"You still haven’t cited anything proving that the brass, deep state etc anticipated and warned the administration that Afghanistan would implode within a matter of days when we withdrew."
Well yes, I have not demonstrated that. I don't think we should conclude that such warnings didn't exist. If they did, they would be conveyed through channels that Republicans have no access to, so we'd be at the mercy of leaks, and if there aren't any leaks, there wouldn't be anything to cite.
But that's frankly secondary anyway. I haven't tried to argue that mostly because I didn't think I needed to, as a premise toward the conclusion that Biden is incompetent and that the debacle is mostly his fault.
We know already that the brass told him not to draw down and abandon the airfield, I cited for that in the prior thread. It obviously wasn't the brass who made him tell George Stephanopolos that we could ignore people dying by falling off the outside of American military aircraft midflight because it happened for or five days ago (Narrator: it wasn't).
But even as to the supposed misinformation and bad intelligence the President received, even that doesn't hold up as an excuse. Does President Biden not have access to (or create) any other information channels? Is he not capable of thinking for himself? Are the people responsible for that bad info, are they uncontrollable or in some way not accountable to the President?
The answers are pretty clear, and not flattering to the President.
Tbh, there's not a huge point in being coy. I was actually thinking of North as I wrote that, but like I wrote, there was more than one, and you fit the bill decently well enough.
In any event, you, North et al repeatedly tried to deflect the blame for the Afghanistan debacle away from the President and towards the brass and other deep state types. "The housecleaning is coming soon, yesiree" But that was a crock from the get-go, and there is no housecleaning.
The recent debacle in Afghanistan couldn't have been Joe's fault. Several regular lib commenters here persuasively argued there was going to be a parade of brass and intelligence types marched out of the Pentagon and Foggy Bottom into forced early retirement Any Day Now. I have no doubt that's going to happen just as soon as OJ finds the real killers and brings them to justice.
I think that this whole thing would have benefitted from a lunchtime meeting at the White House between 4 or 5 people that included Biden, Manchin, and Pelosi.
Find out Manchin’s price and then pay it.
Push comes to shove that'll probably be what ends up happening, but it's not ripe yet. There's an important thing that's been flying under radar over the last 2-3 months, and that is, there is no "soft" or "human" infrastructure bill, or even a comprehensible program really. All there's been so far is topline numbers. Over the next week or three months, exactly what's in the reconciliation bill will have to be hammered out. As part of that process, every Demo Senator or Congressman will have his own set of asks and red lines, and they all have to be heard.
As far as what Manchin in particular wants, he's been very consistent for the entirety of the Biden Administration: figure out how much revenue you think you can raise, and how you intend to get it, then come back to me. As far as program details go, he's pretty agnostic so far, except that he'll probably balk if the climate change stuff is strongly prejudiced against coal or other legacy energy. We don't really know that yet, because nobody knows what the climate appropriations are yet. But it's a pretty good guess, Manchin being Manchin.
Those 2000 troops weren’t the glue holding the place together. That’s just a feeble excuse. The Taliban spent that time subverting the incredibly corrupt and entirely subvertable Afghan government during that time.
There's more than one thing involved here North, maybe I should have been more clear. Certainly those 2000 troop would not have prevented the prior gov't from being subverted and undermined, as you say.
It's just as clear that if we didn't draw down those 2000 troops (or in a worst case increased our troop strength in some well-chosen way to a total number less than 10K) that we could and would have avoided the panic and mayhem that we've seen over the last three weeks.
Otoh, if we had not done the Biden drawdown would the prior gov't still be in power today? I don't think we can know for sure, but there's some reason to believe the answer is yes. Biden's drawdown completely killed our capabilities regarding logistics and intelligence. That's what the 2000 being the glue refers to, and I think you'd be hard pressed to argue otherwise.
And, if we'd maintained those capabilities, would the Taliban have pushed as aggressively as they did? Would the ANA units and other Afghan defectors have flipped as soon as they did? Maybe maybe not. Like you said, they're afraid that we'll change our mind and restart butt-kicking. And as long as we have our airbase, we can change our mind at any time. Conceding the airbase doesn't just telegraph our intentions, it also diminishes our capacity as well. My guess is that the Taliban have waited us out for 20 years already, they would probably wait longer to see if we're actually going or not.
In any event, the whole trillions of dollars, thousands of lives things just doesn't hold water in the context of the Biden drawdown, it just doesn't. Some libs have tried to blame the Trump withdrawal agreement as painting Biden into a corner, but also functioning like the eye of a hurricane, a false calm that would end abruptly if we didn't panic leave a la Biden. But that doesn't really hold up either. The trillions and thousands thing didn't really apply to the whole Trump Administration, not just that part of it after the withdrawal agreement. President Trump signed that agreement because he wanted to leave, just like Biden did.
