President Biden Statement on Afghanistan: Read It For Yourself

Andrew Donaldson

Born and raised in West Virginia, Andrew has since lived and traveled around the world several times over. Though frequently writing about politics out of a sense of duty and love of country, most of the time he would prefer discussions on history, culture, occasionally nerding on aviation, and his amateur foodie tendencies. He can usually be found misspelling/misusing words on Twitter @four4thefire and his food writing website Yonder and Home. Andrew is the host of Heard Tell podcast. Subscribe to Andrew's Heard Tell SubStack for free here:

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116 Responses

  1. Damon says:

    What’s you expect? The “democratic” Afghan gov’t to actually put up a fight? Afghanistan will got back to the way it was, and all that blood and treasure was wasted. +1 for the graveyard of empires.Report

    • Dark Matter in reply to Damon says:

      Our mission wasn’t to make the Afghan gov functional. Our mission was to kill OBL and his crew.

      If the new Afghan gov is willing to oppress people solely on their own ground, then we’re good.

      If the new Afghan gov feels the need to support their ideological allies (AQ renamed) who in turn will launch more 911 style attacks, then we’ll need to go back. We can’t let AQ have the resources of a country without the wheels coming off.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Dark Matter says:

        Our mission was to kill OBL and his crew.

        Didn’t we do this years and years and years ago?

        It would have been a great opportunity to leave somewhere around immediately after our mission was accomplished.Report

        • Dark Matter in reply to Jaybird says:

          Unfortunately OBL’s death didn’t end his movement. Witness the problems we had with ISIS (previous name “AQ in Iraq”).

          Similarly we didn’t just walk away from Germany after dealing with the Na.zis, nor did we walk away from Japan after dealing with whatever in WW2. It takes a LONG time to get the local players used to the concept of power sharing and so on.Report

          • Jaybird in reply to Dark Matter says:

            “his movement”

            This can be read broadly or narrowly.

            Broadly, we wouldn’t have been able to end his movement without genocide.
            Narrowly, we did this years and years and years ago.Report

            • Dark Matter in reply to Jaybird says:

              This is like saying we can’t end Na.zism, or anarchism.

              It’s a true statement but reduces a non-binary situation to binary logic.

              We can’t end the idea but letting the it’s followers have the resources of a country is a bad idea. Bad enough that we had to go back into Iraq.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Dark Matter says:

                Is there a point at which we might be able to say that Al Qaeda was ended?

                If the answer is “no”, then I think it’s safe to say that it is not within our power to end it.

                If the answer is “yes”, then I think it’s safe to say that then would have been a better time to pull out.Report

              • Damon in reply to Jaybird says:

                Your convo with DM reminded me of a convo I had with a jewish woman I was dating. She stated that we must not let the muslim brotherhood win election in Egypt. I asked what we needed to do. Answer: invade. “And, after 10 years and 1 trillon dollars and we leave, they elect them anyway”? I said. Invade again was the response. I asked her “how many times must we invade”? The feedback loop never ends. She objected when I suggested that it would be more cost effective, in american blood and $$ to just nuke the populated areas. Apparently that was a line she wouldn’t cross, but continual invasion and occupation for decades was acceptable.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Damon says:

                In terms of integration with society, the big problems TMB poses is its insistence that the government be run by Islam.

                In October 2007, the Muslim Brotherhood issued a detailed political platform. Amongst other things it called for a board of Muslim clerics to oversee the government, and for limiting the office of the presidency to Muslim men. (wiki)

                So if you’re a non-Islamic woman looking at them restructuring society, yeah, it’s going to hit the radar as a problem.

                Now I don’t see much in terms of genocide, mass murder, or expansion, so they’re missing a lot of things which make AQ such a problem. Note those three are also what made Germany and Japan such problems in WW2.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Jaybird says:

                Is there a point at which we might be able to say that Al Qaeda was ended?

                This is the wrong question, it’s like asking when Na.zism is ended instead of asking when it is inappropriate for us to have an army there. The answer to both is we can take away the army when the opposing force is weak enough that the local police can deal with the situation, or at a minimum we’re not handing them a country.

