Taliban reclaims Afghanistan

[old salt]

This is a bi-partisan situation/decision.

Since both Trump and Biden wanted to pull the plug.

Understandable, I guess. Since it only took about five minutes for the last 20 years of blood and treasure to vaporize.

But we hadn't had a single combat fatality in 18 months. What was the problem with keeping the lid on with the few thousand troops that were already there?

We still have troops in Germany and SK all these decades later. Does that mean those are "endless" wars too?

A full breach of the agreement with the Taliban would have meant Taliban attacks on U.S. forces. There would have been further combat fatalities.

The situations in Germany, Japan, and South Korea are completely different. Those nations are not active combat zones. Afghanistan always will be.

DocBarrister

The "further combat fatalities" would have been overwhelmingly Taliban & ASF fatalities, as they have been over the past few years.

[DocBarrister]

Biden's claim that we can still counter terrorists in Afghanistan is specious. In the places he named, we either have forces there or next door or we can enter from offshore. It's a long flight from our ME bases to Afghanistan... if Pakistan allows us to transit their airspace.

Nonsense. Let our cruise missiles do our talking.

Our greatest challenges in Afghanistan will not be the projection of military power, it will be having sufficient intelligence to know when and where to use that power.

DocBarrister

[DocBarrister]

This is a bi-partisan situation/decision.

Since both Trump and Biden wanted to pull the plug.

Understandable, I guess. Since it only took about five minutes for the last 20 years of blood and treasure to vaporize.

But we hadn't had a single combat fatality in 18 months. What was the problem with keeping the lid on with the few thousand troops that were already there?

We still have troops in Germany and SK all these decades later. Does that mean those are "endless" wars too?

A full breach of the agreement with the Taliban would have meant Taliban attacks on U.S. forces. There would have been further combat fatalities.

The situations in Germany, Japan, and South Korea are completely different. Those nations are not active combat zones. Afghanistan always will be.

DocBarrister

The "further combat fatalities" would have been overwhelmingly Taliban & ASF fatalities, as they have been over the past few years.

That doesn’t matter from either a Taliban or U.S. perspective.

For the Taliban, a combat death is a pathway to a holy reward. Their leaders could not care less how many of their men die … they have a nearly endless supply of recruits.

For the United States, even one combat fatality is a tragedy.

DocBarrister

[old salt]

Biden's claim that we can still counter terrorists in Afghanistan is specious. In the places he named, we either have forces there or next door or we can enter from offshore. It's a long flight from our ME bases to Afghanistan... if Pakistan allows us to transit their airspace.

Nonsense. Let our cruise missiles do our talking.

Our greatest challenges in Afghanistan will not be the projection of military power, it will be having sufficient intelligence to know when and where to use that power.

DocBarrister

Right. That worked well when Clinton targeted OBL before 9-11. That's what Biden wanted to do to take out OBL. Fortunately, Obama overruled him & sent in SEAL Team Six, ...which Biden subsequently took credit for.

[old salt]

For the United States, even one combat fatality is a tragedy.

DocBarrister

...& the slaughter of thousands of Afghan allies, who risked their lives alongside us, who we assured we'd keep them safe, those lives are suddenly inconsequential.

[DocBarrister]

Biden's claim that we can still counter terrorists in Afghanistan is specious. In the places he named, we either have forces there or next door or we can enter from offshore. It's a long flight from our ME bases to Afghanistan... if Pakistan allows us to transit their airspace.

Nonsense. Let our cruise missiles do our talking.

Our greatest challenges in Afghanistan will not be the projection of military power, it will be having sufficient intelligence to know when and where to use that power.

DocBarrister

Right. That worked well when Clinton targeted OBL before 9-11. That's what Biden wanted to do to take out OBL. Fortunately, Obama overruled him & sent in SEAL Team Six, ...which Biden subsequently took credit for.

The SEAL team was sent in to verify the kill, which was rather important.

A cruise missile would have killed bin Laden all the same.

Obama made the gutsy call, but history would have had a different judgment if a SEAL team member had been killed during the mission.

Biden clearly cares for the troops. I think folks can differ on military tactics, but Biden has the most important characteristic that an American Commander in Chief can possess … he cares about soldiers, airmen, sailors, marines, and coast guardsmen whom he commands.

DocBarrister

[Typical Lax Dad]

Biden's claim that we can still counter terrorists in Afghanistan is specious. In the places he named, we either have forces there or next door or we can enter from offshore. It's a long flight from our ME bases to Afghanistan... if Pakistan allows us to transit their airspace.