The whole thing is pretty clear if you read the info from the Administration and other lib sources for what it is, politically motivated spin. That doesn't guarantee that every word of it is false, but it is wildly misleading at the very least.
Instead, you should be thinking in terms of mission, capacity, and leadership. To be sure, those aren't kindergarten words, but they're not that complicated either. Once you grok those things, the situation is pretty clear.
The government could have fallen at some point, might not have happened by now. We wouldn't have gotten suicide bombed, that's pretty clear.
In any event, once you even try to understand anything meaningful about mission and capacity, it becomes pretty obvious that the Administration's line that President Biden is a tough-minded leader, standing up to the generals, who could finally pull the plug on 20 year trillion dollar quagmire, etc, etc, is that much garbage.
The trillions of dollars, thousands of lives thing, we're not paying that now, that's from a long time ago. Trying to pretend otherwise, you're falling into a weird reverse sunk cost trap, ie that because we had wasted so much there, that we have to repudiate our investment. In fact, our commitments at the time Biden took office were not especially expensive, either in blood or treasure.
All he did was temporarily reduce our troop level from 2500 to 700. Of course we found out the hard way that those ~2000 troops he pulled were the glue holding the whole place together.
As to other nations perceptions of America’s follow through? I’d say they think we’re idiots for slamming our hand in the door of Afghanistan for 20 years but at least they know we’re not the kinds of idiots who’ll slam our hand in the door for 30 years.
Yes those are circumstances. Those circumstances are more or less unique to Afghanistan, other nations are almost guaranteed to be different.
This is what I was getting at before when I said that this is a crisis of leadership, not a crisis of circumstance. As long as we have Demo President Joe Biden doing Demo President Joe Biden-y things, we are going to get fcuked by the same failure of leadership.
If no Americans die over it then it’ll be viewed as a canny move, and vice versa if any do.
Not on your life. There is no way in hell that anyone in that position wants their information turned over to the enemy. People who are putting their trust in the US have to know we're not going to do what BIden just did. We can't necessarily keep them from being killed, but we can keep them from being betrayed.
we got 130,000 people out in a month. That’s not a Chinese firedrill.
The point about the Chinese Fire Drill is that the only reason we're going through this superfluous panic is because President Biden fcuked up the mission requirements in the first place.
I don’t see any way a hindsight claim that the attacks on troops could have been prevented had there been more troops holds much water. Had more troops been present there simply would have been more targets in more places for the assorted bad actors to aim for. You keep bringing up Bagram airbase but that’s a non-sequitur. That airbase is 40 km outside Kabul through mountainous terrain. It’s hard to get to (which is why we liked it) and has no civilian facilities for evacuation. It would have been utterly useless for evacuation purposes which is why they dumped it in the first place.
No North, you're fixating on drawing down troop levels while ignoring mission and capacity, pretty much like Biden come to think of it.
If our mission in Afghanistan is scoped correctly, our troops in Afghanistan are not soft targets. We're not doing nation-building, hearts-and-minds, or search and destroy. We're winding down (or I should say we ought to be winding down) our presence there in an orderly, and appropriate way.
As far as Bagram goes, it's important to think about it in terms of capacity. In particular, a military airbase like Bagram is not at all the same thing as a civilian airport like HKIA.
Once we have claimed Bagram, it's ours. We can move personnel and materiel in and out of there 24 hours a day, and it's in the middle of nowhere so we're not going to get suicide bombed like at HKIA.
If we had to, we could evacuate whoever we wanted to from there. Ie, we could chopper taxi them from our embassy to Bagram, or drive them there if passage was safe. But most likely we wouldn't have had to, because probably Kabul wouldn't have fell in the first place and we would never had the panic at the disco in the first place.
And for certain the marines would be alive since they wouldn't have gotten suicide bombed.
Yes, I recall the list story. What I don’t recall is a subsequent story about the Taliban stringing all those Americans and Afghanis on the list up from the phone poles and killing them.
That may have happened already, it may yet happen, or it may never happen, but either way it's still a crisis of leadership incompetence which will have reverberations throughout the world, in the thing you're calling the domino theory but really isn't.
Have you given any thought at all as to how an episode like that affects other nations' perception of our follow-through, of our information security? Somehow I doubt it.
This idea inside your head that the only thing that really matters is being out of Afghanistan and everything else is ancillary simply isn't working, on every level.
Finally, when we come to enumerating what has strategically been lost you offer nothing but some warmed over domino theory? Guess what, the Soviets aren’t around any more and if China’s calculus to, say, Taiwan has changed at all because of Afghanistan it’s probably moved away from attacking since there no longer will be thousands of Americans sitting exposed and helpless on China’s western border.
You can call domino theory if you'd like I guess but it really isn't because it's not about the circumstances of bloc conflict where one domino falling causes the next one to fall as well. This is what I was trying to get at in my earlier comment where I said this is a crisis of leadership, not a crisis of circumstance.