                Now to be fair the Taliban isn’t AQ, so it’s not totally clear what we’re doing.Report

              • InMD in reply to Dark Matter says:

                Even by this metric the conflict could have been essentially over by 2004 when the Taliban was ready to capitulate to the Karzai government and AQ scattered. Instead we chose to nation-build.Report

          • Chip Daniels in reply to Dark Matter says:

            Steven Taylor over at Outside The Beltway had some good comments about how America failed to learn the lessons of how to secure the peace.

            In the case of WWII, we had large teams of people who spoke German and Japanese and were well versed in their histories, and were closely aligned with the previous pre-Nazi cultures, and could therefore construct a restoration of these regimes, with a new added shot of liberalism.

            We drove the Taliban up into the hills in short order, but we couldn’t secure the peace in Afghanistan because none of the necessary components for a peaceful society were present.Report

  2. InMD says:

    Biden’s comments are 100% right.

    If these people won’t fight for their government neither should we. Also the media needs to just shut the hell up with the hysterics about the human rights abuses. There’s nothing we can do. If they care so much I’m sure there’s some corrupt anti-Taliban warlord with a Soviet bullet lodged in his head that will be happy to use them for cannon fodder.Report

  3. North says:

    Good speech. Right call. It’s still gonna suck.Report

  4. Pinky says:

    “When I came to office, I inherited a deal cut by my predecessor—which he invited the Taliban to discuss at Camp David on the eve of 9/11 of 2019”

    We’re going to have 16-year-olds who’ve never seen the country led by an adult.Report

    • North in reply to Pinky says:

      So you’re saying this country hasn’t been led by an adult since, what Washington? I’m sure even he blamed the British for stuff that happened prior to his administration.Report

      • Burt Likko in reply to North says:

        In his day, and given his position in the culture, his critics couldn’t blame him for much, though — as they did back when they were Englishmen when they wanted to politely say the King had blown a call — early Americans chose to blame this or that advisor for giving the President bad advice. Fortunately, Washington gave them both Jefferson and Hamilton in his Cabinet so it was pretty easy to find someone to blame.Report

      • Pinky in reply to North says:

        There’s a difference between putting something in context and being petulant. And while I didn’t completely agree with the recent article on politicization of foreign policy, this kind of childishness is particularly gross when it goes beyond the water’s edge. Ask yourself, does that aside about Camp David seem “presidential”?Report

        • North in reply to Pinky says:

          Biden is a politician, he’s gonna politic, it’s his job. The right hasn’t put aside petulance for my entire adult life and in the context of current and recent politicians a charge of petulance against Biden for that accurate if somewhat very mildly mean dig is the height of chutzpah.Report

          • Pinky in reply to North says:

            I don’t remember stuff like that from W.Report

            • InMD in reply to Pinky says:

              I recall a pretty thorough and not particularly fair throwing of the Clinton admin under the bus for the 9/11 attacks, which then culminated in a heated interview of Clinton himself with Chris Wallace.Report

              • Pinky in reply to InMD says:

                Personally, in his major addresses?Report

              • InMD in reply to Pinky says:

                Sadly I lack perfect memory of those addresses. But assuming he never specifically said it in a speech to the country I’m not sure I really see a difference. The message was out there.

                Anyway I’d imagine we’d be pretty hard pressed to find a president who didn’t characterize moves of past administrations in ways they deemed advantageous to them in the moment.Report

  5. Jaybird says:

    Okay. We probably don’t want to call right-wingers “The American Taliban” anymore.Report

  6. InMD says:

    Long read below from 2019, but really insightful on why they’re collapsing so quickly. There are situations where tens of thousands of Afghan security forces won’t stand up to a couple thousand Taliban fighters. They’re too corrupt, incompetent, and do not care.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-army-police/?itid=hp_special-topic-chain1Report

  7. InMD says:

    I have sinned by editing a comment with a link, and humbly request a rescue.Report

  8. Fish says:

    I’m having a really hard time drumming up any outrage over this. I feel for our own who lost so much and who maybe feel like their service was all for nothing. I feel for the Afghan people, especially the terror our allies must be feeling right now. But the rest? Exactly why did we ever think things were going to be any different this time?Report

  9. Chip Daniels says:

    What’s noteworthy is how little American policymakers or opinion shapers appear to know about the Afghans, even after 20 years.

