To put things in context: at the time, the US wanted al-Qaeda and the Talibans to face justice, so this amnesty deal was not inline with that goal. It would have led to Taliban leaders walking without punishment aside from losing power.
I'm not taking any position here, but I think the nuance is helpful.
On the positive side the Taliban generally lack the technical skills and spare parts supply to maintain any of that equipment more sophisticated than trucks and small arms.
Maintenance for modern military gear can be quite expensive and challenging. My armchair analysis thinks that it’s more likely this gear would be sold to other interested countries if it was captured.
I suspect the kit will get bombed to smithereens by US et al too.
Modern armies do it to their own hardware if it’s at risk of being captured by the enemy. I guess there are few secretive things the Afghans got, but even that isn’t for wider consumption.
That demonstrably did not happen. Did you see the picture on the cover of all of the major news sites of the Taliban sitting in the presidential palace? At least according to Reddit (I'm not an expert on military weaponry) those rifles are American made M4s and M16s.
Real dearth in American leaders. Getting real hard to think of a someone in the past few decades who will go into the history books for having produced an actual outcome.
That's not what Biden said. Just over a month ago, on July 8th, he actually argued that the Afghan army could win:
Q Is a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan now inevitable?
THE PRESIDENT: No, it is not.
Q Why?
THE PRESIDENT: Because you — the Afghan troops have 300,000 well-equipped — as well-equipped as any army in the world — and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban. It is not inevitable.
...
I trust the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped, and more re- — more competent in terms of conducting war.
What answer is he supposed to give to that question, even if he is relatively confident of an eventual Taliban victory? I don't mean to ask what the honest answer is. I mean to say, what is the sayable answer?
An honest answer, perhaps? Why is an honest answer not sayable?
And why tell a lie that will soon be disproven so spectacularly?
(To be clear, I'm not arguing whether he lied or really believed what he said. I'm responding to "even if he is relatively confident of an eventual Taliban victory")
It's a sad reality that there are some answers that the people are not ready to hear, even if they are true. If people rewarded politicians for being truthful, they would be more truthful. They are just responding to incentives, like everyone else. I wish it were different, but that doesn't mean I think it ever will be.
Be the change you wish to see. If you think Biden was lying here, don't defend him for it.
Even in terms of realpolitik this was clearly a mistake. He obviously didn't think his words would be disproven so quickly; it would be foolish to lie about what's going to happen almost immediately.
> Be the change you wish to see. If you think Biden was lying here, don't defend him for it.
Me criticizing Biden on an internet forum for offering comforting falsehoods will do nothing. He's responding to a tendency in human nature or perhaps American culture that is far too big to be moved significantly by so small an act, or even thousands or millions of such acts. So I'm happy to continue discussing this in realistic terms rather than idealistic ones.
Or the account of this former Army colonel who mentions how poorly managed Afghanistan was all this time, with basically no real attempt at establishing institutions over the last twenty years: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/how-americ...
There are plenty of ways this could have been handled better. It all comes down to having better leadership. The US hasn't had good leadership for a long time. Four different presidents came into office based on populist sentiments more than competence, and the result is they completely mismanaged all of this while we still incurred the immense expenses that a more successful plan would have required. Worst, they lied to the public and assured the public of how things were going well - this too came from multiple presidents.
Indeed. We should have been out of there long ago once it became clear that we did not understand the conditions for victory anymore / when we realized that we did not want to allocate the resources required to win. Staying this long was pure sunk cost fallacy combined with weak leadership. Kudos to Biden for having the balls to rip the bandaid off, as painful as it is.
Of course there was a "winning strategy." China is about to embark on it. There must have been clear signs that the Taliban was capable of doing what they just did. Even if the goal is to exit Afghanistan (which we should have done a long time ago) you still need to build a bridge out and not simply let the cardboard government collapse on itself spontaneously. We should have been making concessions to the Taliban, acknowledging it is a legitimate political force in Afghanistan. At the very least we should have negotiated a permanent military base in Afghanistan while accepting Taliban control of the rest of the nation. We spent too long trying to do too much and ended up getting nothing and looking stupid.