You may or may not know, but it was reported ~a week ago that the Biden Administration gave the Taliban a list of Afghans for whom it requested safe passage. You don't think everybody in the whole world noticed that little episode?
That's to say, even if we have lots of ships and planes and troops and bombs and whatever, we are still prevented from defending our national interest in the world arena if our leadership is as incompetent as the Demo Biden Administration has shown itself to be.
-On the double down post that’s 5000-troop number is nonsensical. The last time we “surged” troops in 2009 we sent 30,000 bringing the total in the country to 100,000 and that effort did not repel the Taliban but merely contained their advancements to around a fifth of the country.
Again, probably more than one response to your latest comment, but I wanted to reply to this first.
As far as this goes, either you're misunderstanding something or I wasn't very clear. Maybe my most recent reply to Philip can help.
In any event, we have a mission in Afghanistan that's been pretty clear from the late Trump Administration to today: we want to cease operations in Afghanistan and bring home all the appropriate people, materiel and information. That's obviously not the same mission as 5 years ago or 20 years ago, but it is still a mission nonetheless.
And that mission has requirements just like any other, wrt numbers, training, readiness, other resources, etc. And with respect to _that_ mission, President Biden has starved the military of the resources needed to complete the mission, and at the same time been inflexible as to the outcome of the mission itself.
That's what Gen Milley said in that long quote from my comment above, and that is uniquely Demo President Joe Biden's failure.
And this becomes all the more clear when you put concrete numbers on things. That is President Biden gave up the Bagram airbase because he wanted to draw down our troop level from 2500 to 700.
In this world, surging 30K troops to total troop strength of 100K is completely irrelevant. That's about trying to make Afghanistan safe for democracy or attempting to kill or capture High Value Targets of the Taliban, or some other mission that's no longer operative.
This is about maintaining appropriate troop numbers for the mission we're in. Biden failed to do that, and as a consequence our boots on the ground were forced to carry rabbit's foot because of Biden's incompetence. And guess what, 11 marines 1 soldier and 1 corpsman weren't very lucky (to say nothing of the hundreds of Afghans).
And like I wrote to Philip above, we had to send in the troops anyway to pull off this Chinese Fire Drill evacuation anyway. We should have just done it earlier when we could have done ourselves some good.
And most important for you, I think, is that the numbers involved are small and have nothing to do with 2009.
Philip, your comment is a reading comprehension failure of substantial proportions.
I can assure you that I am not ignoring the troop levels of the US presence in Afghanistan. Those levels are a substantial premise to everything I've argued in this thread and the other Afghanistan threads. How are you possibly not getting this?
Here is Gen Milley telling all the world that President Biden is full of shtt:
On your question of Bagram, securing Bagram, you know how big Bagram is. You've been there many times. Securing Bagram is a significant level of military effort of forces, and it would also require external support from the Afghan Security Forces.
Our task given to us at that time, our task was protect the embassy in order for the embassy personnel to continue to function with their consular service and all that. If we were to keep both Bagram and the embassy going, that would be a significant number of military forces that would have exceeded what we had or stayed the same or exceeded what we had.
So we had to collapse one or the other, and a decision was made. The proposal was made form CENTCOM commander and the commander on the grounds, Scott Miller, to go ahead and collapse Bagram. That was all briefed and approved, and we estimated that the risk of going out of HKIA or the risk of going out of Bagram about the same, so going out of HKIA -- was estimated to be the better tactical solution in accordance with the mission set we were given and in accordance with getting the troops down to about 600, 700 number.
That is, instead of maintaining appropriate troop strength to accomplish our mission in Afghanistan, President constrained our military to make success impossible and chaos inevitable. All of this was in service of superficial appearances and artificial deadlines, fcuking absolutely unforgiveable.
And as you point out, when the shtt hit the fan, we had to send the troops back in anyway before we had to do this Chinese Fire Drill evacuation. We could have done that earlier where it would have actually done some good. Ie, the marines wouldn't have died, we could manage civilian evacuations, refugee/visa vetting, war materiel, sensitive information, etc, etc. In fact, if we had continued to hold or increase troop strength from where Trump left office, the various elements of the ANA might not have surrendered and Kabul might not have fallen.
This is why, for this second at least, I'm not on the blame-the-Pentagon bandwagon. President Biden is eating this one alone.
As for credibility. Definitely not worth the cost of being mired in that rat hole. The US departed ‘Nam and did just fine reputational wise.
That's only part of the credibility issue, and not most important part (at least as it pertains to Afghanistan).
It's not so much that we're losing our strategic interest in our relationship to Afghanistan, which like you said isn't important. What is important is our relationship with every other country, and how Biden's incompetence has depreciated them.
I'm not a historian of Asia by any means, but we had a strategic plan in Vietnam, called Vietnamization, which was largely the brainchild of Kissinger and Nixon. That plan clearly failed with the fall of Saigon. There's some debate of whether that was inevitable, or consequence of the impending impeachment of Nixon, blah blah, I don't really know, won't get into it here.