    I don’t recall very many interviews with Afghans, either people on the street or government officials, or leading cultural figures and thinkers, ever.
    There was the occasional snippet or photograph thrown in for color, but all the leading voices on Afghanistan have always belonged to Americans.

    Its like the Taliban and the other Afghans are just shadow puppets cast onto a wall by the government and media outlets, nonexistent images created to fill a role written by outsiders.

    Like that WaPo article
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/08/15/afghanistan-military-collapse-taliban/
    discussing how, after the initial withdrawal agreement was signed, almost the entire Afghan military and security establishment scurried to strike surrender deals with the Taliban, and when the time came, ordered their troops to stand down and surrender without a shot.

    How did the Pentagon, CIA, and State Departments not know how corrupt and fickle the Afghan government and military was? How did they not hear about these quiet backroom deals, despite having so heavy a presence in the country for two decades?

    I don’t know for certain but I think a lot of it goes back to the first days, when it was practically a point of pride for the Americans in charge to NOT know very much about Afghanistan and how none of them bothered to learn or even hire people who did.

    Instead we were subjected to the shadow puppets of the Evil Taliban and Heroic Yearning For Secular Democracy Afghans, which were fictitious creations of the US government and media.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels says:

      I kinda expected it to take, I dunno, six months for Afghanistan to fall.

      Not, like, six days.

      This strikes me as being a *MASSIVE* intelligence failure (and military and diplomatic one).

      Like, to the point where if I wanted to say where we could have turned this around, I don’t think that we could have. This would have happened under Bush, under Obama, under Trump, and now it’s only happening under Biden because it didn’t happen under Trump or Obama or Bush.Report

      • InMD in reply to Jaybird says:

        Allegedly there has been a slow motion surrender going on for some time now.

        https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/08/15/afghanistan-military-collapse-taliban/

        The deals, initially offered early last year, were often described by Afghan officials as cease-fires, but Taliban leaders were in fact offering money in exchange for government forces to hand over their weapons, according to an Afghan officer and a U.S. official.Report

        • Jaybird in reply to InMD says:

          I just saw this:

          Maybe we need smarter academics.

          Or maybe we need to start using ones that are significantly dumber.Report

        • Mike Schilling in reply to InMD says:

          As soon as it was clear the US was leaving, everyone knew the government would fall and the Taliban would take over, so everyone took that into account. The paymasters stopped paying the soldiers (that money was needed to bribe the Taliban and/or GTFO), the soldiers started negotiating with the new bosses, the Taliban stopped fighting and started planning their coronation. This was going to happen whenever the US left, under any president; nothing to be done about it other than get more people out.Report

        • Brent F in reply to InMD says:

          There’s some word from in country that the orders came from on high for units to give up the fight suggesting deals were cut.

          Also, this kind of defeat tends to be highly contagious. When you’re losing because your compatriots morale has broken its a strong sign that you should break to rather than hold position to be the poor dumb suckers that died instead of giving up or running. A full on rout is more contagious than the flu.Report

    • InMD in reply to Chip Daniels says:

      From what I read they knew, they just lie about it to the public. Even then the basic facts of the situation have been out there for years.Report

  10. Chip Daniels says:

    What’s noteworthy is how little American policymakers or opinion shapers appear to know about the Afghans, even after 20 years.

    I don’t recall very many interviews with Afghan, either people on the street or government officials, or leading cultural figures and thinkers, ever.
    There was the occasional snippet or photograph thrown in for color, but all the leading voices on Afghanistan have always belonged to Americans.

    Its like the Taliban and the other Afghans are just shadow puppets cast onto a wall by the government and media outlets, nonexistent images created to fill a role written by outsiders.Report

  11. Jaybird says:

    A take that left me wincing and agreeing:

    Report

  12. Philip H says:

    I have a vague memory – so its probably wrong – of Bin Laden giving an interview saying he believed the best way to bring down superpowers was to mire them in Afghanistan. It certainly broke the Soviet Union, and while America didn’t break, only the chewing gum and bailing wire is holding us together at the moment.Report

  13. Jaybird says:

    Kinda hoping that Afghanistan is a useful example of why we shouldn’t attempt nation-building when the opportunity comes up in… October? November?

