. Donald Trump had announced his intention to leave the country in order to belatedly fulfill a 2016 campaign promise. The military objected and leaked their opposition to the press. Trump lost. Biden came in and, for whatever reason, pushed a withdrawal on an idiotic, publicly pre-announced schedule. This time military objections took the form of unrealistic prognostications about the vitality of the Afghan military. Oops!
The result we have before us.
So I guess that master's degree in gender and women's studies that Kabul University had going is over, huh? PBS was touting it in 2015. Oh noes! Will Biden and Harris be held accountable?
When gender and women's studies meet radical Islam something has to give. Intersectionality is a harsh mistress, but perhaps the Taliban doesn't play that game.
I'm no expert on military anything, but even I, as a non-expert on military anything understood deep down in my bones that announcing the September 11th withdrawal date was a really bad move. Biden and his handlers gave the Taliban all sorts of time to plan. and a date! The arrogance of that move is obvious to everyone. The entire mob-left are so cocooned and protected by the fawning press and the late night ice cream giggle hosts. Our nation is a joke. Biden and his son are crooks. Pelosi family only care about power and money. same with all of the insiders who are too. Our nation is a cluster-F.
I'm not sure folks are getting this. Afghanistan is not throwing out the US. Afghanistan is under attack by what amounts to a foreign army--armed, supplied, sanctuary in Pakistan make it foreign, no matter the origin of the fighters, which is always presumed to be Astan and not various true believers from elsewhere.
The Astan failure to achieve New England town meeting democracy models is not throwing out the US.
Biden is pulling the troops out because.....something or other. To end a war in which no Americans have died in nearly a year and a half? A good many troops have died in training accidents and mischances off duty in that period. Which shows Astan is SAFER than home? Go figure. More soldiers have committed suicide at Ft. Bliss in that period than have died in Astan. Or been, apparently, murdered.
So, when does Xi invade Taiwan? When he stops laughing. Is anybody dumb enough to think Xi is being put off by the spectacle of a powerful, committed, competent America?
So Astan will revert to a base for the next al Quaeda, except we won't go after them this time. They'll be immune, no matter what they do. And the candidates for bin Laden's legacy know it.
And the Chinese and/or the Russians will be messing around to our disadvantage.
The Upside is...?
It's amazing to me that after lying to Commander In Chief Donald Trump about Syria, for their own political reasons, the generals are surprised that Biden ignored them.
I will stipulate that Richard Aubrey has more actual military experience than I (he couldn't have less) but I'm going to push back.
Perhaps--perhaps--the many military suicides have to do with the stress of deployment upon deployment in losing wars. Wars fought without any over-arching and historically-informed idea of the theater and its inhabitants, and thus what is possible.
It may be that this retreat (perhaps a rout before long) emboldens bad actors; in that case, maybe we're better off consolidating nearer home than stuck in the middle of nowhere surrounded by savages.
I take no comfort from the fact that this disaster is unfolding under Mr. Biden's administration. I do wonder if perhaps, the scales might fall from the eyes of some of my liberal friends who despised Trump.
Drago is correct. We'll soon get a 3rd Impeachment Trump trial for his "enabling" the Fall Of Kabul and his "inciting" the Taliban with his tweets. No doubt Fatboy Vindman will make a return appearance with some classified phone call transcripts.
But more seriously, I agree with a previous commenter - I applaud Biden for withdrawing. That he executed the withdrawl in an utterly incompetent manner (and probably caused the loss of thousands of Afghan lives and $Billions in USA equipment) doesn't change the fact that the decision to leave was correct. In fact, we should have left 10 years ago.
It'd be nice if Americans would heed the Advice of John Adams: "America does not go abroad looking for monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own."
Tomcc wrote:
"I take no comfort from the fact that this disaster is unfolding under Mr. Biden's administration. I do wonder if perhaps, the scales might fall from the eyes of some of my liberal friends who despised Trump."
