Today, in Afghanistan, Taliban fighters took over the presidential palace in Kabul, the country’s capital, while the president of the U.S.-backed Afghan government, Ashraf Ghani, fled to Tajikistan.
My husband Glen died of ALS last year. The Veterans Administration considers ALS to be a service related illness- upwards of 20% of people diagnosed with ALS in a year are current or former military.
Wheeling Glen’s wheelchair through the VA hospital here in Minneapolis last year was a hellish experience because of COVID. And the incredibly vulnerable, sickly and disabled folks I saw being cared for had to be truly in need to risk a trip - I was praying the whole time, trust me.
The care we received was stellar. Adaptive equipment that helped me care for Glen at home, a van to help me transport him safely and every other week visits from a home health care nurse to check Glen’s vitals helped immensely.
Now multiply my experience across the country with every family caring for a sick or disabled veteran. Millions.
Whatever you need to rant about here concerning American military policies around the world, when completed, please take a moment to think about those paying the ultimate price for those policies - the women and men who comprise the military. And if you are able, support one of the many organizations that support veterans and their families. My personal favorite is Paralyzed Veterans of America but there are many. My gratitude for their help with Glen’s care and help obtaining Glen’s military benefits is endless.
Afghanistan was a debacle, start to finish. The Taliban’s treatment of women is terrifying. But I know, from first hand experience, that watching a loved one die slowly and painfully is also terrifying-and way outside the military’s thought process when planning campaigns. So, by all means write your congress people and share your knowledgeable and thoughtful opinions but please support veterans and their families too.
I am so sorry for your loss, Sheila. My first cousin, also a veteran and 6 years younger than me, died of ALS a few years ago. He was still on active duty when diagnosed. His time with ALS would have been far more complicated without the support he and his wife received from the PVA.
You have the biggest right to rant, TC. Not asking folks not to rant. Asking them to do something in addition to ranting here. Trying to motivate folks. My brother is a Vietnam Vet who rants with me all the time. Then he goes and sits with his buds at the American legion hall and rants some more. After that, he calls his congressman - and the man lives in Louisiana so he's talking out of tune in a red state. After listening to him, I try and figure out what I should do next - something that might make a difference. Don't assume you understand my motivations for doing what I do. I come from a military family top to bottom. I have paid a price for that the others, who have cared for the broken and dying, understand well. I appreciate your perspective and generally learn something from your rants. I hope you learn something from mine. Thanks for being here.
Thank you for this bit of insight. I've had the opportunity to accompany a Veteran friend of mine through several appointments/surgeries/evaluations at the VA in Portland. I see the spouses. I got to sit with 3 young men (in their mid-late teens) while their Dad was in surgery, with the ultimate result of Stage 4 colon cancer. That was heartbreaking. The families pay the costs.
So sorry William. One of the toughest things I’ve witnessed are the multiple effects of Agent Orange on the human body. A tough price for families and veterans to pay for serving in the military.
I'm a member of a military family. I do indeed support veteran groups and veterans. Not sure why you think we who "rant" have not lost loved ones to war and its consequences. I am very truly sorry about the tragic death of your husband. But it doesn't help others who may be mourning their own losses to impugn their motives.
It was always about the oil. But I did not know about "spent" uranium use in our weapons and armour. Despicable. Just despicable. And we taxpayers paid for it, then paid for the veteras' medical bills (and widow benefits). And the environment? Despicable.
Yes, the veterans' medical bills. I don't think Americans have any grasp of what the medical costs will be to treat the current veterans and those now coming back from the Middle East. Every time I call the VA to make an appt. or ask a question, the first thing asked of me is, "Have you thought of harming yourself or others?" That is the VA greeting when a vet calls. The veteran suicide rate is real. I'll bet the government is worried about getting new enlistments when word of those troubles get around.
What I posted on Lucian Truscott's substack posting this morning:
As always, Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires. But what I find stunningly hypocritical in virtually all media outlets, in the political community and, yes, in the military (especially those 4-star generals NPR loves to interview) is all the hand wringing that is going on now. There was virtual silence and nothing but shrugs when the Taliban started assassinating reporters, female educators and female members of the Afghan assembly, anyone with clear ties to the west. They "didn't take responsibility" for the murders, so all those people now hollering about how horrible it is shrugged and said "we don't know who killed her" (which is bullshit and we know it). It reminds me all too much of Shrubbie Bush discovering, after 9/11, that Afghani women were being oppressed--who knew?! I'm sickened by the whole thing, especially by the hubris of the US government and military leadership in thinking that they are so special they can change an inevitable outcome. Why did the Taliban win? Because they had never really lost.
Over the last several days I've found myself screaming at the interviewers on NPR. In one instance, a person representing the view of the Biden administration was trying to explain the rationale for the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, now. He was interrupted, talked over, and pushed back on every point with but "what about the humanitarian disaster?"and never really given a chance to fully articulate Biden's position, nor even to respond to the interviewer's questions. In another instance, a republican congressman, from Ohio , I think, was allowed to spout a completely erroneous 'blame Joe Biden for this mess' diatribe with no questions asked of him. He just had a megaphone to the NPR audience all to himself, as though he were on Fox being egged on by one of those nut jobs. I'm finding NPR's coverage of this stage of what has been a 20-year long fiasco to be as one sided and inaccurate as the Republicans who are rewriting its history. All I can conclude is that knee jerk liberals can be as tendentious as knee jerk reactionaries.
Overall, the coverage has consisted of emotional hand wringing rather than informed analysis..like no one seems to know anything at all about Afghanistan. And yes, I am sending this to NPR....
Please do send it to them and demand a response. I listen and donate to my local NPR stations but have noticed this happens too often, giving a megaphone to republican officials with no pushback or deep questions at all . Your description of giving them a megaphone is spot on. Many times in the last five years I wondered what the hell they were thinking. Even Adi Cornish this weekend kept jumping in and interuppting to challenge Maura Liasson's commentary on the situation in Afghanistan. Very rude to say the least.
It's not just NPR. Through all of Tя☭mp's presidency, through all of COVID's first (and now second) wave, through everything else we've been through, I never felt the need to turn off the TV news until now. Covering Afghanistan and what is happening now, and throwing the blame to Biden, has finally done me in.
I've noticed the same thing. I loved what Heather wrote about this and already knew most of it and agreed that although it is sad what the people in that region are going through, we can't be the cure. Evidence abounds. So, before wee let too many more of the confused people who live in our own country go down any of those terrible paths here, let's focus on our own citizens in that regard now. One of the things we've learned over the years is that if you want to change the health of a baby, start with the grandmother. Look at how it takes two generations before "our ways" become normal for people who immigrate here. And it is "normal" for the grandchildren, not the grandparents. The older often soften as the kids come into their own maturity. *sigh* Complex stuff. No denying that!