A single isolated military base would be untenable without reasonably secure land supply routes for fuel and other bulk supplies. The US military lacks the airlift capacity to fly in everything needed on a permanent basis.
It was absolutely a humiliating defeat for Biden. There was no reason for him to declare a rapid pull out timeline and do it all so quick. Trump's Afghanistan deal last year would have incrementally pulled out as commitments were met by the Ghani government and the Taliban. Instead, the rug was pulled out from under the Afghan people with little planning. It was so poorly planned that there are numerous articles about the Taliban fighters raiding US weapon stores that were left behind and acquiring thousands of weapons, including military vehicles and helicopters. The whole thing was incredibly poorly managed.
> “I’m left with some grave questions in my mind about his ability to lead our nation as commander-in-chief,” [the former ambassador] said. “To have read this so wrong – or, even worse, to have understood what was likely to happen and not care.”
Pres. Biden had to pull US troops out eventually. His real failure was in failing to protect Afghani translators and other local staff. They're now at extreme danger of being tortured and killed by the Taliban. That's 100% on Biden. He could have evacuated them and chose not to.
No US president wants this media attention but frankly Biden is the president who should take the least flak for taliban controlled afghanistan. 3 presidents before him failed to either remove US troops or find an achievable goal in Afghanistan
There are two options that anyone has been able to figure out over the last twenty years: indefinite occupation, and eventual retaking of the country by the Taliban. There may have been some third way, but if so, nobody who had the power to influence the outcome was able to think of it.
It's certainly a bad "look" for Biden, but the real error was going there in the first place. That was when this outcome was decided. Whoever finally pulled the plug was going to have a PR issue on their hands, but this is hardly Biden's defeat.
I believe there should be criticism on the current withdrawal. It is definitely a catastrophe in many ways.
However, I remember the chorus of opposition when the Bush administration decided to send half a million troops to Iraq instead of Afghanistan. Rumsfeld wanted to try invading Afghanistan on the cheap so the US could afford two wars, and because Iraq had a legitimate military and “all the good targets.” They were so delusional they thought both would be over in months. Here we are twenty years later, with the same problems and 10 trillion dollars missing from the treasury. We tortured people and imprisoned them without trial or due process. We debased ourselves on so many levels and we have nothing to show for it.
Dig into the origins of the Taliban, and you’ll find US and Saudi Arabian meddling in the 70s and the 80s exploiting that extremism to counter Russia and communism. Saudi Arabia needed a way to rid themselves of radical theocrats, and the US was looking for soldiers to counter Russian influence. So we helped them fund and train militants by building madrassas in Pakistan and Afghanistan. With haunting irony, Russia was trying to impose similar reforms by invading: gender equality, secularism, and their version of political freedom.
Do you want to know why the second Bush Administration never investigated Saudi Arabia after 9/11? They were all the same people from the first Bush and Reagan administrations, and they knew the paper trail would lead right back to themselves.
Meddling in the affairs of foreign nations always has unintended consequences. Democracy spreads through attraction, not enforcement. I sincerely hope the lesson we learn is not to blame the people who finally accept it, but the people who always think that this time will be different.
What is stunning about the wars in Afghanistan is that they are all exactly the same. British in 19th century, Russians in 1970s, NATO now.
Each war is initially “won” very quickly, then the occupant struggles to find allies, reliable new political elites, and frankly purpose. It all turns sour, things go from awkward to deadly, and there is a disastrous and embarrassing retreat and that’s that.
How with all the advanced equipment, spy satellites, human sources and trillions of dollars is the US military and intelligence community so clueless? What a waste of money.
4 days ago, US intelligence officials revised their estimate for the fall of Kabul from 12 to 3 months.
