Ok, so, it seems our only viable course of action was to to withdraw.
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I have a distinct and clear memory of protesting in the streets 18 years ago, and knowing with painful agonizing certainty that this would be the inevitable outcome.
Bush, Cheney and all the rest were so in love with their ideas they couldn’t see how utterly incompatible with reality they actually were.
Repeat after me: It is impossible to occupy and change a place that doesn’t want to be occupied and changed without genocide or utterly brutal suppression, and even then it is largely not possible. There are no ‘heroic’ wars of aggression. (Note: The many individual soldiers were undoubtedly heroic and had their lives squandered by these fucking morons who should have known better).
Remember when the Taliban offered to give up Bin Laden if he could be tried in a neutral country? Instead the US and everyone else chose to invade, kill by the hundreds of thousands, not catch Bin Laden for years, and ultimately put the Taliban back in charge.
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It was naive to think we could keep the region under our control in the first place. It’s not for nothing that Afghanistan has been long dubbed “The Graveyard of Empires.”
If you can’t get a place under control after 20 years of constant military occupation then when exactly DO you decide to cut your losses?
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They’ve been planning it for 20 years, but this could have happened 20 years ago, too.
At whatever time the US leaves, they fill the power vacuum.
The US was constantly bailing out a ship that was always just about to capsize:
they never looked at Afghanistan as part of a Afghanistan-Pakistan-India system.
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At some point we have to stop trying to think our way around a region that has nothing to do with us. Who would ‘dissolve’ the concept of Afghanistan? If the Afghans choose to do something like that then we should do what we should do anyway - respect that choice.
I wonder what would have happened if Bush had accepted the Taliban’s offer to give up Bin Laden? After 20 years in power I have no doubt the Taliban would have either become corrupt and collapsed, or begun to shift away from extremes towards a more pragmatic governance - it is hard to be extreme and effective at the same time.
Instead we all just gave them tons of motivation to become even more radical and monstrous.
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Ok, so all the news is “what a disaster this is” and a black eye for Biden. But at the same time I’m only seeing opinion that this is (and was) a mission doomed to failure and the US “holding up the leaky dam and keeping the water back” was futile. Does anyone have any sense of what Biden or any President could do to keep this from being “their” disaster? None of this, honestly, makes much sense. If Trump had done this and (of course) the same results happened, would he be hailed as a hero? In other words, this is a disaster that transcends anyone at this point. At the end of the day, it seems that perhaps Biden got it right?
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The last three guys just kept kicking the can down the road so they wouldn’t have to own the consequences. Afghanistan is a disaster, but I can respect that Biden was willing to be the guy to rip off the Band-Aid.
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Remember that trump guy? He initiated the pullout with a May date for all out. Pompeo was all in. Now Pompeo and trump sycophants are screaming into the hot winds of FOXNews, etc. that it’s all Biden’s fault. Ohhhh what a mess! they say. Well, fuck them, it was always going to be a mess.
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I’ve been listening to a few podcasts where the folks are just pissed as all get out at this withdrawal but I just don’t hear what they think is a good solution? “Stay the course?”
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Why are the Aimak and Turkmen colors swapped between the map and the pie chart? Or is one of them mislabeled, and if so, which one?
The people of Afghanistan need to make that road. (Sigh) Outsiders such as the US can not make it happen for them. As many other countries have learned over the ages.
“Afghanistan is a notoriously difficult country to govern. Empire after empire, nation after nation have failed to pacify what is today the modern territory of Afghanistan, giving the region the nickname “Graveyard of Empires, ” even if sometimes those empires won some initial battles and made inroads into the region. If the United States and its allies decide to leave Afghanistan, they would only the latest in a long series of nations to do so. As the British learned in their 1839-1842 war in Afghanistan, it is often easier to do business with a local ruler with popular support than to support a leader backed by foreign powers; the costs of propping up such a leader eventually add up. The closest most historical empires have come to controlling Afghanistan was by adopting a light-handed approach, as the Mughals did. They managed to loosely control the area by paying off various tribes, or granting them autonomy. Attempts at anything resembling centralized control, even by native Afghan governments, have largely failed.” -TheDiplomat
Solution? Well, we can at least try and help the people.
Unlike the previous administration.
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“Pull out? Doesn’t sound MANLY ENOUGH!! I say let’s stay in there, get the job done!”
-Carlin, referring to 'Nam.
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Yeah. China has a reputation for building infrastructure rather than giant army bases when they make a country a client.
Somebody in the US political mainstream should be watching.
This is fucking depressing.
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With the fall of South Vietnam came the myth of the Bloodbath theory.
But with the Taliban, it doesn’t seem like a myth. At the very least, civil rights will send Afghans (and in particular Afghan women) back to the dark ages. But there’s gonna be a bloodbath. They will exact retribution.
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Kick the can down the road by expending just enough blood, violence and money to keep the Taliban out of power until the NEXT administration. Which is largely why this clusterfuck lasted 20 years.
Well the occupations of Japan and Germany worked pretty well. But those were already NATIONS with strong central governments. Which Afghanistan has never been. Indeed the early successes of the US invasion were largely because of restive warlords in the North that were unhappy under the control (especially the anti-drug policies) of the Taliban.
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Yeah, the English establishment seem to blame the Trump deal.
Defence minister says that they vociferously objected to the Trump Pompeo deal which handed the initiative and momentum to the Taliban. I know nothing so whether that’s realistic or not I can’t say
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“…the UK had no choice but to pull troops out, because the international community had to act together. “When the United States as the framework nation took that decision, the way we were all configured meant that we had to leave,” Wallace said”
Because the UK mil and others were renting container homes and parking spaces inside of US bases, I mean “framework”. 
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And as the article points out (or is it another?) not only the Afghans but none of the NATO members can run air operations in Afghanistan without the US.
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I think that the powers that be in the US convinced themselves that because the Afgan army looked kind of like an army and the government looked kind of like a government (albeit a stunningly corrupt one) that what was going to matter was the tactical prowess of the army. Which was poor, but not non-existent. But the army is mostly made up of people that are there for a paycheck, and while they may well prefer Afghan national government to the Taliban, they aren’t really loyal to it, So once it became clear that the Western powers and their support was going away, all the Taliban had to do was credibly offer to accept the surrender of Army forces. Few wanted to be killed to keep this particular set of corrupt assholes in charge, and almost nobody was willing to fight for a lost cause. Really once the Taliban had visibly NOT slaughtered army troops that had surrendered, this was going to cascade pretty quickly. All of which shows you why killing prisoners is such a bad idea. Something that the Taliban seems to realize in a way that Al Qaeda doesn’t.
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You fell victim to one of the classic blunders - the most famous of which is “never get involved in a land war in Asia”…
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