Be not surprised. NPR has become a "nice" Republican outlet. Seriously, that was one of the many "infiltrations" a few decades ago, along with school boards and local elected offices to stop the dastardly liberals. (I am facetious with that last part.) Their complaint was the federal tax dollars being spent to support a voice for the left
Certainly not facetious about local school boards or elected offices...we see it here in the (2nd?) bluest state, especially on school boards which hire superintendents. About 8 years ago I wrote a scathing letter to the editor of our local newspaper calling out the school superintendent for his blatantly racist speech at my daughter's graduation. He left town to go back to his red state where his rhetoric was appreciated. Only recently have dastardly liberals been able to successfully challenge and oust some local decision makers. We're hoping and working for it to continue, having realized we've been asleep at the switch.
It’s all about the establishment and the establishments politicians, both democrat and republican. And the establishment politicians include pretty much all of the republicans and a large swath of the democrats, including Biden ( although I am surprised at some of the good things he’s done and is advocating) , but he did vote for the Iraq war, along with Hillary and others to make a point. As far as I’m concerned the best set of politicians the U. S. has is the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. We had that wing of our political system in place once before In this country and the country by and large did pretty good, and that political wing was FDR’s government.
In fact it was so good that after WW2 ,Western Europe , the Scandinavian countries mainly, but Germany, Holland all adopted a reasonable facsimile of FDR’s government, and look where they are today as compared to us.....
I just watched Andrea Mitchell’s show on MSNBC today, and my thoughts about her Afghanistan coverage parallels your thoughts about NPR’s Afghanistan coverage.
Carolyn, I, too often find myself screaming at NPR for their shallow reporting.
NPR doesn't give "informed analysis." Like most of the other networks, they mostly read the censored reports. They also have have time limits for to which they must adhere. Their reports on Palestine/Israel just give us the Israeli lies. The local NPR station here in south central PA does carry BBC radio from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., when most of us are sleeping. That is unfortunate, since BBC, which is usually very prejudice, does often carry "informed analysis" of some stories. These stories are broadcast in England at Greenwich Mean Time, which is five hours ahead of us in Easter Time. If it is 11 p.m. here, it's already 5 a.m. the next day in England, so their broadcast is in the morning rush hour there.
Its not only NPR - it appears that our "main stream media" - you know, the places that have to show the "two sides" to everything political? When on one side its lies and misinformation & on the other side -TRUTH!! But they appear unable to say that. I imagine its the bottom line of their organizations, but the responsibility lies as much with them as it does with Faux, OAN or Newsmax. I guess a lot of us here are old enough to remember actually listening & watching the NEWS all those year ago! And I'm sure most of us here knew exactly what to expect when either Biden did pull our military out or did not.
By the way - did you see that the RNC removed the page on their website that bragged about TFG's magnificent deal with the Taliban?????? Yup - took it down. Quite frankly they are a bunch of chicken-s__ts! Sorry if that perturbs anyone - but its true.
And the Halliburton Boeing etc military industrial complex that W brought into his administration. (Cheney et al) profited billions while working class American military and Afghans were murdered Ann maimed.
The New American Century was founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan in 1997, and its stated focus watt "to promote American global leadership.” In the above Wikipedia link, the organization stated that "American leadership is good both for America and for the world," and sought to build support for "a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity.”
From Wikipedia: “In 1998, Kristol and Kagan advocated regime change in Iraq throughout the Iraq disarmament process through articles that were published in the New York Times. Following perceived Iraqi unwillingness to co-operate with UN weapons inspections, core members of the PNAC including Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, R. James Woolsey, Elliot Abrams, Donald Rumsfeld, Robert Zoellick, and John Bolton were among the signatories of an open letter initiated by the PNAC to President Bill Clinton calling for the removal of Saddam Hussein. ..... Stating that American policy "cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council," the letter's signatories asserted that "the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf"
All of the above characters would advise Pres. Bush, and they led America into the Iraq War, with the cheerleading of the military-industrial establishment. When I read of “our vital interests” in a foreign land, I want to immigrate to France.
Yes, and now today I read that Liz Chaney, who for all her support of an investigation into January 6th, has been criticizing Biden for his handling of a situation made worse by her dad.
Yesyerday, I also heard Cheney, on NPR, say that the former guy was to blame, along with Pompeo and Rand Paul. The Taliban had been invited to Camp David, hadn't they? Of course, she also blamed Biden....shared blame, she said.
Have to say, I agreed with her in that instance. Seems like the whole removal of Americans & the Afghans who helped us wasnt handled as well as it should have been. Why were they still there? Should we still be there - hell no. But certainly watching that plane take off with people hanging off & dropping to their deaths? Where was the military or security at that point? Or was there no thought given that this would happen? Sure did look like VietNam all over - even down to the helicopter evacuating people from the Embassy. My gosh, I certainly have no foreign policy experience but for the past week or two - we all could see the advance of the Taliban!
Sorry dont mean to pile on with all the naysayers, but really?
And don't forget Erick Prince's Blacwater mercenaries the U.S. government under all administrations since W who were hired to fight in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places. Prince, brother of Betsy DeVos maid oodles of money.
The Taliban are pushed from the rear by Putin and a network of mean oligarchs and drug cartels. Lots of money, lots of antipathy for the West, and lots of motivation to humiliate Biden. I am rather certain that Trump called for our military withdrawal to take place during the Biden administration because Putin told him so, just like we removed most of our military from Syria under Trump so Russia could dominate. "Praise Allah and pass the ammunition!"
Thank you for one of the most brilliantly written summaries of the Afghan war in light of today's events that I have seen and, I am certain, that will be written.
First, the NY Times, where I get most of my news, a news source that was pro for American invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, is saying that the Afghan war cost a mere $86 Billion dollars. That is an outrageous lie. Your estimate of one trillion may even be low. The amount of infrastructure the USA built in in Afghanistan, had it been built in the US, I once read, could have built a new American public High School in every town in America. Or, it could have built a new Hospital in every town in America.
Second, the NY Times has Bret Stephens today, a Republican who often obscures the actual past to create a false look at the present, does precisely that in his lengthy blame of Biden for what happened. Your writing here clearly delineates Donald Trump's role in the US pullout after Trump's agreement with the Taliban. Although Trump was probably being told what to do by Putin, I completely agree with pulling out of Afghanistan.