They won't. By the end of next week the narrative will be that Trump was the reason the Taliban took control- that Biden did the best he could with a bad situation left to him by Trump, and the media will oblige. However, Biden will have to make this case in person with a televised address to get the ball rolling. Is he up to it? I don't know.
Narr. The deployments have a cost. But about a year ago, last I heard, 85% of the suicides were of guys who hadn't deployed. It's women, money, and maybe drugs.
As I say, the last year plus hasn't gotten any Americans killed in Astan. In addition, unlike my father's war--WW II in Europe--your accommodations are pretty okay. My dad and his guys slept where they ended up when they could.
I didn't deploy--was supposed to be in country late 70 but my brother was killed so I didn't go. But in Infantry training, we had some cold beds, when we got a chance to sleep which was rare. The FOBS feature bunks, showers, even anti-mortar protection, hot chow. Lots of potable water.
Not half the guys in muddy holes struggling to stay awake while the others, trusting, tried to go to sleep before the cold made them into insomniacs.
I have an alt-hist question. Presume that, in 1936, the hypothetical "french platoon" or a more robust force, resisted the remilitarization of the Rhineland. The German officers initiated their plan B and returned to Berlin and canned Hitler. Some were talking of bringing back the Hohenzollerns
So, no WW II. How would the French resistance be characterized today. Sordid victor's vengeance. Struggle for markets. Military industrial complex looking for another fight. Ginning up a foreign enemy to solidify a political position.
Question is how many and what kind of sacrifices are justified if one of them might prevent WW III, although you don't know for sure and you wouldn't know which one?
Fehrenbach in "This Kind of War" looks at the Korean War--bang up history including historical forces--and the place of the military in a bipolar, nuclear armed world, and in a liberal society. Moral. Don't let the other guy think he can win. Even if he's wrong, it costs you a hell of a lot more than it would to be convincing beforehand.
Tomcc. Not a chance in hell.
Hopefully this will be the last of the foreign misadventures our "leaders" in Washington get us into. We don't have the will or competence to convert the third world into modern civilization. We can't even defend our own borders.
The only time in my life the US was ever attacked was 20 years ago this September 11th. Our armed forces watched Flight 77 crash into their headquarters that day. You'd think everyone would show some humility about what we're capable of after that experience.
Tomcc,
You might look at the WaPo op-ed page today. Max Boot suggested that Biden f'ed this one up royally, and that there was no way for anyone in good conscience to say otherwise.
Now, Max Boot is an odd character, stipulated. I remember him from way back when we were both students at UC/Berkeley, and he was then writing snarky, brash, contrarian far-Right columns in the Daily Cal. But the Max Boot of 2021 loathes Trump, has never said a single good word in his favor, has shoved in the boot (no pun intended) every chance he gets. In this case, he allowed that the US -- meaning the Biden Administration -- had screwed up horribly, and would likely cost tens of thousands of lives, as well as giving the Taliban the public relations victory of the millennium (we are talking here about people who think in the very long term). And, hey presto, the WaPo readership promptly forgets everything Boot has ever written about Trump, and turns on him as a Trump suck-up of the first water.
Which, to me, shows that the WaPo readership -- or, rather, the tiny part of it that comments -- simply doesn't care what anyone says about anything, apart from its being pro- or anti-Biden. They have the shallowest and shabbiest of all sorting mechanisms.
Bunky. Not sure turning the third world into civilization is/was the point in Astan. Or should have been. What we want is a reasonably sedate place to put our forward assets to keep the pressure on the bad guys. We don't want to spend half the time defending the base's perimeter while operating against a foe.
To the extent western-style institutions showing up are a help, sure, give them some support.
It would be interesting to see what proportion of our expenses in Astan were involved directly in improving women's lives; school, getting the locals to defenestrate the fundamentalist mullahs and judges, so forth.
But "nation building" is an easy thing to say but difficult to distinguish from building infrastructure whose primary purpose is to help us.