That would not have aided in the policy goal of "leaving Afghanistan". This was already such a well known strategy in the 80s that the (absolutely fantastic) British comedy show Yes Minister explained exactly how to do it:
Bernard Woolley : What if the Prime Minister insists we help them?
Sir Humphrey Appleby : Then we follow the four-stage strategy.
Bernard Woolley : What's that?
Sir Richard Wharton : Standard Foreign Office response in a time of crisis.
Sir Richard Wharton : In stage one we say nothing is going to happen.
Sir Humphrey Appleby : Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.
Sir Richard Wharton : In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we can do.
Sir Humphrey Appleby : Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now.
The back-and-forth sounds similar to the same concerns raised about mail-in voting and security of the vote for last year, or even for strong action to be taken in early days of the pandemic (masks, border closures, etc).
Nothing to see here since nothing has happened yet, after it happens it's too late to do anything about it. Oops!
This is a well-preparered and well-executed military operation by the Taliban. First, they negotiated a truce in exchange for a deadline on troop removal. Then they prepared a mobile military force, aimed at conquering big cities quickly (not even the Taliban can really control Afghanistan's countryside). They knew that this domino effect would kill the much larger ANA and the current administration. The media did exactly what they were supposed to do, btw. - this was a media campaign as much as a military one.
This gives us some interesting observations:
Someone must have aided the Taliban buildup. Logistics, intel, control and communication for such a wide-spread campaign ain't trivial. Taliban have no industrial base.
US and, to a certain extend, Afghan officials must have known what was coming. They must have seen the buildup, intercepted communication, etc.
The ANA was unable or unwilling to fight. The obvious counter to this offensive would have been to bolster the defense of a couple of important locations, let them be besieged and smash the local Taliban detachment with superior forces. Even four weeks ago such a strategy could have produced a stalemate. The Taliban likely cannot afford a long-lasting campaign. It looks like the ANA was completely corrupt and was out of the fight before it even began.
What really troubles me is that the Afghan people want the Taliban back. No one seems to protest, let alone resist. There are no volunteers rushing to defend Kabul from the conquerors. No women in arms defending their way of life. It makes me think that the Afghan society as a whole demands and deserves the Taliban rule.
Finally, I wonder why neither China or Russia seem very concerned. Yes, of course they will be happy when US helicopters evacuate burning embassies, but both have their own issues with radical islamists. So maybe they think they can use the Taliban to counter the IS?
Yes. The strength of the Taliban was attrition. In an all out frontal assault on cities, the ANA on paper should have easily dealt the Taliban a huge defeat, but they just didn’t fight.
100% this, it says something that the citizens of the country did not rise up when the taliban entered their cities. They did not have ‘military superiority’ entering provincial capitals. Perhaps to the afghan citizens the government was not that much better than the taliban.
I've long thought that we should have done more to arm the women of Afghanistan. They stand to lose a lot more from the return of the Taliban than the men do. Some of the men might even welcome the Taliban's return.
I doubt 300k women in the ANA would have surrendered to the Taliban so quickly.
I think its very straightforward to blame the US for the state of Afghanistan today, but the fleeing president had failed to collect any allies in the region, failed to get any formidable resistance to the taliban, and allowed warlords to spend US money lavishly on their homes and close compatriots. Ghani’s children benefited from immense nepotism by living in America working for thinktanks or going to university for phds, meanwhile taliban leaders planned suicide bombings involving their own children. They simply wanted it more.
The corruption in the government of Afghanistan is not to be underestimated. As much as we hate the Taliban here in the US, we should all also look into the government “we helped establish” in Afghanistan.
For a fascinating insight into the disaster that was supposed to be the training of and transition to local security forces, I highly recommend the 2013 documentary "This Is What Winning Looks Like":
Shouldn't they have left some part of Afghanistan, see what happens, go back and fix it, repeat until they know how to leave the country in a stable situation?