The entire Republican party is trying to wash away the fact that Bush started the war, and failed to find Osama Bin Laden, even though the 911 attack was sponsored mostly by Saudi Arabian citizens. They are also washing away that fact that Trump, probably operating under Putin's instructions, had negotiated the removal of all American presence with the Taliban.
Biden is doing EXACTLY the right thing here after 20 years of the USA sponsoring a textbook case of how to create a disaster in another country by wantonly killing innocent Afghans with contractors and sometimes the US Military. Including killing almost all of the 12 year old boys in an Afghani village who were gathering wood outside the village. A 50 caliber machine gun from a US Helicopter killed them all but one. Can nobody remember the past?
My hearty congratulations to Joe Biden for having the courage to do what no other President would do. Biden has implicitly admitted our mistake, which was invading Afghanistan in the first place, and then corrected it by getting our boys and our money out of that country.
George W. Bush, a Republican, should go down in history as the most corrupt, worst President in US History, for his failed wars.
Biden should go down in History as a mature, right thinking American for removing our incompetent presence.
Your otherwise phenomenal post was blemished by the reference, "getting our boys . . . out . . ." You must realize this is how women's contributions are erased from history. I do not wish to be unkind but please update your mindset. After all, it is women and children who have the most to lose now that the Taliban has taken control.
No edit function except "delete" and I'm glad you did not delete the post. I am 65 and have lived a lifetime of professional sleights. I understood there was no malice in the comment and have been guilty of my own outdated comments. We have to help each other recognize the problem. If only Andrew Cuomo had listened and understood he was living an outdated mindset!
To edit, copy your response, paste it to another page (e.g. Word document on computer, Samsung Notes on my phone), correct it, copy edited version, post it again, then delete original. Convoluted, but possible.
While I actively protested this war from the beginning, I’m shocked at the lack of strategy in our withdrawal. djt set up the failure by excluding the Afghan government in the negotiations, but, Biden’s administration could have gone back to the negotiating table. At the very least they should have removed sensitive personal before withdrawing troops.
We were never going to win this war. We have only added to the Afghani’s suffering.
I completely agree with you. What’s happening to all of the Afghanistan interpreters that allied with us, and who should have been protected, is a disaster. And what about the women and girls who were encouraged to take positions of leadership and self autonomy? Many of them were given assurances that they would be “supported” and they are reaching out for help. Do we just abandon those we have promised to protect?
It is shocking how fast the government in Kabul and the Afghani soldiers that we were paying and equipping gave up and ran.
Biden cannot be blamed for the fact that the USA spent $100 Billion equipping and training the locally born people of Iraq to fight for themselves, only to find them unwilling to do so.
I think the Afghan collapse occurred rapidly due to the well known and widespread disdain the Afghan people held the government of Kabul with.
I think Biden was probably misinformed by someone about the corruption, deceit, lies and downright criminal behavior of the Afghani government.
As one person noted today: The US supported Afghani government would shake down people during the day and the Taliban would do it at night.
Mike, I wholeheartedly agree it was long past time to be out for many reasons. My only criticism was that knowing we were withdrawing troops, we owed it to Afghanistan translators, drivers and support personnel, we promised to protect, an orderly evacuation.
I listened to Afghanistan veterans talk today about their extraordinary effort to help those they promised to protect by providing the administration in May with detailed extraction plans, only to be ignored until after troops were withdrawn this week.
They talked about the moral injury soldiers would carry because of this betrayal. We are leaving 10s of thousands behind who risked their lives for our soldiers.
Yes, we (yes, us) appear to be leaving them behind without regard for their contribution.
However, we, the USA, did exactly the same thing in Vietnam. There is a famous photo of the last American being lifted off the top of the building surrounded by the Vietnamese who helped them up to that point.
I do not believe that is Biden's fault. I believe that the fault lies with all of us.
We, all of us, allowed a dim witted, corrupt, man to push us into war where none was needed. We did this knowing that invading an entire country just to find one man was dumb. Then, to keep the war profits going, we allowed them to keep that war going.
We should have known how it would all end because, we have done this before.
Mike, there was a pretty similar picture from Kabul a day or so ago! Whats the old saying? Insanity is doing the same thing over & over and expecting a different outcome! Seems to be an American trait!
I don’t disagree with the withdrawal. I disagree heartily with America’s engagement in the first place. I remember that even in the wake of 9/11 there was tepid criticism voiced by a few. Why not a limited police action, multinational in scope, to simply catch and deal with bin Laden? With that mindset America would assuredly not have attacked Iraq. And the police presence in Afghanistan would have not lasted 20 weeks, let alone 20 years. Whatever happened to American isolationism?
And now here we are. This is a seminal moment in American history. I disagree thoroughly that Biden is a hero here. He has done the right thing the wrong way. What could have been an orderly devolution from war to peace has instead become a panicked withdrawal.
Was there no intelligence predicting the speed with which the Taliban would move? Or did Biden defy intelligence warnings?
He has done so well so far and this has broken my heart. His Presidency is now irretrievably off the rails. We can point the finger at Trump. We can say that Biden was simply honoring a badly-conceived Trump deal. But that is all stuff for history to sort out.
For now Biden will wear this decision and it must be hoped that the ramifications are limited to what can be seen now. Anything much more complex and the domestic agenda, so difficult but so promising, will be road kill.
"I disagree thoroughly that Biden is a hero here. He has done the right thing the wrong way."
Do you think that there is, or was, a "right way" to extricate the United States of America from Afghanistan once we invaded, only to learn Osama Bin Laden was not there, but, to continue to kill innocent Afghani citizens?
Reminder -> The USA: A country that directly killed, through war upwards of 200,000 Afghani citizens, people who played exactly zero part in the attack on the Twin Towers?
I submit that the right thing to do was never associated with the invasion of a country, Afghanistan, full of people who had nothing to do with 911.
In fact, the "right way" today, is to get the corrupt, evil, deadly, wrongheaded USA out of Afghanistan as fast as possible.
This has already resulted in one of the world's most corrupt governments, the USA supported "democracy" in Kabul, to flee. A great outcome.
The "democracy" in Kabul was, in all seriousness, a completely corrupt government that, when it looked like no more payments from the US would be forthcoming, simply fled to safety.
Good riddance to both that government and the USA.
Eric O'Donnell: I agree with you... and it's shocking to think that the analysts didn't understand that the Afghanistan people have intergenerational PTSD... which no amount of training can change. From the political leaders through the entire military, and the population in general. This should have been foreseen...
Mike, Bret Stephens is exactly as you describe him, but he is an Opinion writer not a reporter. Opinion mean his opinion. He also is an editor of an Israeli media outlet and an apologist for that country. Comments from some readers of an Opinion he's written often scorch his self-importance and loose 'logic'.