And of course that failure actually did hurt our reputation and credibility, basically for the duration of the 70s and didn't really recover till Reagan, for largely the reasons that you're dismissing. The other countries in the world would a lot more confident that the Soviets would follow through of whatever they threatened or promised, and would be substantially less confident in us.
Again, that's a sidelight. What's most important here is that the lack of credibility as a consequence of Afghanistan isn't a crisis of circumstances, it's a crisis of leadership.
That's to say, some other country, eg Taiwan, Estonia, the Philippines, whoever, they have different circumstances in Afghanistan. So they could, in a different world, relate to the US based on their circumstances as opposed to whatever happened if Afghanistan.
Except, that our leadership is telling everybody who's paying attention that we don't know what's going on in the world, don't care, and don't have any intention of changing those things. In that world, the world we actually live in, friend and for alike are going to be reevaluating how that want to deal with us, and not to our benefit.
That's why, I have been insisting that this debacle has a particular nature as a _partisan_ failure_, as a _Demo_ failure, as a _Biden_ failure.
As the United States, we still have 99.9% the same resources and the same interests we had before. But if Biden is going to call a lid on the day at 11AM and spend the rest of the day eating ice cream at Camp David, those things won't help us.
Uh huh but the choices were not withdraw or status quo. The choices were withdraw vs double down.
That's kind of dubious, but so what. "Double down" then. say from 2500 troops to 5000 troops. It's still less than what we had there a week ago after we had to send in the 82nd Airborne.
In other words, have at least enough troops there to hold on to your airbase.
Basically until/unless the media can dig up a memo showing that the DoD and military warned Biden in advance that Afghanistan would implode in a matter of days then that isn’t on the Administration.
Not on your life. FIrst of all, there very well may be such memos. Unfortunately, Biden wouldn't remember anything that was presented to him anyway.
Of course, Biden shouldn't need a memo anyway. It was widely believed among various people that was going to happen, not least among our enlisteds and junior officers who'd done tours there. So Biden should have anticipated at least some probability this was coming.
And, one thing has to be mentioned since it is so obvious to most people, but some reason can't be acknowledged by libs. That is, the reason the evacuation was such a clusterfcuk, was because the US didn't have enough boots on the ground to run its logistics processes correctly. And the reason it didn't have enough boots on the ground is because Biden insisted on drawing down our troop levels.
This is a very important consideration in the whole blame-the-brass thing the Administration's apologists are going for. The brass fed Biden bullshit because that's what he told them to do.
This is somewhat complicated, so I might reply more than once.
Unless you’re a in the camp that we should have surged in Afghanistan- again (and I don’t think you’re a remainer are you?)
I am, actually, which surprises me as much or more than anyone.
If, as the apologists for the Administration have tried to say, our choices were the status quo ante of Jan 20, when President Biden took office, or a Demo President Joe Biden-supervised withdrawal, we're better off staying. By a lot.
Saul has a point. HRC was a horrible, unlikeable person and candidate, and the deplorables thing aggravated the adverse perceptions of her. But, as a practical matter it would be really hard to get away from since so much of the motivating energy of activist libs is tied to that.
Well yeah, it's President Biden's reckless and impulsive decisions which have harmed our strategic interest. First of all the 13 marines and other servicemen who died because the Biden evacuation was a clusterfcuk.
And everything else extrapolates from there. Eg, the American citizens and other foreigners who had some connection to America who we have or had some duty to protect. Our equipment and sensitive info that fell into the hands of the Taliban, or in one notorious case that we handed over to them. And of course our loss of credibility and engagement with any other nation that we might have important dealings with, ie almost all of them.
None of those things were baked in the cake, and they were all preventable if President Biden could either supervise a competent evacuation _or_ maintain the status quo.
For example, a week or two ago, President Biden complained to George Stephanopolous, who mentioned to him the fact that a few desperate Afghans fell to their death when they could not maintain their hold on the surface of a US transport aircraft while it was in flight.
Specifically, the President said that was irrelevant since it happened "four or five days ago," a statement which for sheer callousness and lack of humanity is up there with anything Former President Trump ever said.
Furthermore, it was typical of Biden's ignorance and lack of engagement in that the incidents where only two days ago at the time that he said that. And, he would have called to comment on it earlier, by the press or someone else, except that he was hiding out at Camp David or Delaware trying to hide from his responsibilities.
Revisionist? Gotta admit, didn't see that one coming. Ok, so for the record, it is absolutely preposterous that I could be a revisionist in this situation.
It is the main narrative of Afghanistan for two weeks that Biden, his Administration, their lack of competence and engagement, has created a situation where America has lost important strategic interests, in Afghanistan and elsewhere. It is revisionist to suggest, as you apparently do, "Look at this great panic evacuation we just pulled off, see Biden really had it under control the whole time."