    Can we get rid of the AUMF?Report

  14. Saul Degraw says:

    I think Biden was correct in just pulling off the band-aid. It is now possible for someone to serve in Afghanistan or Iraq but have been born after 9/11.

    I don’t expect the foreign policy set to learn any lessons because they never do. The simpler solution would just to be allow more immigration in the U.S. rather than try and fix Afghanistan or any similar country.Report

  15. Jaybird says:

    There are a lot of anti-Biden folks out there making hay with the whole Afghan extraction. Comparisons to Saigon.

    The main point of this, I guess, is to get the pro-Biden folks to make obviously wrong statements or obviously sycophantic ones (“people use helicopters to leave, sometimes… that doesn’t make this like Saigon!”) and so it’s kind of silly to see the point scoring and the absolute inability to do anything but fight against the wrong people scoring points among the folks for whom the game is more important than anything else.

    But I am hoping to hear from Biden and/or Harris today or tomorrow to explain that Afghanistan has been a corrupt mess for the last couple of decades and now heads are going to roll at the Pentagon and the various intelligence agencies that were, presumably, in charge of making sure that the fall of Kabul would take months rather than hours.Report

  16. Saul Degraw says:

    Stephen Miller reminds the world that he is a horrible person.Report

  17. Philip H says:

    The “writing on the wall” hasn’t been hidden –

    Sopko said his agency released multiple reports and he testified more than 50 times to sound the warning in the last decade.

    “I mean, we’ve been shining a light on it in multiple reports going back to when I started 2012 about changing metrics, about ghosts, ghost soldiers who didn’t exist, about poor logistics, about the fact that the Afghans couldn’t sustain what we were giving them. So these reports have come out,” he said.

    The speed with which the Taliban overtook Afghanistan “maybe is a little bit of a surprise,” Sopko said. But “the fact that the ANDSF [Afghan National Defense and Security Forces] could not fight on their own should not have been a surprise to anyone.”

    https://www.npr.org/2021/08/15/1027951992/u-s-watchdog-criticizes-steps-preceding-taliban-takeover-in-afghanistanReport

  18. Chip Daniels says:

    “This was entirely foreseeable!”, exclaim pundits who did not foresee it.

    How many I-told-you-so tweets and op-eds will we be subjected to by journalists who will smugly tell us that they had inside information about the weakness of the ANA but mysteriously held in private until now?Report

    • Dark Matter in reply to Chip Daniels says:

      The actual projection was for the Afghan gov to fall in a few months. I can’t think of anyone who thought they could do it alone. Certainly the Iraqi gov losing to AQ should have taught us a lesson.

      And this is armchair quarterbacking. Biden, with a extremely large budget for this sort of thing and dozens of experts, is supposed to be better at this than we are.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels says:

      For what it’s worth, I’m not sure that the pundits claiming to have seen it beforehand are the problem here.

      It’s the Professionals Who Do This Stuff For A Living who were blindsided that need to give an accounting.Report

      • Dark Matter in reply to Jaybird says:

        Remember Obama proclaiming ISIS was the JV team and there was no chance Iraq or Afghanistan would fall apart?

        Might be the professionals were told what to think and/or didn’t want to displease their masters.

        This does not suggest good things on whether we’ll have to go back.Report

        • Jaybird in reply to Dark Matter says:

          I’m sure he trusted his experts who were, it is now apparent, lying to him.

          And then, by extension, to us.

          Report

          • Dark Matter in reply to Jaybird says:

            Might be easier than that. The President is given a range of options and a range of opinions. He picks the one he likes.

            Bush hears that Iraq has WMDs.
            Obama hears that we can safely pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan (and that Obamacare’s website is turn-key ready).
            Trump hears that the election was stolen.
            Biden hears that Afghanistan will stay stable.Report

            • North in reply to Dark Matter says:

              I think the more likely thing is that the FP and military hands say “Afghanistan will fall apart in the course of a few months to a year if you leave and you’ll be blamed!” thinking that this’d dissuade Biden from leaving so they can have a surge 2.X. Biden says
              “Good, I have a few months to pull all our assets out.” Turns out he has less than a week. I hope he fires some people but I fear he won’t due to the politics of it.
              Either way, we’re out, thank goodness for that.Report