From my post "Why We Fail" at my substack blog, That's Another Fine Mess:
In 2008, Ruslan Aushev, a highly decorated combat veteran of the Soviet adventure in Afghanistan who served two tours, first as an infantry battalion commander and later in charge of a full Soviet regiment during nearly five years, gave an interview to the Toronto Globe and Mail:
"Canadians and Americans are learning the hard way. You have been there seven years and you have no prospect of early victory. We knew by 1985 that we could not win," he recalls. It then took Moscow four more years to extricate hundreds of thousands of troops from Afghanistan, while claiming victory on the way out. Afghanistan was plunged into civil war."We could take any village, any town and drive the mujahedeen out. But when we handed ground over to the Afghan army or police they would lose it in a week.”
"The Taliban may not be able to win militarily but they can't be defeated and sooner or later the Western alliance will be forced with pullout," he warned. Support for the insurgents will grow the longer the foreign armies remain in Afghanistan, he said. Although the Soviets deployed more than 100,000 soldiers across Afghanistan and trained an Afghan army three times the size of Kabul's current security forces, it was never enough, Mr. Aushev said. "There will have to be an accord with the Taliban, because at least 50 per cent of the Afghan population supports them. It's impossible to conquer the Afghans. Alexander the Great couldn't do it, the British couldn't do it, we couldn't do it and the Americans won't do it. No one can.”
This morning, amidst the reports of the end of the U.S. Afghan war, NBC News Pentagon Correspondent Courtney Kube gave the best analysis of the actual military situation on the ground I have heard in 20 years of war reporting about Afghanistan.
She pointed out that, no matter how much training and equipment the United States could provide, we could not give the Afghans the will to fight, the willingness to fight to the death against the Taliban. “And throughout the war, the Taliban fighters have been willing to lay down their lives for their cause,” she stated, nailing the essential truth. She went on to point out that while there were Afghan special forces that had been fighting very competently for several years, “The average soldiers, they’re out in the rural areas, and they get told that the people who have been supporting them are leaving in a few months. That means no more medevac, no more air support, no more logisitics - the simple things like providing food and fuel and ammunition regularly. No more air control to tell the air force where to provide support. You have to understand the corruption there in the government, in the military, they’re unable to provide just those absolute basics.. That loss of support led to a loss of morale. And the result was they stopped fighting because they couldn’t see a way they could win.”
No world power has succeeded in imposing its will on Afghanistan. Not Alexander, not the British, not Russia, not the US, not nobody no how. One cannot expect W or Trump to have known better, since neither knows anything, but the military brass should have known better, and Obama should have known better. Bin Laden was found by a covert intelligence operation. The war had nothing to do with it and may well have impeded it. Obama knew enough to get that part right. Too bad he let the military brass bamboozle him on the rest of it, but that's not a real surprise either. They're experts at using the ignorant bellicosity of the American electorate to bamboozle presidents into allowing them to prosecute continual war. MacArthur bamboozled Truman, Westmoreland bamboozled Johnson, Petreaus and the rest bamboozled Obama. I presume there were numerous earlier bamboozlings but I don't know enough pre-WWII history to put them on the list. It's a little different with W and Trump. They bamboozled themselves on every front, but the American electorate, they're a constant fountain of ignorance. A warmongering pack of rabble from way back.
Rex, you are correct. And Obama also fell into the the chasm that is filled with the hubris of presidents, thinking that they actually can change an inevitable outcome.
'Obama should have know better' would be an appropriate evaluation in other situations, although, what it really spells are his failures, his weaknesses -- not a truly good politician -- not a politician in any sense.
Obama had plenty of political skill. He got the ACA passed. Clinton and many before him, since Teddy Roosevelt, failedto do that. Then backlash set in and has never subsided. Obamma would have had to be a genius politician on the order of Lincoln, FDR, or Lyndon Johnson to overcome that. I think his weakness was in assuming he was dealing with reasonable people.
The whole deal started off with a backroom giveaway to Big Pharma and a lack of courage to offer a Public Option. Obama wavered a lot during the course of the process.
I think his goal was to just get something/anything passed. It did bring insurance to a lot of people but it's been getting watered down over the years. A lot of the initial "Have to do's" have been changed. Like complete annual physicals, now it's every 2 or 3 yrs where on the off years it's more like an interview/health assessment. And we're still being robbed blind by Big Pharma.
It's not universal healthcare like the other major industrialized countries. It's still driven by private companies taking 15% off the top. This is why we have copays and other fees. We paid for the insurance but the company took a big cut so we have to pay again.
It wasn't so much genius as it was schmoozing and capitulating to the insurance and pharmaceutical complexes.
All true, but he got something workable done. Nobody else did in a hundred years of attempts, so second-guessing his compromises is borderline hubris, at least.
Yes, that he did, no question about it. Then it was hard to gauge but the Obama we know today has left an obvious trail.
It's like Michelle said in an interview when her husband was running the first time if he'd run again if he didn't get the nomination. She said, in all honesty, they would because they'd be wealthy by then.
He's the perfect example of the rags to riches American dream and good for him. His actions speak louder, however, than his words sometimes.
All we can do is second guess if he doesn't come right out and say it. It's all part of the American Soap Opera. ;-)
We can revisit this when Stacey is the first Black FEMALE President. That's the real test.
And he allowed the Republicans to draw it out and water it down, when he had the votes to pass the original bill. So much for bipartisan participation.
At the time it still seemed logical, kinda, sorta. Many thought, and I was hoping, the GOP could be pulled back into a reality where compromising wasn't a 4 letter word. He just kept trying too long relying on his office to have absolute leverage.
He should have wised up when Mitch promised to make him a one term president. Barack had the last laugh there for sure. #sweet
Yes, Obama didn’t realize how absolute their opposition was until too late. McCain’s blindside was the only reason the ACA passed.
And let’s not forget, the ACA was a version of the Republican plan Bill Clinton rejected and Mitt Romney later implemented in Massachusetts. And still they wouldn’t take “yes for an answer.”
Nonetheless, I’m deeply grateful for all the ACA has accomplished.
We so wanted to love Obama and his beautiful family that we ignored his passivity in the face of any opposition. We needed someone to fight for us and he never did.
Hear, hear, Christopher…and will ALWAYS be infinitely better in most every way than the diabolical iDJT (hard for me to stomach much negativity about Obama these days, in such fresh, stark contrast). Plus, Obama “gave us” Joe Biden!
