It was written by a retired veteran: Mike Jason retired in 2019 as a U.S. Army colonel, after 24 years on active duty. He commanded combat units in Germany, Kosovo, Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
It pulls no punches and, in my opinion, is worth reading.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/how-americ...
I read a book a while ago that was well researched and gave the impression that Afganistan would always belong to the Taliban. It was called "No Good Men Among the Living".
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17454723-no-good-men-amo...
The public just believes otherwise because of 70 years of US propaganda [1]. The only thing US soldiers left us europeans with are a massive influx of refugees of which we have to take care of and for which we are ridiculed by US politicians and their citizens alike.
[1]: https://www.vox.com/2014/6/16/5814270/the-successful-70-year...
At least US tried to make a difference. EU is very passive in that sense (I'm from EU).
And an honest question: why do American people think that it's so damn important to spread American democracy at the cost of waging wars? Pew Research said 94%+ of Afghanistan adults support Sharia laws. So why do we risk our own people's lives, kill thousands of people in a foreign nation, and throw trillions of dollars just to force other countries to buy our own ideology? Isn't it text-book definition of pure evil? Another case in point: According to the book Skin in the Game, the western countries removed Assad in the name of bringing democracy, yet triggered one of the most brutal civil war in a country, left dozens of cities in ruins, and ironically fostered the largest slave market in the world. Yeah, slave market. Isn't it ironic?
This is the only way to keep the faux heaven looking as it does. Utopian.
It’s also the one topic you can have both sides of the aisle always agree on. No matter the political climate. When the military is working, it’s always at work in keeping us free.
Woodrow Wilson would have been proud at how we monetized his emotional button of American exceptionalism
Remember that the companies you talk about are not the only ones that profited here. It's not that different from when Hillary Clinton was laughing at the camera and saying the greatest thing about Lybia's liberation would be that they would pay for the reconstruction.
This is a management issue. For all of the failings of the current US president, getting the hell out of an endless, unnecessary war is a good thing.
We should have at least kept a smaller force around as a presence to maintain continuity. See this “rescue plan for Afghanistan” from the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board for more suggestions that aren’t blindly exiting Afghanistan in a few short months: https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-rescue-plan-for-afghanistan-t...
Not that the US DoD is in any way a model of efficiency, but I suspect you are vastly underestimating the difficulty of the problem set.
Over the past 200 years, the British, Soviet, and American empires have all failed to pacify Afghanistan. Probably the Mongols and Alexander the Great struggled too, I need to dig into the history of those campaigns for more specifics.
Can you articular which particular aspects of our nation-building and counter-insurgency techniques are distinct from our equally-failed predecessors? Have you considered that the objective may not have been to erect a fully-functional Afghan government and military, but instead to conduct a multi-decade delaying action to stymie Chinese expansion for as long as possible?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_Civil_War_(1989%E2%80%9...
I recommend checking out this thread, as the whole Afghanistan = Graveyard of empires meme only applies to quite recent history.
https://twitter.com/Alex_Khaleeli/status/1425608335726940166...
(I mean this as an honest question, i don't know that much of the geopolitics of the region)
That wasn't in the original brief, and I've never heard it before in the 20 years?
Frankly if it's an expensive unpacifiable area, let China have it. They can sink effort into an unwinnable war instead.
Also, having consulted a map, how do you expect China to physically get there?
In my view there's always arrogance in thinking that GIs can literally fall from the sky and "save" the locals...
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210814-weapon-seizur...
Why wasn't all this equipment repatriated or destroyed? Why were the bases just abandoned without proper transition to Afghan Control, so that in some cases they were even looted by civilians?
Possible explanations:
1. Extreme incompetence or total apathy by US Commanders/Politicians
2. There was no land/sea transport route through Pakistan to retrieve all the equipment
3. The US Military-Industrial Complex was happy for all this stuff to be lost, so it could be reordered
4. The US wanted the Taliban to reconquer the country quickly, so that any power vaccuum could not be filled by China or Russia
5. Managed decline of the US Empire, requiring deliberate humiliation and demoralization of the US forces, enabled by corrupt senior US commanders and politicians who have made deals with China.