And, of course, the President and his Administrations public-facing actions relating to their communications to America have also been a disaster, shouldn't forget about that either.
First of all, President butchered the lead-up to the evacuation. Clearly he did not anticipate that the Taliban were going to come back to power nearly as quickly as they did, even though lots of people outside the deep state said that was going to happen.
But even allowing for that he didn't supervise the evacuation properly, most importantly but not limited to giving away Bagram Air Base. And then, after we had been sandbagged, after Kabul fell, he failed to react appropriately to get Americans out, to sort out the Afghans who America intended to bring out vs random Afghan "refugees", largely because for America to go back and do things the right way, as we should have done, would clearly illustrate the lies and incompetence of the actions leading up to the debacle in the first place.
Yeah, maybe. I gotta say though, I'm not havin' this latest convenient scapegoating of the deep state. I would have been all for it six months ago, or three months ago, but the current crisis has been caused by the recklessness and obliviousness of the Biden Administration.
Biden has put our strategic interests in peril for the most superficial of reasons. He has put our armed services and foreign policy apparatus in a situation where they could not succeed, and accordingly they failed. The deep state has a lot of answer for, but not this one.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “President Biden Gives Vote of Confidence to CJCS General Milley”
"You still haven’t cited anything proving that the brass, deep state etc anticipated and warned the administration that Afghanistan would implode within a matter of days when we withdrew."
Well yes, I have not demonstrated that. I don't think we should conclude that such warnings didn't exist. If they did, they would be conveyed through channels that Republicans have no access to, so we'd be at the mercy of leaks, and if there aren't any leaks, there wouldn't be anything to cite.
But that's frankly secondary anyway. I haven't tried to argue that mostly because I didn't think I needed to, as a premise toward the conclusion that Biden is incompetent and that the debacle is mostly his fault.
We know already that the brass told him not to draw down and abandon the airfield, I cited for that in the prior thread. It obviously wasn't the brass who made him tell George Stephanopolos that we could ignore people dying by falling off the outside of American military aircraft midflight because it happened for or five days ago (Narrator: it wasn't).
But even as to the supposed misinformation and bad intelligence the President received, even that doesn't hold up as an excuse. Does President Biden not have access to (or create) any other information channels? Is he not capable of thinking for himself? Are the people responsible for that bad info, are they uncontrollable or in some way not accountable to the President?
The answers are pretty clear, and not flattering to the President.
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Tbh, there's not a huge point in being coy. I was actually thinking of North as I wrote that, but like I wrote, there was more than one, and you fit the bill decently well enough.
In any event, you, North et al repeatedly tried to deflect the blame for the Afghanistan debacle away from the President and towards the brass and other deep state types. "The housecleaning is coming soon, yesiree" But that was a crock from the get-go, and there is no housecleaning.
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Lol, libs.
The recent debacle in Afghanistan couldn't have been Joe's fault. Several regular lib commenters here persuasively argued there was going to be a parade of brass and intelligence types marched out of the Pentagon and Foggy Bottom into forced early retirement Any Day Now. I have no doubt that's going to happen just as soon as OJ finds the real killers and brings them to justice.
On “The Painfully Simple Future of Joe Biden’s Agenda”
Push comes to shove that'll probably be what ends up happening, but it's not ripe yet. There's an important thing that's been flying under radar over the last 2-3 months, and that is, there is no "soft" or "human" infrastructure bill, or even a comprehensible program really. All there's been so far is topline numbers. Over the next week or three months, exactly what's in the reconciliation bill will have to be hammered out. As part of that process, every Demo Senator or Congressman will have his own set of asks and red lines, and they all have to be heard.
As far as what Manchin in particular wants, he's been very consistent for the entirety of the Biden Administration: figure out how much revenue you think you can raise, and how you intend to get it, then come back to me. As far as program details go, he's pretty agnostic so far, except that he'll probably balk if the climate change stuff is strongly prejudiced against coal or other legacy energy. We don't really know that yet, because nobody knows what the climate appropriations are yet. But it's a pretty good guess, Manchin being Manchin.
On “An American Exercise In Washing Our Hands of Afghanistan”
There's more than one thing involved here North, maybe I should have been more clear. Certainly those 2000 troop would not have prevented the prior gov't from being subverted and undermined, as you say.
It's just as clear that if we didn't draw down those 2000 troops (or in a worst case increased our troop strength in some well-chosen way to a total number less than 10K) that we could and would have avoided the panic and mayhem that we've seen over the last three weeks.
Otoh, if we had not done the Biden drawdown would the prior gov't still be in power today? I don't think we can know for sure, but there's some reason to believe the answer is yes. Biden's drawdown completely killed our capabilities regarding logistics and intelligence. That's what the 2000 being the glue refers to, and I think you'd be hard pressed to argue otherwise.