Ashley, Barack did not give us Biden. Remember when he favored H. Clinton over him? Biden brings Biden. In terms of Obama, I have not noticed him taking a bashing. Some columnists have continued to underrate him in a nasty way, but I don't have a general sense of that. Obama was a big disappointment from my point of view. We are on to other much more important business, so I will not take the time to lay it out. I posted a couple of negative comments about him, which were from reputable sources and not personal in nature.
Yea, and Biden's team is pumping up a war (like) attitude toward China and more money into the Pentagon to build a nuclear bomb many more times powerful that those laid on Japan...and, I seem to remember, ordering 600 of them.
"The US is building a new $100bn nuclear missile based on a set of flawed and outdated assumptions, a new report by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) will say." (Google)
Not to mention also, increasing sanctions on that mammoth
island of Cuba. Biden's no prince of peace or good will.
Holding that as a frame, obscures the lethal realities of Obama. Straight truth helps illusions and delusions disintegrate. Have we learned yet that suave talk and cool handsome in black, brown, yellow, pink, purple, white or green packaging (skin) doth not mean a person walks their talk nor furthers the welfare of those with economic, educational, sex/age and class circumstances different than their own "kind."(especially, level of wealth and "elite" education).
Particularly, if they give Nancy Pelosi the credit she is due for her work on the the Affordable Healthcare Act. That is a big ask, even while there is plenty of documentation of her role and input.
His problem was lack of experience. Had he come to the office with say ten years as a senator, it would have been different. He listened to bad advisors like Vichy Democrat Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod (who might have been a good election advisor, but campaigning is different from governing). Had he gone out and campaigned for the ticket in 2010 the way he campaigned for the office in 2008, history would be vastly different. Every Democrat who understood the political crisis was screaming over the lack of comprehension in the White House about what they faced. Figuring it out in 2012 was way too late.
I still love the guy as a person, and will never forget how good it felt calling people for money (the worst job in politics) and the response I got from people who had never donated to anyone throughout the campaign. But I was waaaaayyyyy wrong when I turned to a co-worker after the election was called and said "We've finally won the election of 1968."
It is beyond me why there is any tangent of discussion about Pres Obama today and “blame” for Afghanistan on a president of less than 7 mos. Yet very little of the former’s negotiations with Taliban thugs with no seat at the table with the Afghan government supported by how many years?
With this kind of discussion, the Repubs will have to do little to scrub their clamor and support of Trump “ending” the war and then constant discussion of Biden “continuing” the war when the former lost. The politics is disgusting to me when really nothing can be said or criticized until all Americans get home and any others that will need shelter.
Love seems to cloud your keen vision in this case. He couldn't get down to the politics of working with representatives and senators. Not a negotiator, and why didn't you name Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers as two more problems? TC, the list is longer, but there are much more important problems inside the door.
As the negotiations and the vote-getting on raising the debt ceiling dragged it became clear that Obama really was not a good negotiator. Several times, just as a deal seemed imminent, the discussions collapsed—and very publicly.
'... when it comes to schmoozing with those of different political ilk — a key ingredient for a successful policy persuader — he’s sorely equipped said Chris Matthews.
'The fundamental flaw of the current National Security Strategy, a flaw it shares with all its predecessors, is that it ignores concessions, tradeoffs, and hard choices inherent in American foreign policy.' (Christopher Hemmer)
'Paralysis by committee. One of Obama’s greatest failures as a leader is the homogeneity in perspectives and attitudes of those closest to him. His economic advisors — Larry Summers and Tim Geithner — share a similarly orthodox economic mindset. Numerous eminent economists have complained vociferously about being frozen out — they can’t gain access to Obama. Sound familiar? It should: organizational closure is the same mistake Dubya made — he surrounded himself with neocons, and when their ideas failed, so did his presidency, and the nation.' (Harvard Business Review.)
'Let the burning platform sputter. Where is the Obama administration’s burning platform — not merely for health care, but for the multitude of challenges facing America? Where is the burning platform for education, finance, transportation, manufacturing, energy — to name just a few 21st century challenges? Great leaders ignite burning platforms — and never let them sputter.' (Harvard Business Review)
He was aloof. Kept his distance from legislators and without the temperament and skills to legislate. There is a lot more fault with Obama as not a politician, but points have been made.
He wanted to be loved and run with the cool kids as was made clear at this year's bday bash. Disinviting the ones who brought you to the dance is not "going high".
He is a talented writer. I cannot tell whether his level of drive and depth in that arena are strong enough. Security and luxury may be more in keeping with his instincts.
I do know that Roosevelt was bamboozled into refusing aid to the European Jews, and that led to 6,000,000 of them dying in concentration camps. I don't know whether he was shouted down by advisors, generals, or perhaps he was aware of our "Christian" citizens' anti-semitism, but the result was the same - they were murdered.
Courtesy of Katya Partan's post on HCR's Facebook:
"...we built an Afghan National Army for a nation that simply doesn't exist...the Taliban proved how you fight in Afghanistan. And it's about the long term, really in-depth knowledge of local politics and the ability to understand which levers to put pressure on and how to isolate and work around in a very methodical manner local power structures. We never had any time for that."
Afghanistan is defined, at least by the external world if not by themselves, as a distinct geographic area. The lines on the map effectively mean nothing in the minds of the people. This mountainous region is a collection of "kingdoms" and peoples ruled by traditional and/or opportunistic War Lords and this is not going to change even with the Taliban. Coalitions and adaptations amongst them are made, regrouping those with common interests which maintains the traditional priviledges of the leaders and the horrendously patriarchic and brutal nature of their society. The War Lords and the Taliban leaders share the spoils while the people mostly only survive as they have done for centuries. Like in the US South, the adherence of part of the population...the men... is assured by showing them that another part is worse off than them ...the women. Both in reality live precariously in a state of fear as they have done since time immemorial. The Clock never applied to this mountainous backwords of humanity.
I would agree with much of this sharp analysis, but the scorn for a world not based in the rapacious nation-state disfigures it. I’m surprised by that—scorn for the people who live between the lines drawn by the West and called Afghanistan is of course rampant as we abandon them to the hell our interfering ignorance has caused, but you are an intelligent and thoughtful person so I’m disappointed to see it here. Disappointed as well to find there seems no limit to HCR’s approval and defense of Joe Biden. My friends who work with people in Afghanistan are sleepless with fear, grief and shame for the human beings Biden has taken off our list of responsibilities. This president ran on a platform of Niceness, touting an expertise in grieving and fellow feeling that I hadn’t seen a lot of outside his grief for his own family members, and fellow feeling expressed in encounters with individuals undergoing exactly similar personal losses. Maybe the Afghan people have the usual problem—not quite White enough to grieve with? The Pentagon has developed a special program though, to help Afghan interpreters who managed to get out before the fall of the cities grieve the beheadings of their colleagues left behind. So we are off the hook for grieving too.