  19. Jaybird says:

    I do not know who Josh Rogin is but he appears to have gotten copies of Pelosi’s Afghanistan Talking Points:

    Report

  20. Burt Likko says:

    I wouldn’t normally offer an extended quote here, but I find this in my e-mail inbox from Heather Cox Richardson’s substack, Letters from an American:

    By 2018 the Taliban, which is well funded by foreign investors, mining, opium, and a sophisticated tax system operated in the shadow of the official government, had reestablished itself in more than two thirds of Afghanistan. Americans were tired of the seemingly endless war and were eager for it to end.
    To end a military commitment that journalist Dexter Filkins dubbed the “forever war,” former president Donald Trump sent officials to negotiate with the Taliban, and in February 2020 the U.S. agreed to withdraw all U.S. troops, along with NATO allies, by May 1, so long as the Taliban stopped attacking U.S. troops and cut ties with terrorists.
    The U.S. did not include the Afghan government in the talks that led to the deal, leaving it to negotiate its own terms with the Taliban after the U.S. had already announced it was heading home. Observers at the time were concerned that the U.S. withdrawal would essentially allow the Taliban to retake control of the country, where the previous 20 years had permitted the reestablishment of stability and women’s rights. Indeed, almost immediately, Taliban militants began an assassination campaign against Afghan leaders, although they did not kill any American soldiers after the deal was signed.
    Meanwhile, by announcing their intentions, American officials took pressure off the Taliban to negotiate with Afghan leaders. The Pentagon’s inspector general noted in February that “The Taliban intends to stall the negotiations until U.S. and coalition forces withdraw so that it can seek a decisive military victory over the Afghan government.”
    Hoping to win voters with this deal to end the war, the Trump administration celebrated the agreement. In September, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted, “A vote for Joe Biden is a vote for forever war in the Middle East. A vote for Donald Trump is a vote to finally bring our troops home.” Then–Secretary of State Mike Pompeo suggested the U.S. would have “zero” troops left in Afghanistan by spring 2021.
    When he was Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden had made it no secret that he was not comfortable with the seemingly endless engagement in Afghanistan. By the time he took office as president in January 2021, he was also boxed in by Trump’s agreement. In April, Biden announced that he would honor Trump’s agreement—“an agreement made by the United States government…means something,” Biden said—and he would begin a final withdrawal on May 1, 2021, to be finished before September 11, the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
    In July, 73% of Americans agreed that the U.S. should withdraw.
    On July 8, Biden announced that the withdrawal was taking place quicker than planned and that the military mission of the U.S. in Afghanistan would end on August 31. He said the U.S. had accomplished what it set out to do in Afghanistan—kill bin Laden and destroy a haven for international terrorists—and had no business continuing to influence the future of the Afghan people. Together with NATO, the U.S. had trained and equipped nearly 300,000 members of the current Afghan military, as well as many more who are no longer serving, with all the tools, training, and equipment of any modern military.

    It’s abundantly clear that both political parties in America responded to a broad, bipartisan consensus that Americans wanted to at long last end our twenty-year war in Afghanistan. Whether Americans thought through that this would mean the Taliban would immediately step into the power vacuum we left behind is less clear, but what is happening today is what Americans wanted. And what’s more, it’s reasonably likely that in several months, most Americans will have forgotten about whatever outrage, disappointment, anger, or fear they feel from this week’s events, to be replaced by whatever new bullshit has come up in the news cycle. Remember how mad everyone was about Critical Race Theory last month? Seems very far away now.

    So too with the Fall of Kabul be an unpleasant but distant memory come mid-September when we shall surely become engrossed with whether or not the still-rampaging Delta Variant should close schools, politically-wedged cultural debate about something some NFL player hasn’t done just yet, and maybe VP Harris will show up to a tiebreaking vote in the Senate wearing rainbow-colored Chucks and the pearls will be clutched so hard they’ll get ground into dust.

    Biden’s play, domestically, is to just eat the frog, right now and all at once. And that’s what he’s done. And if we’d re-elected Trump, that’s what Trump would be doing too, albeit with different rhetoric.