The point is to not then escalate back into having more troops once the taliban inevitably regained control. The ANA had 20 years to prepare for the countrys defenses. The US has spent 100s of billions propping this government up, and it has become clear today (and frankly for years) that it couldn’t stand on its own. It wouldnt matter if the us left in 5, 10 or 20 more years
Afghanistan is never going to have a "stable situation" because it's not a single country with a single national identity. The various ethnicities (and tribal identities) are far more important to the people there [0]. It only has national borders because its neighbors enforce their national borders. Its border with Pakistan is another in a long line of the British Empire's poorly considered border delineations [1].
As for retaking areas, it takes a much larger force to take a defended region than to hold it. The same force holding that area doesn't have the strength or supplies to retake it once it's lost. The only reason the Taliban has moved in so easily is the ANA has folded at every encounter leaving regions effectively undefended once the US pulls troops out.
Large parts of the country have been handed back over to the Taliban for years. I just read an article an article from 2017 talking about daily life in a Taliban controlled region. The American government has known exactly what was going to happen for years, but had no remaining political will to continue occupying the country. There was also no political will in Afghanistan to continue the "western style" government the Americans has put in place without the continued support and payments from the US. This is just the final step in a years long surrendering process.
The US didn't leave Afghanistan in one big step. The US ended its combat mission in Afghanistan is December of 2014. That's 6.5 years ago now.[1][2]. This was widely covered by the international news media. At the time there was a big ceremony in Kabul to mark the occasion of turning security of the country over to the Afghan armed forces who were ~350k strong at that point. The drawdown of US troops in Afghanistan has been going on for over a decade now and began in 2010. By 2015 there were only 10K troops left and their role since then has been non-combat(advisory and training.)[3] More recently under Trump that number of troops was drawn down to just 3K.
The U.S. military carried out at least a dozen operations, including commando raids and airstrikes,
in early March 2017, American and Afghan forces launched Operation Hamza to "flush" ISIS-K from its stronghold in eastern Afghanistan, engaging in regular ground battles.
"In January 2015, United States Forces began conducting drone strikes in Afghanistan under the direction of the administration of the United States President Barack Obama against Taliban militants".
American forces have increased raids against "Islamist militants"
Throughout 2015, the US launched about one thousand bombs and missiles at targets in Afghanistan
"Despite US airstrikes"
"U.S. forces have been carrying out operations with Afghan forces"
"According to Defense Department statistics 9 U.S. service members were killed in action"
"US aircraft conducted around 30 air strikes in Helmand Province"
You might want to look closer at your own link which clearly points out that post 2014 the US and Afghanistan began coordination on Operation Freedom’s Sentinel. The purpose of that mission was solely assisting the Afghan security forces with counterterrorism operations against local ISIS and Al-Queda affiliates as well as the Haqqani networks. All of your copy/pasted quotes are actually in support of these facts.
Further, your link also explains that in 2015 began the NATO-led Resolute Support Mission whose purview was solely training, advising, and assisting the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces.
I think that’s exactly what they did. Both Obama and Trump removed significant numbers of troops from Afghanistan, and now Biden is removing what’s left. Obama went with the above approach, putting troops back in as needed (with surges and such) but we’d always come back to the same point. This just us finally giving up.
The superpowers never understood the war they were fighting here or how to fight it. This country, it’s terrain, history, and culture are just different from what western politics is willing to understand or have the stomach to address.
Not just western. The soviets and the Chinese have suffered similar problems throughout history. And the Indians, Persians, etc… basically, no one is really good at conquering unless they simply colonize what they conquer (eg the normans in England, or the Europeans in America).
I feel terrible for all the Afghans who aren’t religious extremists, who are going to live a life of terror and suffering under the Taliban. Afghan women especially, who are going to go right back to the brutal oppression they faced pre-9/11. However, I don’t really see a good alternative, either.