And, if we'd maintained those capabilities, would the Taliban have pushed as aggressively as they did? Would the ANA units and other Afghan defectors have flipped as soon as they did? Maybe maybe not. Like you said, they're afraid that we'll change our mind and restart butt-kicking. And as long as we have our airbase, we can change our mind at any time. Conceding the airbase doesn't just telegraph our intentions, it also diminishes our capacity as well. My guess is that the Taliban have waited us out for 20 years already, they would probably wait longer to see if we're actually going or not.
In any event, the whole trillions of dollars, thousands of lives things just doesn't hold water in the context of the Biden drawdown, it just doesn't. Some libs have tried to blame the Trump withdrawal agreement as painting Biden into a corner, but also functioning like the eye of a hurricane, a false calm that would end abruptly if we didn't panic leave a la Biden. But that doesn't really hold up either. The trillions and thousands thing didn't really apply to the whole Trump Administration, not just that part of it after the withdrawal agreement. President Trump signed that agreement because he wanted to leave, just like Biden did.
The whole thing is pretty clear if you read the info from the Administration and other lib sources for what it is, politically motivated spin. That doesn't guarantee that every word of it is false, but it is wildly misleading at the very least.
Instead, you should be thinking in terms of mission, capacity, and leadership. To be sure, those aren't kindergarten words, but they're not that complicated either. Once you grok those things, the situation is pretty clear.
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The government could have fallen at some point, might not have happened by now. We wouldn't have gotten suicide bombed, that's pretty clear.
In any event, once you even try to understand anything meaningful about mission and capacity, it becomes pretty obvious that the Administration's line that President Biden is a tough-minded leader, standing up to the generals, who could finally pull the plug on 20 year trillion dollar quagmire, etc, etc, is that much garbage.
The trillions of dollars, thousands of lives thing, we're not paying that now, that's from a long time ago. Trying to pretend otherwise, you're falling into a weird reverse sunk cost trap, ie that because we had wasted so much there, that we have to repudiate our investment. In fact, our commitments at the time Biden took office were not especially expensive, either in blood or treasure.
All he did was temporarily reduce our troop level from 2500 to 700. Of course we found out the hard way that those ~2000 troops he pulled were the glue holding the whole place together.
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Yes those are circumstances. Those circumstances are more or less unique to Afghanistan, other nations are almost guaranteed to be different.
This is what I was getting at before when I said that this is a crisis of leadership, not a crisis of circumstance. As long as we have Demo President Joe Biden doing Demo President Joe Biden-y things, we are going to get fcuked by the same failure of leadership.
Not on your life. There is no way in hell that anyone in that position wants their information turned over to the enemy. People who are putting their trust in the US have to know we're not going to do what BIden just did. We can't necessarily keep them from being killed, but we can keep them from being betrayed.
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The point about the Chinese Fire Drill is that the only reason we're going through this superfluous panic is because President Biden fcuked up the mission requirements in the first place.
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No North, you're fixating on drawing down troop levels while ignoring mission and capacity, pretty much like Biden come to think of it.
If our mission in Afghanistan is scoped correctly, our troops in Afghanistan are not soft targets. We're not doing nation-building, hearts-and-minds, or search and destroy. We're winding down (or I should say we ought to be winding down) our presence there in an orderly, and appropriate way.
As far as Bagram goes, it's important to think about it in terms of capacity. In particular, a military airbase like Bagram is not at all the same thing as a civilian airport like HKIA.
Once we have claimed Bagram, it's ours. We can move personnel and materiel in and out of there 24 hours a day, and it's in the middle of nowhere so we're not going to get suicide bombed like at HKIA.
If we had to, we could evacuate whoever we wanted to from there. Ie, we could chopper taxi them from our embassy to Bagram, or drive them there if passage was safe. But most likely we wouldn't have had to, because probably Kabul wouldn't have fell in the first place and we would never had the panic at the disco in the first place.
And for certain the marines would be alive since they wouldn't have gotten suicide bombed.
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That may have happened already, it may yet happen, or it may never happen, but either way it's still a crisis of leadership incompetence which will have reverberations throughout the world, in the thing you're calling the domino theory but really isn't.
Have you given any thought at all as to how an episode like that affects other nations' perception of our follow-through, of our information security? Somehow I doubt it.
This idea inside your head that the only thing that really matters is being out of Afghanistan and everything else is ancillary simply isn't working, on every level.
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No, that's exactly what's wrong. There's nothing baked in the cake until we give up the airbase, that's the point of the quote from Gen Milley above.
Certainly not a massive suicide bomber like the one who killed the marines and Afghans a couple days ago.
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You can call domino theory if you'd like I guess but it really isn't because it's not about the circumstances of bloc conflict where one domino falling causes the next one to fall as well. This is what I was trying to get at in my earlier comment where I said this is a crisis of leadership, not a crisis of circumstance.