Surprising - how gullible we seem to remain about our "true" intentions for our invasion of Afghanistan - as if we care more about the status of women and the other downtrodden there more than we care about the profits the USA war/weapons industry makes. How many billions have we spent on insuring all our own people of their right to vote? How many billions have we fueled the IRS to force the Big Rich/Corporations to fork over their fair share in tax dollars to help fund infrastructure and creative production to mediate climate warming/catastrophe?
Mary, there is no scorn in my thoughts or words. I'm just realist, have an understanding of some of the forces shaping events and a great respect for history. Life on earth is not necessarily governed by niceness and consideration for the other
Agreed. My words on Biden’s Niceness were bitter. I found his emphasis on it tacky and insulting to our intelligence. But the lack of any sense of the moral tragedy now, the lack of foresight and imagination in his management of the bad hand left him by Trump, is to be deplored. And feared.
When a sentence pulls the threads together, 'The Clock never applied to this mountainous backwards of humanity'. It need not be mountainous, the land could be flat or hilly, too. Thank you, Stuart.
Well, most of The Middle East could be described in similar terms, and Mohammed was called for as a negotiator by War Lords exhausted from fighting each other. In my understanding of this region there is the early circumcision of little boys, creating an artificial strengthening of clan loyalty, but not leaving the potential soldiers with as deep a trauma as when the same operation is done to teenagers, as in subsaharan Africa. Both Moses and Mohammed understood that this practice could not remain tribal since the tribes would then continue to fight each other, so it was made "religious", and thereby created a wider unity capable of fighting "the others".
Assad's Syria, Gaddafi's Libya, and Hussein's Irak were all states based on balancing the different tribal powers against each other, and tyranny instead of generally accepted central power. The US attack on Irak has created a turmoil in Syria where all different groups, with strengthened clan loyalty, have turned against, or been made to fight each other; maybe avoiding The Clash of Civilisations, where Muslims would join against Jews and Christians; along the lines of Samuel P. Huntingdon.
The establishment of accepted central power in Afghanistan remains to be seen. The Chinese are said to make contact with the Talibans. Their huge business interests and sense of central power may accomplish what other empires did not, or just confirm that Afghanistan is where empires go to die.
Morning TC. The lesson was already, given our epoch's short memory span, perfectly clear in Vietnam. The same thought, like 'em or hate 'em, dynamized the Viet Cong.They were fighting for the "freedom" and survival of their country. The leaders of the South were fighting for the maintenace of their personal interests and priviledges. The US never really had an idea of what they were fighting for other than a stupid and irrelevant nonsense in terms of political thought....the Domino Theory.
The Domino Theory, initially underlined by Eisenhower in 1954, was a left over of 1945 and the panic concerning the overly rapid advance of Stalin's troups well beyond Berlin and the rigid application of the Yalta agreement. We have paid dearly for the "Reds under the beds" incomprehension and the idea that ownership of the means of production by the "people" is in total contradiction (McCarthy et al) with the capitalist system. In reality the wealthy capitalists understand well and work closely and very profitably with "state capitalists" masquerading as communists....they understand and appreciate monopoly power and market fixing when they see. The capitalist critic of the "democratic" system is that they are not more like the state ownership systems as we stop them enjoying total spoiliation rights....unlike their state system partners. And they have the nerve to call the Democrats "Socialist"!
Basically quite simple but short term, Elie. "Our enemy's enemy is our friend" on the one hand and on the other Putin has been doing what the CIA were previously doing funding and arming the Taliban to the extent of his limited means...tit for tat between fair weather friends and enemies! It certainly won't last longer than the final flight out.
Probably because they were state backers, where do you think the Taliban got all of their arms and ammunition? They don’t have any industries necessary to manufacture the armaments that they demonstrated to have in such abundance. If you think we pushed in a lot of that stuff you would be right, but the Taliban had a supply line equal to their needs as well.
Interestingly, every US veteran who has gone back to Vietnam and met their "opposite numbers" has come away with how much they like them. While I was researching my two books on the war, I was put in touch with Dr. Nguyen Sy Hung, historian of the Vietnam People's Air Force, who put me in touch with retired Lt. General Phu Thi Thai (an ace from the war) and retired Senior Colonel Tu De (last living participant in the attack on USS Higbee and the raid on Tan Son Nhut on april 28, 1975 that shut down the evacuation and has been blamed for 46 years on "renegade VNAF pilots, since they didn't believe the North Vietnames could learn to fly A-37s that fast - another final underestimation of the enemy) and they are excellent people. US pilots who have read "Historic Confrontations," the VPAF official history, say it is more accurate than any of the US "official history" - I was privileged to get the first English-language translation in hardback, signed by all three.
Not only is the corruption and moral of Afghans rubbing off on our troops, but the extremism is too, when you consider how many of our own vets ransacked our Capitol.
Whose corruption is rubbing off on whom? Did we declare war on Afghanistan? Was the real motivation for the war "enlightenment" of the heathen or for USA weapons/war industry to rake in more than a few shekels? If it was"enlightenment" about the virtues of democracy, how devoted are we - in terms of cash outlay - in insuring our own people of the right to vote in our own "democracy/oligarchy" ? or insuring that the Big Rich/Corporations pay their fair share of taxes? Or hoisting our own poor out of misery through jobs training, $15 national minimum wage, free college/trade school? Did Afghanistan invite us in? Under 3,000 911 American deaths. 171,000-174,000 Afghanistan deaths. Were the terrorists from Afghanistan? See the foregoing post about the sizable chunk of change our weapons/war industry is fattened by recent sales to whom? Saudi Arabia? Isn't that the country where most of the terrorists were from?
We never declared way in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is not a country, never was. We declared way on the Taliban who weren’t corrupt, and installed a corrupt, puppet regime and built them a paper tiger army. Glad we’re out, wish it went better.
Afghanistan is a country according to the CIA Factbook and the UN. But it is not and never has successfully made itself a unified nation state (nor had any country in the world before 1500 or so), and no European or Euro-American nation state seems able to imagine that--because a few lines were drawn on a map by imperial greedhogs a couple centuries ago who believed that was some kind of magic. A magic, practiced across a globe's worth of captured and colonized lands and peoples, that has unspooled a century of war, especially civil war between peoples who didn't/don't share the superstitions of their imperial overlords. I agree with Selina Sweet, but I think you do too! No need for semantic debate. Afghanistan is a region parts of which have had rather powerless "national" governments since its borders were drawn under the influence of the British in their so-called "Great Game." We invaded it, destabilized it, abandoned it, and are now offering the excuse of necessity.