Nonsense. Let our cruise missiles do our talking.

Our greatest challenges in Afghanistan will not be the projection of military power, it will be having sufficient intelligence to know when and where to use that power.

DocBarrister

Right. That worked well when Clinton targeted OBL before 9-11. That's what Biden wanted to do to take out OBL. Fortunately, Obama overruled him & sent in SEAL Team Six, ...which Biden subsequently took credit for.

The SEAL team was sent in to verify the kill, which was rather important.

A cruise missile would have killed bin Laden all the same.

Obama made the gutsy call, but history would have had a different judgment if a SEAL team member had been killed during the mission.

Biden clearly cares for the troops. I think folks can differ on military tactics, but Biden has the most important characteristic that an American Commander in Chief can possess … he cares about soldiers, airmen, sailors, marines, and coast guardsmen whom he commands.

DocBarrister

You mean they are not props for Trump?

[DocBarrister]

For the United States, even one combat fatality is a tragedy.

DocBarrister

...& the slaughter of thousands of Afghan allies, who risked their lives alongside us, who we assured we'd keep them safe, those lives are suddenly inconsequential.

That mission is ongoing. I don’t think anyone in U.S. intelligence, the State Department, or the Pentagon anticipated the complete refusal of the Afghan Security Forces to resist the Taliban invasion of Kabul. Biden is dealing with difficult circumstances, but he certainly wants to get U.S. allies out if possible.

This differs, by the way, from Trump’s intentional and deliberate sacrifice of American allies in Syria to the malignant alliance between Russia and Syria. Did you complain as much about that deliberate and purposeful betrayal?

DocBarrister

[DocBarrister]

Biden's claim that we can still counter terrorists in Afghanistan is specious. In the places he named, we either have forces there or next door or we can enter from offshore. It's a long flight from our ME bases to Afghanistan... if Pakistan allows us to transit their airspace.

Nonsense. Let our cruise missiles do our talking.

Our greatest challenges in Afghanistan will not be the projection of military power, it will be having sufficient intelligence to know when and where to use that power.

DocBarrister

Right. That worked well when Clinton targeted OBL before 9-11. That's what Biden wanted to do to take out OBL. Fortunately, Obama overruled him & sent in SEAL Team Six, ...which Biden subsequently took credit for.

The SEAL team was sent in to verify the kill, which was rather important.

A cruise missile would have killed bin Laden all the same.

Obama made the gutsy call, but history would have had a different judgment if a SEAL team member had been killed during the mission.

Biden clearly cares for the troops. I think folks can differ on military tactics, but Biden has the most important characteristic that an American Commander in Chief can possess … he cares about soldiers, airmen, sailors, marines, and coast guardsmen whom he commands.

DocBarrister

You mean they are not props for Trump?

That depends on whether you are asking Trump or a non-Satanic individual.

DocBarrister

[old salt]

Biden's claim that we can still counter terrorists in Afghanistan is specious. In the places he named, we either have forces there or next door or we can enter from offshore. It's a long flight from our ME bases to Afghanistan... if Pakistan allows us to transit their airspace.

Nonsense. Let our cruise missiles do our talking.

Our greatest challenges in Afghanistan will not be the projection of military power, it will be having sufficient intelligence to know when and where to use that power.

DocBarrister

Right. That worked well when Clinton targeted OBL before 9-11. That's what Biden wanted to do to take out OBL. Fortunately, Obama overruled him & sent in SEAL Team Six, ...which Biden subsequently took credit for.

The SEAL team was sent in to verify the kill, which was rather important.
The SEAL team was sent in to execute the kill, improvise if necessary, & make sure it happened.

A cruise missile would have killed bin Laden all the same.
You can't be sure of that. If it did not (as it failed when Clinton tried it), OBL slips away again.

Obama made the gutsy call, but history would have had a different judgment if a SEAL team member had been killed during the mission.
That SEAL would have been remembered as a hero, just as all his teammates are, who did not came home alive.

Biden clearly cares for the troops. I think folks can differ on military tactics, but Biden has the most important characteristic that an American Commander in Chief can possess … he cares about soldiers, airmen, sailors, marines, and coast guardsmen whom he commands.
...then he should respect their experience & follow their advice.

DocBarrister

[Brooklyn]

...& the slaughter of thousands of Afghan allies, who risked their lives alongside us, who we assured we'd keep them safe, those lives are suddenly inconsequential.