    Of course, the losers in all this are the people of Afghanistan. They lost whatever vibrancy they could have hoped for in their country way back in 1979, and so for the entirety of almost all of this site’s readers’ adult lives, Afghanistan has been in a state of crippling civil war. We offered them hope for a time and now it’s gone, and if Alexander couldn’t bring enduring stability to the top of the Khyber Pass three thousand years ago, perhaps we were simply vain to believe ourselves any better at extending our empire there than was he.Report

    • Donald Trump sent officials to negotiate with the Taliban, and in February 2020 the U.S. agreed to withdraw all U.S. troops, along with NATO allies, by May 1, so long as the Taliban stopped attacking U.S. troops and cut ties with terrorists.

      That is “You can have a free hand in Afghanistan” was explicitly agreed to.Report

      • Dark Matter in reply to Mike Schilling says:

        Us pulling out means we’re not pointing guns at them, and they’re not going to honor any agreement with us unless it’s at gun point. That’s the “shifting sands” part of how things work over there.

        Ergo making an agreement with them that involves us pulling out means, by definition, they’re going to do what they want.

        Early reporting from towns they’ve taken says despite what they said about women being allowed to work (assuming that happened and wasn’t just happy talk from someone) , woman have to stay in their homes, need to be accompanied by a male relative, can’t go to school, and the dress codes are back.

        The real question is whether they’ll go back to backing groups that try to mass murder their way to a global Islamic Theocracy. Backing groups like that is probably what “virtue signaling” looks like in their group.Report

        • InMD in reply to Dark Matter says:

          I think you’re missing what the very probable outcome is, that being continued targeted assassination by drones based in other countries. The real evolution in thinking isn’t that we shouldn’t intervene, it’s that we can accomplish 90% of what we want without a single boot on the ground, issues of other country’s sovereignty or our own competence notwithstanding.Report

          • Dark Matter in reply to InMD says:

            That line of reasoning is why imho we could/should have stayed.Report

          • Chip Daniels in reply to InMD says:

            “Get what we want…”

            We don’t even know what we want!

            After twenty years, the American people and their government still have no idea what we would want to accomplish with Afghanistan, what “success” would even look like.

            This is the madness, where our foreign policy is a shifting mirage of fantasy fears and daydreams;

            We fear a fantasy “global Islamic Theocracy” headed by…a mullah in a cave in some remote mountaintop. Meanwhile we form close alliances with the House of Saud, the largest promoter of Islamic Theocracy called Wahabbism.

            We have a daydream of a secular liberal Afghanistan where pink haired lesbian bartenders listen to rap music, a daydream of our own desires projected onto the Afghans.

            Its complete madness, completed unmoored from any actual knowledge of the real world or thoughts about American strategic interest.Report

            • Dark Matter in reply to Chip Daniels says:

              What we want is no more 911s. Similarly how ISIS ran Iraq seemed like a bad thing.

              It’s less about what we want and more what we don’t want.

              Transportation costs have shrunk the world to the point where a mullah in a cave can level buildings in the US. It’s in our best interests to prevent people like that from getting their hands on the resources of a nation state.Report

              • North in reply to Dark Matter says:

                Hogwash. The window for Mullas in a cave to pull off what happened on 9/11 closed on *checks notes* 9/11. Afghanistan was not some institution of vast resources that allowed Bin Laden to scheme his attacks- it was just where he happened to be camped out. If Islamists could have done a 9/11/ style attack after 9/11 they’d have done it, us being in Afghanistan not withstanding. The hinterlands of Pakistan are functionally identical to Afghanistan pre-American invasion and have been for the past decades.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to North says:

                The window for Mullas in a cave to pull off what happened in 9/11 closed on *checks notes* 9/11.

                You’re claiming that airplanes being jackable was the only flaw in our society that two dozen suicide attackers can exploit. I disagree. I can think of others. I refuse to discuse how to min/max mass murder and strongly suggest no one else do so.

                OBL didn’t take 12 random guys and train them into a strike force and come up with some magic plan that got lucky.

                He needed a recruiting organization, he needed training bases, he vetted his potentials for personality and so on. This took years and much organizational effort and resources even if the implementation only needed box cutters and plane tickets.

