Afghanistan Thread: 16 years Later, America is still there

[6souls]

Germany was in charge of setting up the county's infrastructure, but with the Taliban back in charge, that has fallen apart leading to massive losses. Also, Germany is sending 200 paratroopers to get staff out of Kabul, but are unlikely to evacuate anyone not in the city because they didn't send a single helicopter to aid them.

[Andalusian girls]

IMO there are a lot of countries whose populace would be better off if it was a US colony where we stabilize a socially liberal puppet government for limited blood and treasure. Unless "indefinite colony" was the final status of Afghanistan, though, the withdrawal was an eventuality necessitated by our decision to invade their country in the first place.

Also, we hadn't had fatalities for 18 months because Trump made a "don't shoot us and we won't shoot you btw we're leaving" deal with the Taliban. That represents substantial operational discipline/coordination on the part of the Taliban, honestly beyond what I thought they were capable of. If we were still there in a year there's no guarantee they wouldn't go back to their tomfoolery.

the eighteen month lack of fatalities precedes even the beginning of last year's peace talks, and the vast majority of the casualty reduction occurred when we ceased active combat operations around 2015. to wit casualties in 2020 during the Taliban-plays-nice-period were 11 (which includes non-combat casualties), in 2016 they were 14. besides the shift in operations a great deal of reduction was simply reducing our footprint from 100,000+ to 2,500.

to the crux, it is a lazy intellectual conflation to state that maintaining a support force of a few thousand to stabilize a country turns them into a colony. there has been a permanent force of tens of thousands in South Korea for 70 years to stabilize the peninsula and forestall North Korean invasion, and they have developed into a strong, free, and independent nation. Afghanistan is obviously a different kettle of fish, but there are precedents throughout the world where a U.S. military force in-country has acted to stabilize the political scene while not reducing the host nation to a vassal state. the perhaps most pertinent example would be the force of 2,500 troops currently in Iraq, who do not engage in combat, do not suffer combat casualties, but helped eradicate the cancerous ISIS growth and continue to promote political stability in that still fragile country.

[6souls]

https://twitter.com/MarcusReports/st...63089834512384

Scores of Afghans, who had been cleared to evacuate, managed to get onto the aircraft's half-open ramp. Instead of forcing them off, the crew decided to take-off.

[6souls]

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-...ost_type=share

The Afghan military has been fleeing to Uzbekistan with at least 750 troops accounted for.

[Andalusian girls]

Serious question: Is there a compelling reason that we withdrew our troops before our civilians / allies? I'm no four-star general, but that seems pretty fucking backward to me.

because the execution of the withdrawal was a clusterfuck of the first order. drawing down the troop totals to a skeletal force immediately before reintroducing thousands of soldiers back in country to complete the withdrawal speaks self-eloquently to the administration's organizational acumen. there was a drastic misunderstanding of the situation, a drastic overestimation of Afghan army abilities, a drastic underestimation of the Taliban, and a horrific miscalculation re how dependent Afghan security force morale was on the pledge of continued American support.

for those with the stomach for it two agonizing minutes of the president and his allies tricking themselves into believing what they were warned would happen would not happen immediately before it happened.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video...adf_video.html

it is one thing to argue the correct geopolitical move was to abandon Afghanistan to its new masters, that America needs to retrench to more vital regions and whatever the humanitarian concerns the only direct security concern from this wasteland is the rise of extremist Jihadism, which can (one could argue) be dealt with through intelligence arms and transnational drone strikes/special forces operations. it is a legitimate argument.

what can not be argued is that this was a properly conducted operation. there are some 20,000 Afghanis officially eligible for evacuation and resettlement as their work with U.S. forces put them at risk of reprisals (a preposterously low figure of course but it is what our Congress and State Department authorized), and as our guarantee to evacuate such individuals extends to three family members as well this brings the total to 80,000 American allies we were honor-bound to protect. the latest figure i saw was we've managed to evacuate 1,400 hitherto. and given fully half of the individuals identified live outside Kabul, and the administration had no plan to get them to Kabul, we can safely assume our incompetence has, at the least, condemned those ten thousand and their families to the mercy of the Taliban.

as stated above there is an argument to be made withdrawal was the correct course, individuals i like and respect are making it, and it is understandable for these individuals to celebrate the end of our participation in the war. but it is the rankest and most boot-licking partisanship to pretend this withdrawal was conducted competently and is a thing to be celebrated. it is a tragedy and we have made farce of it.

[6souls]

America needs to retrench to more vital regions

Saw a news report that the U.S. troops will be reinforcing the Indo-Pacific region (Japan, South Korea, Guam, and Hawaii).

[archibaldcrane]

Yeah, we definitely fucked up the exit, America should be taking in hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees and had arrangements for other countries to take in hundreds of thousands more - and that process should have been occurring over the past 6 months or more. Clearly they thought they had more time than they had, but even if it had taken months for Kabul to fall the amount of Afghans we prepared to get out was an order of magnitude too small if not more.

[Milkster]

What new hybrid of hate will be birthed from this mess

[6souls]

What new hybrid of hate will be birthed from this mess

Thus is the circle of life.

[archibaldcrane]

What new hybrid of hate will be birthed from this mess

[Salodin]

This is all fine and dandy, but the afghans aren't even interested in fighting. I just can't believe they gave up so easily, look at this live footage.



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[archibaldcrane]

Why should a single Afghan soldier give his life in an obviously losing cause? To forestall the Taliban by a couple months to make the evacuating Americans look better? I sure as fuck wouldn't do that.