If Afgans do not want to fight Taliban themselves what US can do?
The ammo, weapons and military vehicles I believe quite lot of it technically belongs (or belonged) to the Afghan national army or at least was donated to them, although from what others on here have said, they were barely functioning as a force with rampant corruption at all levels.
None of this is new, pretty much exactly the same thing happen after South Vietnam fell, with the North Vietnamese getting an even more massive stockpile of basically US military equipment that makes what the Taliban have captured pale in comparison. https://www.nytimes.com/1975/03/29/archives/arms-left-by-us-... https://militarymatters.online/weapons/vietnam-loves-america...
Not to mention all the helicopters they just pushed into the sea during the Saigon evacuation to make more space on the decks of ships.
Even back to end of world war 2 they dumped huge amounts of equipment into the sea or buried them or just left them in place to avoid the costs of taking them back. I suppose it does make some sense from an overall cost and logistical point of view, but on a personal level it does seem incredibly wasteful. https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/wwii-ended...
... and if some group (Talibans?) fetches it then become a foe, he will be a serious one, and therefore the Complex will sell more stuff.
4. Profit!
“God has promised us victory, and Bush has promised us defeat. We’ll see which promise is more truthful”.
"The fall of the last major city [Jalalabad] outside the capital secured for the insurgents the roads connecting Afghanistan to Pakistan, a Western official said."
The humiliating part is that the U.S. was there at all, not that the U.S. finally pulled out of a place where troops should never have been sent.
That is: the humiliation isn't in retreating, but in things collapsing even before you've left.
People fought in Afghanistan, and people died, but not always in the obvious way. They had been fighting for so long, twenty-three years then, that by the time the Americans arrived the Afghans had developed an elaborate set of rules designed to spare as many fighters as they could. So the war could go on forever. Men fought, men switched sides, men lined up and fought again. War in Afghanistan often seemed like a game of pickup basketball, a contest among friends, a tournament where you never knew which team you’d be on when the next game got under way. Shirts today, skins tomorrow. On Tuesday, you might be part of a fearsome Taliban regiment, running into a minefield. And on Wednesday you might be manning a checkpoint for some gang of the Northern Alliance. By Thursday you could be back with the Talibs again, holding up your Kalashnikov and promising to wage jihad forever. War was serious in Afghanistan, but not that serious. It was part of everyday life. It was a job. Only the civilians seemed to lose.
Battles were often decided this way, not by actual fighting, but by flipping gangs of soldiers. One day, the Taliban might have four thousand soldiers, and the next, only half that, with the warlords of the Northern Alliance suddenly larger by a similar amount. The fighting began when the bargaining stopped, and the bargaining went right up until the end. The losers were the ones who were too stubborn, too stupid or too fanatical to make a deal. Suddenly, they would find themselves outnumbered, and then they would die. It was a kind of natural selection.
This example was discussed in Robert Axelrod's "The Evolution of Cooperation".
The moment Taliban started to carve out territory inside Afghanistan, that leverage was gone. There's some gratitude, but also lots of resentment among Taliban leadership about the way they were treated by the Pakistani authority.
Is Pakistan aiding them in this current offense? It really doesn't seem like it.
It's clear that in the past 30 years afganistan did not have a functioning government at all. Its not about popular support, its a failure of 'statebuilding'
https://observers.france24.com/en/20200218-afghanistan-corru...
https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2019-11-04/the...
The explanation is very, very simple, but I don't see any Western media talking about it at all.
Basically, Afghan government fell apart when USA withdrew the pork barrel of military contracts from locals.
People forget that 20 years ago USA mounted all kinds of warlords, and other rogue elements into seats of power. The entirety of regional elites which emerged in these 20 years are a product of that system.
The only things securing their loyalty to USA, and thus to the government in Kabul were American money.
The moment they ran out, it all fell apart just like Middle Eastern, and Latin American US friendly regimes. The "Our Bastard!" theory showed extreme naivete of people following it yet again.
There is no such things as "Our Bastards!" Time to learn that after 60 years.