                Being able to do all of that, openly and with the support of a nation, was the problem. His organization made a lot of other attacks and spent years learning what works and what doesn’t. They got a lot of organizational skill where people spent enough time at their jobs to get good at them and learn what processes work, what law enforcement does and how to avoid them, etc.Report

              • North in reply to Dark Matter says:

                And, again, they could have done all the exact same stuff in the Pakistani hinterland if they hadn’t done it in Afghanistan. I am not going to say our society is impenetrable but the black and white facts are that vulnerabilities like the one those airliners presented are rather unique. It isn’t easy to get your hands on that kind of mobile volatile mass and airplanes are no longer valid target, partially because of Government security but mainly because the passengers will absolutely not sit quietly any more if you try and hijack them.

                Our being camped in Afghanistan’s mountain wastelands playing whack a mole with the Taliban (note, the Taliban, not Al Queda) has had dick all to do with the lack of major terror attacks in the west subsequent to 9/11.Report

              • Philip H in reply to Dark Matter says:

                Well 20 years of killing them in their own lands, while supporting their bankrollers was probably not our best idea then huh? I mean we assassinated a wildly popular socialist prime minister in Iran, installed a dictator with a throwback title, and it got us a nation state adversary that funds Islamic terrorists and has nuclear weapons. Doing the same thing for two decades in Afghanistan wasn’t exactly a way to show we had learned anything from that experience, now was it?Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Philip H says:

                Our mere existence is a threat to their way of life. We are constantly putting out movies and TV broadcasts showing women who have educations and wear immodest clothes. This encourages their own women to do things god is against. We’re also doing a ton of other things that are flatly unacceptable, like allowing gays to exist and encouraging other religions to exist.

                20 years of killing them in their own lands is the only reason why they might not try something like 911.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Dark Matter says:

                This is absurd.

                The Taliban have never, ever, attacked America, but a bunch of Saudis did, and you seem blissfully unaware of the reasons why.

                Try to say something about the Taliban that doesn’t apply equally to the Saudis, Pakistanis, Iraqis or Yemenis.

                For extra credit, maybe we should all stop assuming that those respective people think of themselves as Afghans, Saudis, Pakistanis or Iraqis, because they sure as hell dont.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                The Saudis wanted to cut OBL’s head off and did exile him. His crew was largely made up of Saudis who were pissed at their gov.

                It is indeed absurd to jump from “Saudi criminals” to “they represent the government of Saudi Arabia”.

                Try to say something about the Taliban that doesn’t apply equally to the Saudis, Pakistanis, Iraqis or Yemenis.

                After 911, when the US asked for OBL to be handed over and his crew disbanded, the Taliban refused because he was their hero and had done nothing wrong.Report

            • InMD in reply to Chip Daniels says:

              I think that conflates two separate things. The US has a legit interest in preventing attacks from Islamic terrorists domestically and on its people and assets abroad. We should be able to have open debates on how to do that and the cost benefit analysis of different approaches. For example, if Clinton had succeeded in killing OBL in Sudan with a targeted strike that would have been a pretty good benefit at a pretty minimal cost.

              The issue is all the separate, highly ideological crap that gets thrown under the rubric. Perpetual occupation of other countries. Nation building. Overthrowing governments without thought to what follows. Intervening in civil wars. And about a million other things.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to InMD says:

                If OBL was nonexistent, and the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, would we be discussing a military occupation of that country?

                Because those are the facts in front of us, yet somehow there is this inertia that demands that we must absolutely be the implacable enemy of Eastasia, er, the Taliban.Report

              • InMD in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                I’d certainly hope not. But I also take what I can get.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                You’re skipping the issue of whether or not they’re going to let AQ do their thing.

                That’s the issue that took us to war with the Taliban before and might do so again.Report

              • InMD in reply to Dark Matter says:

                Without getting into the merits of what’s going on in Yemen or Somalia, it seems like that issue can be addressed similarly to how it is in Yemen or Somalia.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to InMD says:

                it seems like that issue can be addressed similarly to how it is in Yemen, Syria, and Somalia.

                Other people going to war, committing vast war crimes, and turning the entire area into a vast failed state?

                That’s your suggestion on a better alternative?Report

              • InMD in reply to Dark Matter says:

                Yes. Every conflict on this planet is not our problem, and there’s plenty of evidence that our involvement in many of these places does not help.