You may or may not know, but it was reported ~a week ago that the Biden Administration gave the Taliban a list of Afghans for whom it requested safe passage. You don't think everybody in the whole world noticed that little episode?
That's to say, even if we have lots of ships and planes and troops and bombs and whatever, we are still prevented from defending our national interest in the world arena if our leadership is as incompetent as the Demo Biden Administration has shown itself to be.
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Again, probably more than one response to your latest comment, but I wanted to reply to this first.
As far as this goes, either you're misunderstanding something or I wasn't very clear. Maybe my most recent reply to Philip can help.
In any event, we have a mission in Afghanistan that's been pretty clear from the late Trump Administration to today: we want to cease operations in Afghanistan and bring home all the appropriate people, materiel and information. That's obviously not the same mission as 5 years ago or 20 years ago, but it is still a mission nonetheless.
And that mission has requirements just like any other, wrt numbers, training, readiness, other resources, etc. And with respect to _that_ mission, President Biden has starved the military of the resources needed to complete the mission, and at the same time been inflexible as to the outcome of the mission itself.
That's what Gen Milley said in that long quote from my comment above, and that is uniquely Demo President Joe Biden's failure.
And this becomes all the more clear when you put concrete numbers on things. That is President Biden gave up the Bagram airbase because he wanted to draw down our troop level from 2500 to 700.
In this world, surging 30K troops to total troop strength of 100K is completely irrelevant. That's about trying to make Afghanistan safe for democracy or attempting to kill or capture High Value Targets of the Taliban, or some other mission that's no longer operative.
This is about maintaining appropriate troop numbers for the mission we're in. Biden failed to do that, and as a consequence our boots on the ground were forced to carry rabbit's foot because of Biden's incompetence. And guess what, 11 marines 1 soldier and 1 corpsman weren't very lucky (to say nothing of the hundreds of Afghans).
And like I wrote to Philip above, we had to send in the troops anyway to pull off this Chinese Fire Drill evacuation anyway. We should have just done it earlier when we could have done ourselves some good.
And most important for you, I think, is that the numbers involved are small and have nothing to do with 2009.
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Philip, your comment is a reading comprehension failure of substantial proportions.
I can assure you that I am not ignoring the troop levels of the US presence in Afghanistan. Those levels are a substantial premise to everything I've argued in this thread and the other Afghanistan threads. How are you possibly not getting this?
Here is Gen Milley telling all the world that President Biden is full of shtt:
https://www.defense.gov/Newsroom/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/2738086/secretary-of-defense-austin-and-chairman-of-the-joint-chiefs-of-staff-gen-mille/
That is, instead of maintaining appropriate troop strength to accomplish our mission in Afghanistan, President constrained our military to make success impossible and chaos inevitable. All of this was in service of superficial appearances and artificial deadlines, fcuking absolutely unforgiveable.
And as you point out, when the shtt hit the fan, we had to send the troops back in anyway before we had to do this Chinese Fire Drill evacuation. We could have done that earlier where it would have actually done some good. Ie, the marines wouldn't have died, we could manage civilian evacuations, refugee/visa vetting, war materiel, sensitive information, etc, etc. In fact, if we had continued to hold or increase troop strength from where Trump left office, the various elements of the ANA might not have surrendered and Kabul might not have fallen.
This is why, for this second at least, I'm not on the blame-the-Pentagon bandwagon. President Biden is eating this one alone.
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That's only part of the credibility issue, and not most important part (at least as it pertains to Afghanistan).
It's not so much that we're losing our strategic interest in our relationship to Afghanistan, which like you said isn't important. What is important is our relationship with every other country, and how Biden's incompetence has depreciated them.
I'm not a historian of Asia by any means, but we had a strategic plan in Vietnam, called Vietnamization, which was largely the brainchild of Kissinger and Nixon. That plan clearly failed with the fall of Saigon. There's some debate of whether that was inevitable, or consequence of the impending impeachment of Nixon, blah blah, I don't really know, won't get into it here.
And of course that failure actually did hurt our reputation and credibility, basically for the duration of the 70s and didn't really recover till Reagan, for largely the reasons that you're dismissing. The other countries in the world would a lot more confident that the Soviets would follow through of whatever they threatened or promised, and would be substantially less confident in us.
Again, that's a sidelight. What's most important here is that the lack of credibility as a consequence of Afghanistan isn't a crisis of circumstances, it's a crisis of leadership.
That's to say, some other country, eg Taiwan, Estonia, the Philippines, whoever, they have different circumstances in Afghanistan. So they could, in a different world, relate to the US based on their circumstances as opposed to whatever happened if Afghanistan.
Except, that our leadership is telling everybody who's paying attention that we don't know what's going on in the world, don't care, and don't have any intention of changing those things. In that world, the world we actually live in, friend and for alike are going to be reevaluating how that want to deal with us, and not to our benefit.