Henry Kisinger lured USA into a geopolitical deathtrap with his lunatical political theories. Now US has found itself in the world surrounded by backstabbing, and turncoat regimes of its own making, who nor fear, nor respect it now, and who will pounce the moment USA stops spoonfeeding them, and shows its back.
USA has less allies in the world now than at any time in the last century.
USA can't now fight half the world dominated by solidified group of corrupt regimes.
Escaping this situation will be extremely hard.
USA cannot rely on allies who are loyal only to American printing press.
USA will not score any real allies without changing itself first
If there is anything the past few decades have shown, it's that the pocketbook and the sword are both useless tools when it comes to any kind of Middle Eastern policy.
Last time there was a pretty strong grassroot movement against Taliban, particularly in the northern parts of the nation. Taliban didn't have to fire a shot in many of these places this time.
If this really is Saigon 2.0, 20 years from now Afghanistan will be a peaceful country with active tourism. With the Taliban seemingly making efforts to appease China for economic gain, who knows, it just might happen.
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.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/20...
I guess we will be getting an Hollywood version of the facts in 10 years timeframe.
My heart goes to those that died for nothing, and those that will now face the revenge of Talibans.
I wish a safe return to the very professional troops from more than 20 countries still on the ground. Once again they are victims of incompetent politicians.
But it 20 years, was it not always obvious, that a young Afghani, that just got in the Army because it was only available well paid job would not be willing to die for some very local nebulous cause? To defeat a group that embodies the cultural heritage that prevailed in the country for the last few centuries?
Afghanistan's tragic contemporary conflicts has many winners and losers that switch places every so often but there's been one constant loser: its civilians.
This Is What Winning Looks Like (2013?): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja5Q75hf6QI
The only thing it can accomplish is creating additional casualties on your side, and you gain no additional turf.
Killing them while they're trying to retreat just makes them turn around and start shooting back, because if they're going to die no matter what, they might as well go down in a blaze of glory.
When did terrorist groups get spokespeople, geez.
Apparently they also have a English website: http://alemarahenglish.net/?p=48412
Then protested Iraq and they cheered our freedom of speech, then rolled tanks into Baghdad anyway and the WMDs weren't there, just like Scott Ritter told them. That worked out well.
Really should have listened to us when it came to Kuwait in 1991 as well. The towers might still be standing.
I eagerly await the mental tap dancing and 'splaning that results in us being the hopelessly geopolitically naive ones, when the other side of the argument has been wrong for a solid 30 years straight.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/07/19/taliban-expanding-drug-...
Moving away from US centric debates on the economic value of this war and attempt at governance; I fear Afghanistan will again become a breeding ground for Islamic terrorism atrocities and also put increased pressure on Europe in terms of migration.
To the latter point, Europe is already on the breaking point here and further stress will probably - judging from recent experience - lead to further success of conservative and anti-immigration political parties.
The same was said about Bush administration when the war was started. The same was said about the whole 'nation building' and troop surge and so on that happened until now...
Judging by the lack of fighting back, nothing was achieved in 20 years and same thing would happen even if US stayed 20 more years...
Once you go in - you at least have a responsibility for the manner in which you get out.
In particular for all the allies that helped you for the past 20 years and now are at risk.
The Afghan army couldn’t fight back once Biden forbade all service technicians to stay in the country and maintain the machines and veichles, and certainly not when the army was trained to work in coordination with US Air Force which hastily left.
It’s a complete failure all around.
EDIT (in response to reply, since I got the dreaded rate limiting message): Trump didn’t initiate a departure. He set up a deal that included numerous conditions and phases contingent on commitments and actions from both the Taliban and Afghanistan government (https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-sign-historic-deal-taliba...). But it really doesn’t matter. Biden is either the President or he isn’t. The withdrawal timeline he set and executed is his to own. Anything less than full ownership means he isn’t fit to be President.
Afghanistan isn't a modern country and cannot sustain a modern military or modern governance. Taliban is adapted to local conditions, Afghan govenrment isn't. But modern countries cannot help someone build a tribal fighting force best suited for the most remote mountains on the planet; people tend to replicate their own institutions wherever they go, because they are the only ones that we actually understand.