Substitute the words "Afghan traitors" for "allies" {sic} and you would understand why.

Suppose a foreign power invaded the USA and collaborators joined them by the thousands. Once they were defeated, wouldn't you take those traitors to the scaffold? I sure as hell would do so happily. Once we have execution of sentence, I wouldn't lose one minute of sleep over their unhappy fate. That's what happens to traitors. No mercy whatsoever.

[old salt]

So the WP knew about all the advance deals to surrender between the Taliban & provincial leaders, but our IC didn't know ?

Or did Biden just ignore it ?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/20 ... e-taliban/
Afghanistan’s military collapse: Illicit deals and mass desertions
The spectacular collapse of Afghanistan’s military that allowed Taliban fighters to reach the gates of Kabul on Sunday began with a series of deals brokered in rural villages between the militant group and some of the Afghan government’s lowest-ranking officials.

[Brooklyn]

So the WP knew about all the advance deals to surrender between the Taliban & provincial leaders, but our IC didn't know ?

Or did Biden just ignore it ?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/20 ... e-taliban/
Afghanistan’s military collapse: Illicit deals and mass desertions
The spectacular collapse of Afghanistan’s military that allowed Taliban fighters to reach the gates of Kabul on Sunday began with a series of deals brokered in rural villages between the militant group and some of the Afghan government’s lowest-ranking officials.

More importantly, why did the puppet regime ignore all those factors? Demoralized troops and police, many unpaid for months, provincial leaders making deals pocketing money while others had nothing, Taliban having money and offering it to the needy, government corruption. Was all this Biden's problem or Kabul's problem? The Republicans had over 19 years in which to put in good government but chose, instead, to put in a corrupt one. Why is Biden to blame for the futility of the Republicans all this time??

[old salt]

So the WP knew about all the advance deals to surrender between the Taliban & provincial leaders, but our IC didn't know ?

Or did Biden just ignore it ?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/20 ... e-taliban/
Afghanistan’s military collapse: Illicit deals and mass desertions
The spectacular collapse of Afghanistan’s military that allowed Taliban fighters to reach the gates of Kabul on Sunday began with a series of deals brokered in rural villages between the militant group and some of the Afghan government’s lowest-ranking officials.

More importantly, why did the puppet regime ignore all those factors? Demoralized troops and police, many unpaid for months, provincial leaders making deals pocketing money while others had nothing, Taliban having money and offering it to the needy, government corruption. Was all this Biden's problem or Kabul's problem? The Republicans had over 19 years in which to put in good government but chose, instead, to put in a corrupt one. Why is Biden to blame for the futility of the Republicans all this time??

It became Biden's problem when we had to close our embassy, had to evacuate our diplomats & couldn't provide visas, let alone safe passage, to thousands of Afghans we had promised to safeguard. In 2001, Biden was a senior Senator on a powerful committee who voted to go in & was VP when Obama chose to surge to >100k troops. Bush was criticized by (D)'s for not sending in enough troops. Trump was criticized by the (D)'s every time he downsized the 15k troop level he inherited.

Obama was President & intervened when this Afghan unity govt was formed :
Ghani came in fourth in the 2009 presidential election, behind Hamid Karzai, Abdullah Abdullah, and Ramazan Bashardost. In the first round of the 2014 presidential election, Ghani secured 35% of the vote, second to Abdullah who secured 45% of the votes cast. However, in the second round Ghani secured around 55.3% of the votes while Abdullah secured around 44.7% of the votes cast. As a result, chaos ensued and the United States intervened to form a unity government. Ghani was re-elected when the final results of the 2019 presidential elections were announced

[Brooklyn]

Bush was criticized by (D)'s for not sending in enough troops.

They criticized Bush for not transferring them from Iraq into Afghanistan. The war was supposedly won in Iraq by that time. Things were starting to fall apart in Afghanistan.

Trump was criticized by the (D)'s every time he downsized the 15k troop level he inherited.

In all fairness, as part of his campaign tRump did pledge a full withdrawal but failed to do so. Had he done so earlier the Taliban would have been fully back in power (where they rightfully belong) a few years ago. Today as a matter of convenience he is blaming Biden for what he caused.