                But I was speaking more narrowly. If AQ takes up residency again in Afghanistan I assume we will drone them wherever we can. Is this my preferred policy? No. But is it better than wasting American lives and even more money for similar results? Yes.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to InMD says:

                If AQ takes up residency again in Afghanistan I assume we will drone them wherever we can.

                And when the Taliban, i.e. the government of Afghanistan, tells us to stop committing acts of war on their territory, or simply forbids us access, what do we do?

                Those drones don’t have unlimited range and we also would find it very useful to have local intel.Report

              • InMD in reply to Dark Matter says:

                Doesn’t seem to stop us in other places where we have nothing on the ground.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to InMD says:

                Those other places would be failed states that have no government?Report

              • InMD in reply to Dark Matter says:

                In a country like Afghanistan I doubt the Taliban’s writ will extend any further than those places. They didn’t even have full control of the territory when we invaded in 2001.Report

              • Philip H in reply to Dark Matter says:

                Some of them do. Global Hawks are so named because they can literally fly round the world. And Predators are able to cross several time zones, deliver ordinance and return.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to InMD says:

                If AQ takes up residency again in Afghanistan I assume we will drone them wherever we can.

                Why?

                Are we going to wait to see if there is some credible threat to America?
                Or are we simply at war with AQ, because, we have always been at war with AQ?

                One of the most fundamental things to grasp about Mideast politics is that there are a myriad of factions, and they are ever-shifting and evolving into different forms, and (most importantly!) their agenda and goals almost never have anything to do with the United States.

                The mujahedeen were our good friends during the Soviet era; Then after the Soviets left the mujahedeen split apart into what were their constituent tribes and factions, some of whom were to become the Taliban, some of whom formed Al-Queda. Some of the Northern Alliance allies we had during the war have since flipped sides, several times, and ended up fighting for the Taliban.

                ISIS was born out of the remnants of Saddam’s Revolutionary Guard, and pursued goals which were entirely regional and posed no threat to America itself.

                There are about 20 or so different other groups and factions fighting there, either in the Syrian war or the Yemeni-Saudi war, or in the intra-Iraqi clashes.

                The idea that any radical Islamic group demands our armed response is madness since almost none of them pose any sort of threat to us.Report

              • InMD in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                This is my prediction for what will happen, not my proposal of what should happen.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Dark Matter says:

                What “thing” is AQ doing and who is letting them do it?

                Once again, much of their “thing” involved learning to fly which the State of Florida allowed them to do. And purchase tickets, and boxcutters, in Boston.

                As you yourself pointed out, the internet allows people to meet and plan from anywhere.

                There wasn’t anything special about Afghanistan other than it was remote.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                We really should have given more power to the INS, as it was known at the time, to deal with immigrants who were no longer here legally.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                Support of a state has nothing to do with whether or not a group of terrorists can organize well enough to commit terrorism in another nation state?

                I think we’ll have to agree to disagree on that issue.Report

        • Oscar Gordon in reply to Dark Matter says:

          Backing groups like that is probably what “virtue signaling” looks like in their group.

          Alternatively, it’s a policy of appeasement. The Taliban don’t ardently disagree with such people, and backing them means the Taliban don’t have to deal with them as an internal problem.

          The real question is, will the Taliban remember the past 20 years and what happens when you allow such groups your backing? Or will they continue to look at Iran and see how that nation gets away with it?Report

    • Cass RR in reply to Burt Likko says:

      Of course, of course.
      Taiwan and China can start World War Three,
      But America will still only care about
      “Will I Die TODAY!?!”

      China is already starting the bidding on Taiwan.Report

  21. Jaybird says:

    I’m seeing a *LOT* of various kinds of pushback against Biden… like, the NYT and so on. Not just contrarians who argued for pulling out two months ago and turned on a dime the second Biden said “okay”.

    It is difficult to see this as anything but buck-passing.

    To the extent that there are major failures going on, it’s difficult to not see them as the failures of Generals and the CIA. Heads need to roll.Report

  22. Jaybird says:

    Trump could have gotten away with this sort of thing.

    I don’t know if Biden can.

    Say what you will about 3 news cycles a week, it lets people ask “are you still talking about that?”Report