Maybe "nation building" is a warm, fuzzy description of something else entirely.
Bunky. Not sure turning the third world into civilization is/was the point in Astan. Or should have been. What we want is a reasonably sedate place to put our forward assets to keep the pressure on the bad guys. We don't want to spend half the time defending the base's perimeter while operating against a foe.
To the extent western-style institutions showing up are a help, sure, give them some support.
It would be interesting to see what proportion of our expenses in Astan were involved directly in improving women's lives; school, getting the locals to defenestrate the fundamentalist mullahs and judges, so forth.
But "nation building" is an easy thing to say but difficult to distinguish from building infrastructure whose primary purpose is to help us.
Maybe "nation building" is a warm, fuzzy description of something else entirely.
Bunky. Not sure turning the third world into civilization is/was the point in Astan. Or should have been. What we want is a reasonably sedate place to put our forward assets to keep the pressure on the bad guys. We don't want to spend half the time defending the base's perimeter while operating against a foe.
To the extent western-style institutions showing up are a help, sure, give them some support.
It would be interesting to see what proportion of our expenses in Astan were involved directly in improving women's lives; school, getting the locals to defenestrate the fundamentalist mullahs and judges, so forth.
But "nation building" is an easy thing to say but difficult to distinguish from building infrastructure whose primary purpose is to help us.
Maybe "nation building" is a warm, fuzzy description of something else entirely.
@Richard Aubrey--I stand corrected on military suicides. To pursue the macabre angle, I'd bet good money that suicides among deployed may go up, and among veterans possibly way up.
My father was a pilot in WWII, and my older brother was in the Signal Corps in Thailand while I was in high school. I had JROTC (mandatory) and AFROTC (mandatory) and sense enough to go to college--two years before my b.d. became #311 or so. But I study history and military history intensely.
Your What-If is a classic. Niall Ferguson in War of the World uses the same example but at the moment I can't recall exactly how it gamed out. No matter--I tell you frankly I don't know, and since Ferguson argues earlier that WWII actually started earlier, in China, it gets murky fast.
Hitler deposed, OK. Stresses of economics, race, nationalism, and ideology roll over and go to sleep? Maybe. It's not as if there weren't enough flashpoints to generate a different European War(s). The reputation of the hypothetical French stare-down is too remote for me to speculate, especially since we don't know what else might have happened.
Are wars like oncoming trains to be shunted aside with foresight? (IDK)
I'm too tired at the moment to tackle WW3. Again, if things are that dire, we are screwed indeed. As for not letting the other guy think he can win, it's much too late--by many years--for that, in A-stan.
Boot wasn't always wrong back in the day, but after Tucker made him cry over the poor dear Kurds I haven't paid him any mind.
Personally, I hope against hope that my lib-lefty and D friends and family can shake the OMB jones even this once . . .
I personally think, in the long run, a quick Taliban victory is a better outcome than a long, drawn out conflict that they would have won anyway. The only benefit to a long drawn out affair is that all the Westerners can escape the country before the fall along with all the Afghanis that can find refuge elsewhere, but don't kid yourselves- there are over 10 million Afghans in the Kabul and other metropolitan areas that the old government controlled- less than 10% of them were ever going to get out, and probably less than 1%. A long drawn out conflict would surely have killed tens or hundreds of thousands (look up the number killed in the conflict with the Russians during and immediately after that occupation). Blood is going to flow regardless, and sometimes there is nothing one can do to stop it.
I think it is already an indelible stain on his presidency.
Nonsense. The Resident always wears a bib.
I personally think, in the long run, a quick Taliban victory is a better outcome than a long, drawn out conflict that they would have won anyway.
@Yancey, excuse me, but 20 years isn’t long enough or drawn out enough for you?
The only benefit to a long drawn out affair is that all the Westerners can escape the country before the fall
And if you were an American, or any other Westerner, over there that would strike you as one Hell of a benefit!
along with all the Afghanis that can find refuge elsewhere
Except that it should be our responsibility to provide refuge to Afghanis who worked with us.