[CU88]

August 16, 2021
Heather Cox Richardson
Aug 17

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According to an article by Susannah George in the Washington Post, the lightning speed takeover of Afghanistan by Taliban forces—which captured all 17 of the regional capitals and the national capital of Kabul in about nine days with astonishing ease—was a result of “cease fire” deals, which amounted to bribes, negotiated after former president Trump’s administration came to an agreement with the Taliban in February 2020. When U.S. officials excluded the Afghan government from the deal, soldiers believed that it was only a question of time until they were on their own and cut deals to switch sides. When Biden announced that he would honor Trump’s deal, the process sped up.

This seems to me to beg the question of how the Biden administration continued to have faith that the Afghan army would at the very least delay the Taliban victory, if not prevent it. Did military and intelligence leaders have no inkling of such a development? In a speech today in which he stood by his decision to remove U.S. troops from Afghanistan, President Joe Biden explained that the U.S. did not begin evacuating Afghan civilians sooner because some, still hoping they could hold off the Taliban, did not yet want to leave.

At the same time, Biden said, “the Afghan government and its supporters discouraged us from organizing a mass exodus to avoid triggering, as they said, ‘a crisis of confidence.’” He explained that he had urged Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and Chairman Abdullah Abdullah of the High Council for National Reconciliation to clean up government corruption, unite politically, and seek a political settlement with the Taliban. They “flatly refused” to do so, but “insisted the Afghan forces would fight.”

Instead, government officials themselves fled the country before the Taliban arrived in Kabul, throwing the capital into chaos.

Biden argued today that the disintegration of the Afghan military proved that pulling out the few remaining U.S. troops was the right decision. He inherited from former president Donald Trump the deal with the Taliban agreeing that if the Taliban stopped killing U.S. soldiers and refused to protect terrorists, the U.S. would withdraw its forces by May 1, 2021. The Taliban stopped killing soldiers after it negotiated the deal, and Trump dropped the number of soldiers in Afghanistan from about 15,500 to about 2,500.

Biden had either to reject the deal, pour in more troops, and absorb more U.S. casualties, or honor the plan that was already underway. “I stand squarely behind my decision,” Biden said today. “American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves. We spent over a trillion dollars. We trained and equipped an Afghan military force of some 300,000 strong—incredibly well equipped—a force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies…. We gave them every tool they could need. We paid their salaries, provided…close air support. We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future.”

“It is wrong to order American troops to step up when Afghanistan’s own armed forces would not. If the political leaders of Afghanistan were unable to come together for the good of their people, unable to negotiate for the future of their country when the chips were down, they would never have done so while U.S. troops remained in Afghanistan bearing the brunt of the fighting for them.”

Biden added, “I’m left again to ask of those who argue that we should stay: How many more generations of America’s daughters and sons would you have me send to fight…Afghanistan’s civil war when Afghan troops will not?”

The president recalled that the U.S. invaded Afghanistan almost 20 years ago to prevent another al Qaeda attack on America by making sure the Taliban government could not continue to protect al Qaeda and by removing Osama bin Laden. After accomplishing those goals, though, the U.S. expanded its mission to turn the country into a unified, centralized democracy, a mission that was not, Biden said, a vital national interest.

Biden, who is better versed in foreign affairs than any president since President George H. W. Bush, said today that the U.S. should focus not on counterinsurgency or on nation building, but narrowly on counterterrorism, which now reaches far beyond Afghanistan. Terrorism missions do not require a permanent military presence. The U.S. already conducts such missions, and will conduct them in Afghanistan in the future, if necessary, he said.

Biden claims that human rights are central to his foreign policy, but he wants to accomplish them through diplomacy, economic tools, and rallying others to join us, rather than with “endless military deployments.” He explained that U.S. diplomats are secure at the Kabul airport, and he has authorized 6,000 U.S. troops to go to Afghanistan to help with evacuation.

Biden accepted responsibility for his decision to leave Afghanistan, and he maintained that it is the right decision for America.

While a lot of U.S. observers have quite strong opinions about what the future looks like for Afghanistan, it seems to me far too soon to guess how the situation there will play out. There is a lot of power sloshing around in central Asia right now, and I don’t think either that Taliban leaders are the major players or that Afghanistan is the primary stage. Russia has just concluded military exercises with Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, both of which border Afghanistan, out of concern about the military takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban. At the same time, the area is about to have to deal with large numbers of Afghan refugees, who are already fleeing the country.

But the attacks on Biden for the withdrawal from Afghanistan do raise the important question of when it is in America’s interest to fight a ground war. Should we limit foreign intervention to questions of the safety of Americans? Should we protect our economic interests? Should we fight to spread democracy? Should we fight to defend human rights? Should we fight to shorten other wars, or prevent genocide?

