Huge tell on the part of the President, I think he meant.
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I guess I’m just wondering who had any doubts.
I know this is orthogonal to the OP here, but I want to take some exception to this statement. If by “the disaster that has unfolded in Afghanistan” you mean basically everything that has happened since 2003 than I may agree with you, or at last be sympathetic, but if you mean the events of the past 2 or 3 weeks, then I really don’t agree.
Obama first announced that we would be getting out of Afghanistan (by 2014) in mid-2011. We were supposed to leave “once key metrics were met.” Of course, they were never met. Trump at times claimed that Afghanistan was a mistake (he also claimed the opposite… but its Trump) and after a small failed surge in 2017 continued the train and support mission, and to pull Americans out of active combat. In 2020 the administration reach a “peace deal” (aka a fig leaf) with the Taliban and agreed to a complete pull out of troops by May 2021. Trump and Pompeo now claim that had they been in power America would have pulled out and the government wouldn’t have collapsed… as if 7 more months on top of their 4 years running the show would have transformed the Afghan government and the ANA into effective institutions.
I am no expert on Afghanistan, but I have tried to get up to speed, and as far as I can tell we had two options: Stay forever and be more active as a colonial force, or withdraw in the face of complete collapse. I don’t know which of these is the best option for our country or for the people of Afghanistan in the long run. But a lot of people seem to think there is a third option where we pull out, it isn’t chaotic and no one gets killed. But that option is a fantasy. If we stayed until “key metrics were met” we would never leave, if we stayed until we could ensure the withdrawal would not cause chaos and violence and displacement, we would never leave. I give Biden some credit for holding firm when I’m sure his generals, the state department, the CIA, and much of the NGO apparatus were yelling at the administration that they have to stay.
[Edited to add: I think Richard Hanania has been one of the few people talking sense on this issue. Richard Hanania’s Newsletter (substack.com)]
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When the Russians withdrew from Afghanistan, the withdrawal itself was not a bloody mess. The last Russian soldier to come out was a general and after he crossed the bridge, he said, “There are no Russian soldiers behind my back.”
Then the Afghan communist puppet government proceeded to last over 3 years with ongoing Soviet support. The government in Kabul only collapsed when Yeltsin cut off support after the communist government in Moscow fell.
You are right that “victory” wasn’t an option, but we failed to even beat the point spread.
Here are just a few questions about the last couple of months that need to be answered:
-Why was the Afghan Air Force grounded?
-Why were US air assets not brought to bear against the recent Taliban offensive?
-Why was Bagram Air Base closed first rather than last? HKIA is a horrible place to be running an air lift out of in the teeth of a hostile military force. Was an airlift totally unforeseen? If so, why?
-Why were intel estimates of the ANA so horribly wrong? We have men who have been essentially living with the ANA for over a decade. Were they surprised by its collapse? I personally have heard rumors for years that the ANA was essentially a non-thing. Did our generals, diplomats, etc. know this and ignore it, or was this hidden from them?
-Why does it appear, almost two weeks into the acute part of this crisis, that our people on the ground are working without leadership and without a plan?
-Why did we choose the peak of the Afghan fighting season to withdraw?
The Taliban could have closed HKIA with a couple of mortars on or around 8/14 and killed every last American in Afghanistan and there’s essentially nothing we could have done about it. It didn’t have to be that way, and how and why we wound up here is due for some explanations.
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Among the things I notice to be constantly missing from these discussions are these:
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The role of governments (generally) in their mandates from God to judge evil (cf. Genesis 8, Romans 13, 1 Tim. 2:2ff).
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Our Father’s constant willingness to apportion this mandate to governments which are otherwise unrighteous or wicked (!) as we see in the case of His use of the Assyrians to judge Israel. Or, how scrupulously our Father recompensed Nebuchadnezzer for executing God’s judgment on Tyre when that campaign did not result in a fair wage for Nebuchadnezzer and his army. So, God gave him Egypt and its plunder for wages! (Ezekiel 29:18ff).