[Byrthnoth]

We agreed in principle to the drawdown/ceasefire in September of 2019 and had at least 12k troops before the ceasefire drawdown started.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-51689443

We never had alignment with the Afghanis as we did with the South Korean military dictatorship. Bush's commitment to democracy-in-name made for a less stable government that couldn't muster a reliable army. We invaded a country and routed their military, then staffed a civilian government and tried to wait for... the military to change teams? It isn't like their military split when we went in.

The president that should have gotten us out of this war was Bush back when the Taliban said they would trade us Osama bin Laden for a 3 day ceasefire and proof of his guilt in 2001. If they actually turned him in, this war would have ended and Iraq probably wouldn't have happened.

[Kachiko]

The entire problem stems that there is no Afghanistan, except on a map, and we tried to make it so. It always has, and always will be, a loose cluster of tribes that have no national identity. The Taliban "control" it in the sense it's the most uniting ideology, but there will be a constant state of civil war unless the happen to actually unite everyone under the Islamic Extremist banner; most likely they will just pay off what warlrods they can or try to kill them, but there will always be conflict. The result was inevitable, but the execution was always faulty, and Biden's decision was just the cherry on top. In a few years, we'll have to go back in and whack a mole, and we always will, because there's nothing there worth the effort.

My current understanding of the end-game is two things: Fusion and super-conductivity. Once we have that, the world's energy crisis is solved and the Middle East, aside from Isreal, and whoever else modernizes their economy, will cease to be and will never be a problem again; can't come soon enough but it won't be in our lifetime.

[Lucavi]

But then you can't play hero and fire all those sweet new weapons you've just been itching to use.

The amount of Warhawks that existed in that 2000's era with political influence was immense.

[Andalusian girls]

We agreed in principle to the drawdown/ceasefire in September of 2019 and had at least 12k troops before the ceasefire drawdown started.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-51689443

We never had alignment with the Afghanis as we did with the South Korean military dictatorship. Bush's commitment to democracy-in-name made for a less stable government that couldn't muster a reliable army. We invaded a country and routed their military, then staffed a civilian government and tried to wait for... the military to change teams? It isn't like their military split when we went in.

The president that should have gotten us out of this war was Bush back when the Taliban said they would trade us Osama bin Laden for a 3 day ceasefire and proof of his guilt in 2001. If they actually turned him in, this war would have ended and Iraq probably wouldn't have happened.

the article is dated 29th of February 2020, presumably you're referring to an "in principle" agreement that was publicly declared dead within days of it being announced six months earlier. the months immediately following the in-principle agreement were more not less deadly than average for U.S. troops. looking at casualty rates between 2015-2021 and every year sees between 11 and 26 combat + non-combat casualties (compared to the highwater mark of 2010's 496) and it is disingenuous to pretend the treaty agreed to at the end of February 2020 was the catalyst. but it is easy enough to parse the data without bias.

http://icasualties.org/

your second paragraph is ahistorical. we captured the country in 2001 primarily through exploiting the Northern Alliance resistance, the Taliban never successfully pacifying the roughly northern third of Afghanistan, and the new government's leadership both civilian and military came from that organization. indeed your description more closely matches what occurred in Iraq successfully. we began paying off the Sunnis and they did indeed change teams.

[Andalusian girls]

Why should a single Afghan soldier give his life in an obviously losing cause? To forestall the Taliban by a couple months to make the evacuating Americans look better? I sure as fuck wouldn't do that.

you would have made a good Brigadier General in the Afghani military

but also yes it was readily apparent to everyone except, apparently, the decision makers in the Biden administration that U.S. support was propping up the Afghani military. once they lost the promise of that their already low morale collapsed dismally.

[Anoat]

Seen a video on book face today of one of the C130s taking off with people trying to cling on to the plane. Most people bailed out before it got airborne but not everyone. They didn’t last long once in the air. Long drop to splat on the tarmac. Fucked up.

[Mertron]

The entire problem stems that there is no Afghanistan, except on a map, and we tried to make it so. It always has, and always will be, a loose cluster of tribes that have no national identity. The Taliban "control" it in the sense it's the most uniting ideology, but there will be a constant state of civil war unless the happen to actually unite everyone under the Islamic Extremist banner; most likely they will just pay off what warlrods they can or try to kill them, but there will always be conflict. The result was inevitable, but the execution was always faulty, and Biden's decision was just the cherry on top. In a few years, we'll have to go back in and whack a mole, and we always will, because there's nothing there worth the effort.

My current understanding of the end-game is two things: Fusion and super-conductivity. Once we have that, the world's energy crisis is solved and the Middle East, aside from Isreal, and whoever else modernizes their economy, will cease to be and will never be a problem again; can't come soon enough but it won't be in our lifetime.

maybe the real Afghanistan is the friends we made along the way

[Andalusian girls]

The entire problem stems that there is no Afghanistan, except on a map, and we tried to make it so. It always has, and always will be, a loose cluster of tribes that have no national identity. The Taliban "control" it in the sense it's the most uniting ideology, but there will be a constant state of civil war unless the happen to actually unite everyone under the Islamic Extremist banner; most likely they will just pay off what warlords they can or try to kill them, but there will always be conflict. The result was inevitable, but the execution was always faulty, and Biden's decision was just the cherry on top. In a few years, we'll have to go back in and whack a mole, and we always will, because there's nothing there worth the effort.

well said. the failure in Afghanistan was multiple administrations in the making and it is not solely, or even primarily, Biden's fault. and one of the fundamental through-line failures of every American effort was attempting to build a top-down, centralized governing model a la modern first world states. a (relatively) stable Afghanistan always would have been a de-centralized confederation built around federalism that tied regional tribal leaders into a national government through deal-brokering and appealing to their self-interest.