These are not easy questions, and reasonable people can, and maybe should, disagree about the answers.

But none of them is about partisan politics, either; they are about defining our national interest.

It strikes me that some of the same people currently expressing concern over the fate of Afghanistan’s women and girls work quite happily with Saudi Arabia, which has its own repressive government, and have voted against reauthorizing our own Violence Against Women Act. Some of the same people worrying about the slowness of our evacuation of our Afghan allies voted just last month against providing more visas for them, and others seemed to worry very little about our utter abandonment of our Kurdish allies when we withdrew from northern Syria in 2019. And those worrying about democracy in Afghanistan seem to be largely unconcerned about protecting voting rights here at home.

Most notably to me, some of the same people who are now focusing on keeping troops in Afghanistan to protect Americans seem uninterested in stopping the spread of a disease that has already killed more than 620,000 of us and that is, once again, raging.

[dislaxxic]

After Sunday It’s Even More Clear Biden Was Right

My question is, what was/is the American military establishment's roll in all of this? Some here will no doubt try to vilify the SUGGESTION that the military had any roll in this debacle, but i feel like that would be wrong.

How does all that military hardware end up getting left out there like that? How does the American military-trained Afghan Army end up melting into the sand at the end like that? How does all that corruption go on year after year after year...funneling tens of billions of dollars into the accounts of oligarchs and government people and "Afghan Military Leaders"?? Why couldn't Bagram become a sort of Guantanamo of the far east? It might have been more easily defended as a departure point for our allies in country. Where were the military planners and tacticians and leadership all this time that first trump and then Biden were out there talking about getting out. it's not like they didn't know about Trump's "deal" with the Taliban. Remember how he was going to have the Taliban over to Camp David to hash out the deal??

I'm glad we're out and i agree with most of what Josh Marshall says in the post above...i also HOPE that the evacuation of our allies over there is not over just yet...but at some point, our military has to come under a bit of scrutiny for how this has all played out so far.

..

[dislaxxic]

THERE MAY WELL HAVE BEEN AN INTELLIGENCE FAILURE IN AFGHANISTAN

Trump's Deep State poisoned the well? Just an FLP fantasy, probably...they had already tapped into Taliban connections to get the Doha Accord...?

No one can claim to be surprised that the Afghan military folded. That it would has been clear for over a decade.

There are real questions, though, about whether the intelligence community knew how far up the Afghan government the plans to capitulate in exchange for payment went. And that question drives further intelligence questions. Ashraf Ghani has been privy to our Afghan intelligence collection. Hamid Karzai, who is playing a clear broker role but it’s not yet clear with and for whom, likewise was privy to a lot of our intelligence collection. The Taliban have had twenty years to learn how to evade our surveillance. Russia has been stealing key technical data for the last decade, focusing closely on our Afghan operations, and they seem quite chuffed with recent events.

If some or all those people have been working in concert, and may well have been since Trump acceded to this plan last year, it would be child’s play for them to hide from US intelligence how far up the chain of command would cede to the Taliban, if not actively disinform US intelligence. And that, in turn, would make it far easier to take over the country so quickly that the Taliban were even shocked.

If that happened, then it was a real intelligence failure that explains why the US wasn’t better prepared for the collapse of the Afghan government, even without excusing self-serving claims that the Afghan military might have lasted a week or a month or a year longer than they did.

...and how 'bout THIS:

A really worthwhile thread from Afghanistan’s former Central Bank Governor, Ajmal Ahmady, describes rumors that the decision came from higher up.

There were multiple rumors that directions to not fight were somehow coming from above. This has been repeated by Atta Noor and Ismael Khan. Seems difficult to believe, but there remains a suspicion as to why ANSF left posts so quickly. There is something left unexplained

..

[old salt]

THERE MAY WELL HAVE BEEN AN INTELLIGENCE FAILURE IN AFGHANISTAN

Trump's Deep State poisoned the well?

See, Flynn was right about the myopic IC.
He would not have slept while the Taliban stole a march on us.
He understood the Taliban & their appeal to the potential jihadists.

[DMac]

Point fingers and lay blame, analyze and dissect, ultimately what you end up with is yet another group of GIs dead and buried, and countless others maimed struggling with day to day life. You knew this was going to happen when you went in but you went in anyway. We don't learn from our mistakes, I've seen this movie before and it had the same ending. Only question that remains is where we'll send our young GIs to die in vain next. So very sad.