That's why, I have been insisting that this debacle has a particular nature as a _partisan_ failure_, as a _Demo_ failure, as a _Biden_ failure.
As the United States, we still have 99.9% the same resources and the same interests we had before. But if Biden is going to call a lid on the day at 11AM and spend the rest of the day eating ice cream at Camp David, those things won't help us.
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That's kind of dubious, but so what. "Double down" then. say from 2500 troops to 5000 troops. It's still less than what we had there a week ago after we had to send in the 82nd Airborne.
In other words, have at least enough troops there to hold on to your airbase.
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Not on your life. FIrst of all, there very well may be such memos. Unfortunately, Biden wouldn't remember anything that was presented to him anyway.
Of course, Biden shouldn't need a memo anyway. It was widely believed among various people that was going to happen, not least among our enlisteds and junior officers who'd done tours there. So Biden should have anticipated at least some probability this was coming.
And, one thing has to be mentioned since it is so obvious to most people, but some reason can't be acknowledged by libs. That is, the reason the evacuation was such a clusterfcuk, was because the US didn't have enough boots on the ground to run its logistics processes correctly. And the reason it didn't have enough boots on the ground is because Biden insisted on drawing down our troop levels.
This is a very important consideration in the whole blame-the-brass thing the Administration's apologists are going for. The brass fed Biden bullshit because that's what he told them to do.
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This is somewhat complicated, so I might reply more than once.
I am, actually, which surprises me as much or more than anyone.
If, as the apologists for the Administration have tried to say, our choices were the status quo ante of Jan 20, when President Biden took office, or a Demo President Joe Biden-supervised withdrawal, we're better off staying. By a lot.
On ““Deplorables” Turns Five Years Old”
Saul has a point. HRC was a horrible, unlikeable person and candidate, and the deplorables thing aggravated the adverse perceptions of her. But, as a practical matter it would be really hard to get away from since so much of the motivating energy of activist libs is tied to that.
On “An American Exercise In Washing Our Hands of Afghanistan”
Well yeah, it's President Biden's reckless and impulsive decisions which have harmed our strategic interest. First of all the 13 marines and other servicemen who died because the Biden evacuation was a clusterfcuk.
And everything else extrapolates from there. Eg, the American citizens and other foreigners who had some connection to America who we have or had some duty to protect. Our equipment and sensitive info that fell into the hands of the Taliban, or in one notorious case that we handed over to them. And of course our loss of credibility and engagement with any other nation that we might have important dealings with, ie almost all of them.
None of those things were baked in the cake, and they were all preventable if President Biden could either supervise a competent evacuation _or_ maintain the status quo.
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For example, a week or two ago, President Biden complained to George Stephanopolous, who mentioned to him the fact that a few desperate Afghans fell to their death when they could not maintain their hold on the surface of a US transport aircraft while it was in flight.
Specifically, the President said that was irrelevant since it happened "four or five days ago," a statement which for sheer callousness and lack of humanity is up there with anything Former President Trump ever said.
Furthermore, it was typical of Biden's ignorance and lack of engagement in that the incidents where only two days ago at the time that he said that. And, he would have called to comment on it earlier, by the press or someone else, except that he was hiding out at Camp David or Delaware trying to hide from his responsibilities.
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Revisionist? Gotta admit, didn't see that one coming. Ok, so for the record, it is absolutely preposterous that I could be a revisionist in this situation.
It is the main narrative of Afghanistan for two weeks that Biden, his Administration, their lack of competence and engagement, has created a situation where America has lost important strategic interests, in Afghanistan and elsewhere. It is revisionist to suggest, as you apparently do, "Look at this great panic evacuation we just pulled off, see Biden really had it under control the whole time."
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And, of course, the President and his Administrations public-facing actions relating to their communications to America have also been a disaster, shouldn't forget about that either.
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First of all, President butchered the lead-up to the evacuation. Clearly he did not anticipate that the Taliban were going to come back to power nearly as quickly as they did, even though lots of people outside the deep state said that was going to happen.
But even allowing for that he didn't supervise the evacuation properly, most importantly but not limited to giving away Bagram Air Base. And then, after we had been sandbagged, after Kabul fell, he failed to react appropriately to get Americans out, to sort out the Afghans who America intended to bring out vs random Afghan "refugees", largely because for America to go back and do things the right way, as we should have done, would clearly illustrate the lies and incompetence of the actions leading up to the debacle in the first place.
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Yeah, maybe. I gotta say though, I'm not havin' this latest convenient scapegoating of the deep state. I would have been all for it six months ago, or three months ago, but the current crisis has been caused by the recklessness and obliviousness of the Biden Administration.
Biden has put our strategic interests in peril for the most superficial of reasons. He has put our armed services and foreign policy apparatus in a situation where they could not succeed, and accordingly they failed. The deep state has a lot of answer for, but not this one.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.