The point: the rise and fall of nations cannot be adequately explained or understood apart from the counsels of heaven (cf. 1 Kings 22:19ff), counsels of which we are almost always ignorant as to the details. We can only speculate, based on what we have seen as patterns and precedents in the pages of Holy Writ.
No doubt the United States has often been our Lord’s agent for His purposes among the nations. That said, His use of America does not mean our nation is wholly righteous, or undeserving of serious judgment (as has come to pass with the wide river of abortuary blood flooding our countryside).
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The Russian situation was vastly different (though admittedly its a history that I don’t know very well). They came in at the request of a revolutionary government that had seized power in the Saur Revolution and which had an organic and extensive power base in the country. If the Northern alliance would have pushed the Taliban back to Kandahar and then requested US military aid before we came into the country, things would probably look a lot different.
Once again, I profess no special knowledge on this stuff (beyond being generally well informed), but I think a lot of your particular questions show the skew in the reporting on this stuff.
It wasn’t. As the government collapsed the administration and the military told the contractors to get out. In 20 years we haven’t been able to train the Afghans to run the air force we gave them.
They were, we continued bombing and close air support through early August. As the Afghan units collapsed we no longer had working forces to provide air support to.
Bagram was turned over the the ANA, who were in the process of collapsing, it wasn’t just closed. But it didn’t work as an air lift location because we don’t even have a secure road from Kabul to Bagram. They would have had to use helicopters to get everyone from Kabul to Bagram before loading them on C17s. It would have been completely untenable for the volume of people we are moving.
They weren’t all as wrong as you think. The rapid downward spiral and complete collapse were seen as relatively high probability scenarios for a long time, but they aren’t the kind of thing you broadcast when you are trying to keep the ANA from collapsing. People like “The Crisis Group” in the NGO complex have been writing about this for a long time.
But in the military itself the incentives were all screwed up on reporting this stuff up. Our troop training numbers looked great in the reports and power points delivered up the chain. If you called attention to the reality of the situation you were risking your future career and if you claimed that it was going great you were on the route to promotion. The military really should clean house over this, but they won’t.
After the initial failure to control the airport things had been going pretty smoothly until yesterdays attack. I agree that the contingency planning was terrible, but 1. that’s on everyone, not just Biden, and two given the way the rest of the mission has went what do you expect?
Also, I want to note that the administration told all US citizens including non-essential state department and contractor personnel to get out in April. About 4,000 people who stayed signed up for security alerts and I believe all of those people are out. Many of the remaining US citizens are dual citizens who are living with their families in Afghanistan (many of whom aren’t cleared for evac), not all of these people will get out, because not all of them want to.
I agree - this was stupid. My suspicion is that the outlying parts of the ANA were in such bad shape that we didn’t think we could prop them up for another year without going back to doing boots on the ground combat operations, and the administration didn’t want any American deaths on their watch.
All in all I agree that it was a terrible boondoggle, but it has been baked in for a long long time. Our train/equip mission has been a complete failure. The ANA has failed to provide basic logistics to their best troops (Not just poor equipment, some of these people hadn’t been paid in over a year). I just don’t think it is honest or reasonable to pin it all on the current administration. I’m sure things could have been much better, but it was going to be ugly regardless.
If you believe that story then I have a Friendship Bridge to sell you. The first thing the Russians did was to whack Hafizullah Amin, the President of the regime that had requested their erstwhile help. The Russians were acting in their own interests in Afghanistan.
It should concern us here beyond the horizon of the End of History that communists could put together an organic and extensive power base in Afghanistan both before and after a Soviet invasion, but Western liberalism couldn’t.
The Afghan Air Force remained effective (and indeed decisive) for the Afghan communist government for years after Soviet withdrawal. That was not an unachievable goal, yet we failed.
We absconded from Bagram in the middle of the night without so much as a Dear John letter on the kitchen table.