Having your country constantly occupied by invading forces is a great way to breed religious extremism. The Taliban win because they have a lot of support in Afghanistan, and this isn’t likely to change anytime soon. From what I’ve read, it’s a minority of the population who support them, but the support of around 20-30% of the population, with many, many of those willing to fight and die for the Taliban, is still formidable. I believe the Taliban has more soldiers now than at any other point in their history?
Also, it seems that in a massive number of cases, the Afghan National Army just quickly surrendered without even giving up a fight. They were bigger and better funded, but so many either wanted the Taliban to win, or at least felt that being ruled by the Taliban was acceptable and/or inevitable.
The US had to pull out eventually. When you leave, you no longer control what happens … and in Afghanistan right now, this means the Taliban take over. Really, the US should never have invaded in the first place, so many lives lost so pointlessly.
This is sad. I'm assuming a new world crisis will be fabricated and we will find a way to spend trillions of dollars somewhere else instead of on US people or infrastructure. The stockholders of military contractors should not be worried.
Perhaps the US’ intentions were never good and they were never capable of “liberating” anyone there. It really seems like no matter when they pulled out this would have happened.
It's a proxy war like many of the proxy wars happening in these contention points. War is expensive and destructive. Which means you'll have difficulty collecting any revenue and you'll need a constant stream of money to finance your soldiers. Don't be deluded but most of these militia are working for money, not for "god".
In the case of Afghanistan, you got yourself with Iran, Russia, China, Pakistan, and the US (and its allies). Afghanistan is a great place to yield control over the region. So it was a war of attrition. Of course, the biggest losers were the Afghan themselves but they had little say in this conflict.
Now that the US left, there is a tab to pay to the Taliban. That, or they'll look for a new sponsor. Leaving at this point (where Taliban are quite powerful) is not that stupid (might actually be smart). Pakistan and Iran (and maybe China?) have created a monster that is quite hard to control than a traditional army. Now, they are all living near this monster.
Saigon was an actual government that stood for 2 years after the US disengaged. Kabul has proven itself to be an embarrassingly dysfunctional puppet administration. Its been made clear today the US should have left 10 years ago or earlier.
So even worse than Saigon then because after 20 years of support there wasn't even any significant Afghani interest in having any other government than the Taliban.
More like a completely disfunctional government made up of a bunch of warlords of dubious background and character. AFAIK the Talibans massacred any possible opposition/contender around the 9/11 events, leaving effectively no cohesive group behind that could replace them.
Yeah, honestly this kind of navel gazing is super gross. Viewing the Vietnam war through that one moment really centralizes the Vietnam civil war as something American. It causes Americans to fail to examine Vietnam as the multi-decades long brutal nightmare that it was for the Vietnamese and makes it about American failure and shame.
It sublimates the incredible devastation our government wrought, the brutal corrupt colonial puppet government they propped up and the multilateral atrocities committed beneath a made for TV venere of lost American glory.
This was inevitable really as soon as the retreat happened. As soon as you set a hard deadline for something (in this case withdrawal) you are basically giving up on doing it well.
Why? How does putting a date on a calendar change anything? If the military had ooened up the mystery box and pulled out on oh say the random date of July 2nd or September 23rd this would still be hapoening.
At the end of the day there just are the factions of a country which are better organized, better funded or more popular and they arw going to rise to power once external involvement has ceased to be the driving power.
Yes. On Friday PBS interviewed Ambassador Adela Raz, Afghanistan's Envoy to the United States and asked about this. Her response seemed a bit flimsy and not very convincing. You can see it here at 7:05 mark:
When she mentioned air support being pulled back, I wondered if the U.S. could have still kept some order through that alone. It made me think of how the Americans maintained no-fly zones over Iraq for a dozen years after the Gulf War.
We should never have been there in the first place - twenty years ago, we should have engaged in whatever military action was needed to ensure that al-Qaeda could no longer freely operate against us from the country and then left; if I remember correctly, the Taliban leadership offered just that, and we invaded anyway.