I suppose it’s the American companies who corrupt the pentagon and the puppet regimes who corrupt the Afghan army. Our soldiers are corrupted by witness it all. It was a proverbial house of cards.
So there is a limit to American might. It is staring us in the eye from the front page of the New York Times, a Taliban fighter sitting square on the hood of a military Humvee, rifle held upright, backed by two more fighters on the gun turret behind him. These people have a very different view of the world, compared to ours. They reject western hegemony. While I don't want to romanticize their brutal religiosity, maybe this isn't all bad. I feel that America's penchant for casually dominating the affairs of any and all countries we take an interest in has given us an unhealthy confidence in our willingness to meddle. Perhaps this is the high water mark of American Internationalism. Or perhaps not. I might have thought the same of Viet Nam after the fall of Saigon, and now, decades later that country is another manufacturing center in the global supply chain. Regardless, at the moment there is a definite counterpoint to US Corporate capitalism. It amazes me the level of vicious tenacity it requires to make such a stand.
The paradox is that if we don’t meddle, someone else worse will. China and Russia are certainly meddling. I’m not saying we couldn’t meddle better, though.
TC, This was the first or second comment that I read early this morning. It is so rich in detail, concise and true that my rattled head full of desperate Afghans running for their lives was stilled by reason, sad as it is.
A SPECIAL DAILY MAVERICK LIVE JOURNALISM WEBINAR SUPPORTED BY THE FRIEDRICH NAUMANN FOUNDATION
Join Director of the Brenthurst Foundation, Dr Greg Mills in conversation with Rory Stewart, Former Secretary of State for International Development of the United Kingdom, and Dr David Kilcullen adviser to Secretary Condi Rice and General David Petraeus as they discuss why the west failed in Afhanistant, the prospects for peace, what caused the Afghan armed forces and the government to fold so quickly and much more.
Rory Stewart, Former Secretary of State for International Development of the United Kingdom; Dr David Kilcullen is a former Australian infantry officer, and adviser to Secretary Condi Rice and General David Petraeus; Dr Greg Mills served four assignments with the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan as the commander’s adviser, currently directs the Brenthurst Foundation, and is the author of the forthcoming 'Expensive Poverty: Why Aid Fails and How It Might Work’
H. A. Rose, I have been trying to make sense out of all of this, with the ghosts of Saigon embassy and Kent State living in my head. Another ghost is the body of a Vietnamese civilian burned to death in the street, encountered while we were on patrol. We found out that the Viet Cong had burned alive him for being a little too friendly to Americans. Something broke inside of me on each of those terrible occasions that will never be repaired.
However, your brief polemic is the most excellent explanation of the Afghan situation I have encountered so far. It will allow me to keep supporting my president a thousand percent through this nightmare. Thank you.
President Biden, the Pentagon, and the State Department should use your explanation, word for word.
Your last five words are the mantra the will allow me to at least cope with the horror of what is coming to the Afghan people, particularly the women and girls. “Biden made the least worst choice.”
I'll repeat the words of the Navy fighter pilot I interviewed for Tonkin Gulf Yacht Club. They apply to you, me, and every other American who was there:
"We were fighting to survive our tour, and they were fighting for their country."
Four succinct and accurate sentences H. A. Rose. Trump gambled - if he withdrew while trying to get re-elected, the outcome would have been this. If he did it in a possible second term - who cares - MAGA. But he left it to the next president. No one should be surprised at the shitshow happening right now in Afghanistan (and it appears Russia is NOT surprised because they are probably funding some of it.) But we can all have compassion for the women and children who’s lives are forever impacted.
A very good summary if the geopolitical side of the mess, to complete H, A. Rose's post.
Laurie, I would bet my house that Americans were killed or wounded by Russian supplied arms. In Vietnam we were killed or wounded by Chinese copies of Russian AK-47s, better known as 'Chi-Com AKs which we sometimes referred to as just Chi-Coms. Same-same the RPGs -- rocket propelled grenades. Russian. The same weapon (could have been manufactured and supplied by a country other than Russia) that brought down the Blackhawks in Mogadishu, and have killed Americans in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and all recent wars and 'conflicts.' Thank you for helping me understand why the chumpy orange guy passed this hot mess on to our current President.
Big Mac didn't follow his own advice, rather listening to his collection of suckups, "The Bataan Gang," his long-time staff, and took us into what Sir Martin Gilbert described as "the most thorough defeat of a previously-victorious army in recorded history," the Chinese Intervention in Korea. The day he was asked what he thought of the Chinese warning of intervention if he proceeded, he replied "I would remind the Chinese leaders that no Asian army has ever successfully stood against a Western army." That was the day the first unit of an eventual 250,000-strong "Chinese People's Volunteer Army" crossed the Yalu, completely undetected by US recon. They didn't use trucks or anything modern, each man carried 70 pounds on his back, they moved 15 miles a night through the forest, and no air recon saw them during the day, and on November 24, 1950, they handed MacArthur his head. The Chinese claim they won the war, and they have a good argument - nobody (particularly us) has messed with them since. The memory of that "damn good whacking" colored all our plans in Vietnam ten years later, when we failed to understand China in the Cultural Revolution had no ability to intervene anywhere. "US intelligence" is to actual good intelligence as "US politics" are to actual good politics.
The NVA, moving their entire logistic supply, by BICYCLE, down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Unbelievable. We found American medical supplies, sent by Jane Fonda, in a multi-level underground hospital in the Iron Triangle, shipped via the Trail. How do you prevail against that?
We shouldn't fight Asians or their proxies anymore....
Yes. And in answer to Biden asking the question about sending my sin or daughter. NO. My son already served in Afghanistan and Iraq, as his father did in Viet Nam. They both returned to live full lives , while so many did not. My only wish, hope, or goal is that the US learns this time. We must focus on healing our own culture not trying and failing to impose our views around the world.
Which Afghans, fighting for whose freedom? Many Afghans have been fighting hard for their freedom the whole 20 years we've been there. They just took over the capital city yesterday, with a majority of the Afghan people in support. And the rest of course terrified.