We don’t have a secure anything at HKIA. Perhaps Bagram would have been untenable, but I’d like to see the question investigated. I think it would have been a lot easier to keep Bagram’s runway open than to keep HKIA’s runway open.
I’d love to see the bottom of that discussion. It sure looks like the Biden administration and the .mil went into this with no contingency plan for the total collapse of the ANA and Ghani’s government.
If we want to have a military—I’m open on the question at this point—we’d better get to the bottom of this.
They are mostly going smoothly because the Taliban is making/allowing them to be so. If they’d wanted to Retreat from Kabul 1842 us, they could have killed every last American in Afghanistan. The operation is functioning on the Taliban’s good graces (imagine reading that on October 31, 2001!) which good graces they are promising to withdraw in four days.
Why are our troops not venturing out to collect American citizens? Other countries are collecting their nationals. Where did that order come from? Is it prudent or cowardly? I’m open on the point but I have a suspicion.
Trump and Pompeo had a deal with the Taliban to withdraw before fighting season. Biden broke that deal, which didn’t augur well for an orderly withdrawal. Maybe there are good reasons why we didn’t do that, but we didn’t need to wait another year, just till winter.
This seems like an important detail for ensuring an orderly withdrawal.
Oh, I agree. At this point I’d probably relieve everyone in the Army over about O-5. I think a significant piece of this puzzle is the military throwing a hissy fit that Biden is breaking their rice bowl. Ghani isn’t the only one who’s gotten rich off of endless wars.
When Biden says, “We had to do this at some point,” he’s exactly right, and I wish it had been done sooner.
But here we sit, with not one single Cabinet member, general, senior intel official or diplomat having resigned or having been fired over this. They all think it’s fine. Biden even said so last week to Stephanopolis.
I agree that things would have been ugly. Retreats under fire are never pretty. But what saved us from a military and humanitarian disaster of historic proportions has been the good will of the Taliban. That should be unacceptable.
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I meant the latter. Exception noted.
I don’t think we are far apart. I agree with most of your criticisms, as far as the situation is clear to me.
Just to clarify regarding my first answer on the Soviet intervention: I was just pointing out that they were entering a very different situation, and they weren’t trying to bootstrap a completely new government. I agree that the Soviets were doing it for their own reasons, and getting rid of Amin was on their priority list.
[ETA - this is an obviously biased account; but it is a source for the different collapse scenarios provided to the administrations. CIA’s Former Counterterrorism Chief for the Region: Afghanistan, Not An Intelligence Failure — Something Much Worse (justsecurity.org)]
Agreed. I’ve appreciated the ability to vent and to look smart in my own eyes. Watching the news has been pretty frustrating for the last couple of weeks (Afghanistan)/couple of years (Covid). It sucks to feel powerless. “Thy Kingdom come.”
Go ahead and mark me down as trolled. If this is what we get from The Experts, then maybe I’d as soon take my chances with the first 100 goofballs to wander into the Capitol building wearing Viking hats.
It was funny though.
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I’m not sure what was misunderstood there.
I was referencing the President and the tell that he actually is full of bloodlust. It should be a tell to those who claim he is not.
Ok, except you said you disagreed with me, and didn’t reference the President when replying to me, hence the confusion.
Thank you for clarifying though.
One of the extremely interesting things about the aftermath of September 11th that I didn’t know about until 7 years ago or so was how high profile elected leaders made use of the citation of Isaiah 9:10 in their speeches attempting to rally or encourage the nation. Utterly remarkable given the full context of the verse. It was cited in a Senate speech on Sept. 12, 2001 by Tom Daschle, the Senate majority leader at the time and later on Sept. 11, 2004 in a speech by then Senator John Edwards (2004 Vice-Presidential candidate of ill-repute for the Democratic ticket.) Taken together, seemingly more of a Caiaphas moment then almost anything I’m aware of in the country’s history. Something about testimony being established by the mouths of two or three witnesses comes to mind.