I don't really consider this a policy failure for the Biden administration; this outcome was a foregone conclusion once we decided to try to build a nation in a place where no nation-building was possible, and three administrations kicked the can down the road at a cost of trillions of dollars and thousands of lives because nobody wanted to be the one with the loss on their record.
But the way we've treated the people who risked their lives to help and support us is absolutely criminal; we offered them protection, and instead we screwed around for years with bureaucratic bullshit while time ran out, and now a bunch of people are going to die because of it. Heads should roll over this monumental failure.
Hindsight is a great thing but perhaps we're reaching the goal that might have been achievable within a year, namely punish the Taliban for supporting international terrorism and make clear that it won't be tolerated again. Hopefully, if they have a little sense the Talibans understand this this time.
While I’m also terribly sorry for what happens in Afghanistan and think the discussion on HN will be more thoughtful than in many other places on the internet, I believe these kind of submissions don’t belong here.
Not to be glib but this is the kind of thing that happens all the time in regions where power is unstable. We have a few recent examples of countries (especially the U.S.) rat holding onto one particular power steucture. But more often, governments and business are eager to start wheeling and dealing with whoever it looks like is really holding the keys.
Odd statement, Afghanistan was a pseuo-state at the best of times, Taiwan is a nation with incredible air, naval and ground defenses for its size that doesn’t bleed America financially dry. Embarrassing photos of one of its ‘allies’ losing aside, America leaving Afghanistan makes America financially stronger and more militarily flexible.
Okay, assume it's true and an invasion is inevitable, this brings us back to the cliche question - would the people in power choose to destroy TSMC, instead of stopping the invasion?
the ANA retreated from every fight they involved themselves in. I wouldn’t expect anyone to be fired because this is exactly what was expected when the US left, minus 2-3 months. Embarrassing photos for a few weeks sure, but saving the equivalent of the NHS budget every year by not spending it on a corrupt Afghan government and failed military project has its domestic benefits
But wasn't it some US general's job to train the ANA? If you're training someone to do a difficult dangerous job and the moment you hand things off to the person everything blows up - you probably deserve a lot of the blame.
The US directly trained the Afghan special forces, who in fairness to them did their job well but were often left with hardly any ammunition or air support. The Afghan government was in charge of funding operations and recruitment of the ANA. You can find countless evidence of how they frequently betrayed their units, fled, sold their equipment or were otherwise immensely incompetent. Added to this, the taliban forces stand between 50-100k troops across the entirety of afghanistan with no air support,tanks, or heavy artillery. Its often simply 100 guys with AK-47s on motorcycles going into a capital and claiming it. You cant solve will to fight as a foreign entity.
The US supported regime and even the US military command were literally on the side of child rapists[1]. One can easily find many many other examples with a search, so I won't provide them. Suffice to say the USA was not on the side of the angels here. Furthermore, the rapidity with which the Taliban turned the government forces and took Kabul strongly suggests a Napoleon's return from Elba[2] scenario. The evidence is now overwhelming that the puppet Afghan government and its US supporters were both evil and despised by the common Afghan who jumped at the chance to support the Taliban, actively or by acquiescence.
I'm sure we'll see desperate propaganda attempts in the US news trying to spin it, but it's only going to work on people with absolutely no awareness of history. And as others here have already noted, on top of that it's probably the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on the American, or possibly any, people ever.
In other news, China already informally recognized the Taliban[3] and the Russian embassy is not being evacuated[4]. We are witnessing the first stages of the collapse of the US led "international order"[5]. Fascinating stuff, although as a US citizen it may not be so great for me personally.
I think this is forgetting a few things: The US benefits immensely by no longer being in Afghanistan, its a landlocked nation with limited accessible resources. For the first time in 20 years the US will not be bogged down in an active warzone. This doesnt benefit China or Russia. It might even get the US to finally realize their biggest risk is cyberwarfare/sabotage instead of blindly spending the equivalent construction cost of a high school on an Abrams tank
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/07/news/rumsfeld-rejects-pla...