Narr. Thank for the reply. I figure that, without Hitler's insane genius to rise to the top of and control the rat fight of Nazi politics, things couldn't have gotten organized sufficiently to start a new war.
But my point was, should WW II not have occurred, how would the affair in the Rhineland be viewed fifty years later? Given my view of western intellectuals, I'd suspect nothing positive, and pretty much condemning the French for being poopy heads to a helpless neighbor.
And from that, what views of what we are doing or have done, might do which would possibly prevent WW III.
I ran into some Luftwaffe guys at Ft. Bliss in 1970--long story but perfectly obvious at the end--who were convinced the battle for the Fulda Gap was being fought in SEA and... they weren't fighting it. Twofer. Might have been something to that.
Ran across a historian who said there were five WW II. One in China. But if Germany had stayed home in the late Thirties/early Forties, it would be a completely different picture.
We had about 315k guys in the Army and Navy in 1939. If we take the number of guys killed and double it to include the most seriously crippled, that would be about 800,000. So if we'd had, in 1939, only what we lost, it would have been over a million guys. Spending dollars we didn't have to spruce up manufacturing could have done more rifles, trucks, ships, etc, as well as other things.
If that didn't convince people to stay home, it would have allowed for a much faster demonstration of their bad judgment with substantially fewer millions killed.
Lesson for today: We just convinced a lot of people we can be rolled and somebody might try. That he would be wrong--hope is not a plan--would still get a lot of our people killed.
@Richard Aubrey--fair points, but some are a little too What-Iffy even for me. If the French could have achieved a quick and public humiliation of Hitler, yes, then things would have been very different--and only historians with too much time on their hands would be worried about whether or not the inevitable criticism that they got was fair enough, or foresighted enough.
But I would argue that framing the situation in A-stan now in those terms is misleading. The Taliban are only people standing up for traditional Afghan and Islamic values, not madmen in charge of the most advanced--in many ways--country on the planet, located in the heart of, and--in many ways--AT the heart of Western culture.
The comparisons often made between our occupations of S Korea, Japan, and Germany just prove the point--there are areas of the world that matter, and whose populations want to amount to something. Those places, we can help, and should. Those that cling bitterly to their backward ideologies, not so much.
FWIW, I have predicted that Biden would be tested across the spectrum, and found wanting in
short order. And I suspect that our most committed and observant foes knew we'd bug out sooner or later anyway.
Big Mike,
And which of the 40 million Afghanis is this that worked with us? 1000, 10,000, 100,000, 1,000,000, 10,000,000, or half the population? People are going to be left behind no matter what we did or do. As for the westerners trapped there, if they weren't under military orders to be there, I have no real sympathy at this point- I know I would have left last year before the ink on the Doha agreement was dry. I have known this moment was coming for almost 20 years now- if they didn't know this moment was coming, then that is on them.
Narr. I wasn't trying to rerun WW II. I was making the case that, had the hypothetically successful French resistance worked, it would look to intellectuals fifty years later as a Bad Thing. Useless. Meaningless. Nefarious motives.
So, now, what we do which might prevent WW III is going to be labeled evil, bad, racist, and, should it actually work, we'll never know. Because we do a lot of things. One of them might work. Or perhaps the situation would never have gotten there in the first place. We'll never know unless we fail to do the One Thing.
But our leaders want us to do nothing. Except destabilize Libya....forgot the reason for that.
Again, a few lines from Kipling, about a Burmese brigand:
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!".
Did Gulf One prevent a huge middle east war? No way to know and discussing it isn't useful at this point. Might have. Might not.
As to our prep for WW II, my point was that it could have been done--lots of guys needed jobs, factories needed orders, Keynes was paying for it. What was the down side? And the up side might have been no WW II. Or a less severe one, worst case.
And now....we have proven ourselves wet paper dolls.
Boring old Joe is sooo much better than Trump.
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