See here:
and here:
One of the stranger parts to the story is the fact that a sycamore tree planted by (If I recall correctly) George Washington and others (edit: I didn’t remember correctly 
- it was just an older, large sycamore, possibly related to the colonial era) in lower Manhattan was actually destroyed by falling debris during the attacks and was later replaced by an evergreen tree in a commemorative ceremony during the lengthy rebuilding. In essence, acting out a portion of the passage of judgement in Isaiah 9.
I learned all this listening to some of the instances in which a Messianic Rabbi, Johnathan Cahn, speaks about a book he’s written on the subject. He seems to travel in somewhat charismatic circles of influence but I’ve still found things I’ve heard from him to be mostly balanced and useful, despite some things that I’d not always agree with.
See here:
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I remember hearing the part of then-President George W. Bush’s speech at 9/11 where he said this:
Thousands of lives were suddenly ended by evil, despicable, acts of terror. The pictures of airplanes flying into buildings, fires burning, huge structures collapsing have filled us with disbelief, terrible sadness, and a quiet unyielding anger.
(Emphasis mine.)
I remember thinking at the time that then-President Bush was calling for holding a grudge and that that was something distinctly different from humbling ourselves before God and mourning and fasting and seeking His favor.
President Biden’s words aren’t something new; it’s just more of the same. I don’t want calls for President Biden to be impeached; I want us to humble ourselves and return to the Lord (Amos 4).
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I don’t think those are the same. Anger is not the same as lack of forgiveness. I think it is accurate to describe my current feelings about 9/11 as quiet, unyielding anger. But I wouldn’t say I’m holding a grudge.
Recognizing the variety of ways that God is calling us to humble ourselves and return to the Lord, I still think it’s appropriate to hold men accountable for the work they’ve been given. The President is the commander in chief. He should probably be impeached for this failure of a withdrawal—not for his leading us into unforgiveness.
Nevertheless, I think it is indeed quite noteworthy. Less for the reason that the president is saying something terrible, but more for what that says about our nation.
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Be careful what you wish for.
I really don’t believe Mr. Biden is responsible for the management of the withdrawal from Afghanistan in ways other than bearing that responsibility via bearing the chief executive’s title. Morally and federally, in other words, but I doubt in any ways functionally responsible.
I don’t doubt that there are many with wicked intentions who desire the removal of Mr. Biden from the position of said office-holding responsibilities and who aren’t above using substantial forms of manipulation to attempt it. I try not to under-estimate the level of evil that can be accomplished through cooperation of the State Department and the “intelligence community.” I often fail. I do find it interesting the widespread nature of critical coverage of the administration’s withdrawal. Not that it is undeserving of widespread criticism, but when does logical analysis dictate talking points for “the news?” Fox News and broader conservatism are obvious, ongoing criticism and displeasure of Mr. Biden’s handling of the events from MSNBC, less so. Just some general thoughts, but I’d be concerned with much wider possibilities than simply Ms. Harris.
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Frankly, I think you guys are giving the President too much credit if you think his statement about lack of forgiveness arises from some firm sentiment or conviction rather than a passing feeling that will disappear with the next news cycle. I see it as empty bravado arising from weakness. What comes to mind is King Tirian’s statement in The Last Battle, "And peace, Eustace. Do not scold, like a kitchen-girl. No warrior scolds. Courteous words or else hard knocks are his only language.”
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Agreed. My point was that it is notable that such a statement is seen as good and strong today in our culture. And that is a change.
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I agree with this to a point. Biden certainly didn’t tell the military to [insert any of two dozen poor decisions]. But we are now two weeks into this slow-motion crisis and zero cabinet members, generals, intel officials or senior diplomats have been fired. AFAIK, the only career fallout from this has been a Lieutenant Colonel or two who have committed public career seppuku over this.
The only conclusion I can draw here is that Biden is fine with this. As a leader, you can only blame your subordinates if you’re also willing to relieve them of duty.
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