How could the US mess up so badly on this? One of my management saying is that "No decision is made until you know how to implement it." Where was the planning to get translators and their families out of there safely? Where was the intelligence that said the Taliban would likely take over quickly? Where is the consideration of what was going to happen to the women and girls going back to slavery, rape and worse after knowing freedom? The world has lost trust in the US. The Taliban and others will take advantage of that for decades. It's too late for Americans to put their country over their party. Trust once lost is very hard to regain. Where is the Frances Perkins of our time? Where is the woman with vision to bring Americans back to sanity? Where is the courage to do the right thing by each other and Be the Light as Amanda Gorman so beautifully put it at the Inaugural? It's time to hold politicians accountable and to elect people with courage and empathy for others and the integrity and values to do the right thing by all. Power corrupts. Money is not speech. Perhaps it is time for universal democracy not the sham of representative democracy which is in reality an oligarchic kleptocracy . Our representatives do not represent us any more. They are too busy doing the bidding of their donors who only have personal greed as their god. They are too busy obstructing government rather than being the People's government. They are too busy squabbling like two year olds and telling lies and inducing fear to take away the freedom to vote. Re-elect no one unless you are sure they are Americans and for the People above all else. Only vote for candidates not by the R or D by their name but only ones with A by their name. A for American, a person of integrity, values and courage to create Well-Being for everyone.
Colin Powell, way back in 2001, warned Shrubbie Bush that if he listened to the ravings of Rumsfeld and Cheney and then screwed it up, disaster would follow: "If we break it, we own it." QED.
It’s notable how aware the Taliban were of the optics, when taking Kabul today. When the MAGA terrorists took our Capitol they were screaming like idiots, climbing buildings, wearing horns on their heads, and defecating in offices. When Republicans make the Taliban look good like that, it doesn’t bode well for Democracy. Republicans destroying Democracy at home, and that makes it unsustainable abroad.
Perfect comparison between the Trump Mob and the Taliban, Gregory. You have addressed style as no other. In terms of tribal fashion, the Taliban far excels the Mob. On the other hand, I would not group this country's Republicans with Democracy.
The half-page picture on the morning paper features a Humvee loaded w Taliban fighters. A Humvee, brought to the Taliban from the American military industrial complex.
Point for me is that the Taliban didn’t do anything to make themselves look like idiots. They took the Humvee from the idiots. They don’t look like the idiots, despite the misogyny and murder they’re doing off camera. Now that I have the context of what you meant, that photo does illustrate your point, points to the fact that our Congress needs to change the Pentagon’s mission.
Regardless of how current Washington officials explain Afghanistan or how Trump Republicans rewrite or erase history, this looks a lot like Vietnam. Decades of Washington officials and America military, with US citizen support, propping up a corrupt government in a foreign land that we did not understand.
Vietnam started out as a Democrat war. Afganistan started out as a Republican war. Both ended with the other party trying to win the war, and then withdrawing. Both left the future in the hands of the country that we tried to reshape.
France had colonized Vietnam before the US entry and was driven out. Russia had dominated Afghanistan before the US and was driven out. We can either learn from history or repeat it. We tend to repeat history because of our pro war and agressive too often dishonest politics. The aggressors in our nation draw in our moderates, and our conservatives are never conservative. Our macho leaders like all bullies want to show off their argument that fight makes right.
What troubles me most is that we cannot distinguish between nationalism and extremism. Vietnam was fighting to overcome the centuries of colonial power domination by a number of countries. They had fought Japan in WWII, supported the US and expected the US would support their independence. But we supported France and got hung up on the word "communism" believing all people who tried to free themselves from foreign capitalist domination and got recognition from Russia or China is "communist" and must be crushed. Now we are trading and tourism partners with Vietnam.
The Taliban are an extremist group. That doesn't change our responsibility to allow foreign nations to pursue their own internal governance nor make it anymore appropriate or possible to administer military solutions to their extremism. The fast fall of our propped up modern Afghan society that gave so many average Afghans, particularly women, hope should remind us of how easily the advances of modern civilization can be dashed to pieces and set back what seems like centuries. Our own modern democracy is under siege by our own "Taliban" wing of the Republican Party. They have taken over the Republican Party and are marching into every American capitol taking over in many ways with lies, misinformation, guns and money from wealthy investors looking to eliminate all democratic measures and participation that would limit their power. Women are at risk here in our "Trump World" ie "Taliban" world just as in Afghanistan.
Democracy is fragile. Modern society is fragile. Culture is fragile. Every civilization before and after the Roman Empire has fallen to Huns and thugs. Guns in our society are not for defense. They are for offense. Yes the criminals are the ones who use guns against the defenceless. But we have political criminals in the US just as Afghanistan has them. We need to di a better job of dealing with the political criminals in the US. The ones who say they "can shoot someone ... in broad daylight, and not lose a supporter". The Taliban do exactly this everyday.
Eisenhower got us started in Vietnam. JFK let the domino theory get the better of him and failed to withdraw. Johnson was afraid failing to double down on warmongering would sink his domestic program. Vietnam was a consequence of the domino mythology perpetrated by the Dulles brothers and bought, lock, stock, and barrel, by presidents and the ignorant, bellicose American electorate alike.
I was thinking exactly the same thing (parallels between the Taliban and Trumpism) but you put it far more coherently than I could. The problem throughout the world where there are criminals in or seeking power is that ordinary decent people don't, by their very nature, fight back because they have lives to get on with and are not interested in power grabs: so the bad guys walk over them (as they have done in Afghanistan and are doing in the USA).
I was trying to find the words. Everyday I think about “ Could it be us ? “Never in my long life as a born and raised American even consider the idea of having to do ‘Combat ‘with my neighbor to protect my life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. My Freedom.Do they not recognize Authoritarian control coming like a speeding out of control train at them ?How can they not in the long reach of the media arm ? Everyday it’s right in front of us. I’ve never been this scared . Is it just me ?
No. You are not alone. I am scared for my family and friends who will outlive me for decades. And literally for all of us in this country. Wish my generation could have done better with this place. But that doesn't stop me from trying hard now.
Yes guns are a bit of a rarity in the UK too, as witness the fact that a small mass shooting here recently was headline news for days. It would hardly have caused a ripple in the USA.
Thanks Joe Biden for bringing the inevitable end to the certain failure in Afghanistan. No country, in all of history, has been able to succeed there. We've been living in state of denial of denial because no one wanted to be the President who lost in Afghanistan.
Even if Trump had not started the withdrawal ball rolling, I bet Biden would have done this anyway.
It hurts to admit we failed, and by we, I mean the U.S. Military and it's industrial war machine in the private sector. Maybe if they had tried to fight the Taliban on its own terms there still would never have been a definite end. We've had 20 years to set up the Afghan government and military and they couldn't hold the line for a month. It was never going to change, Biden is right.
History is full of these kinds of failures, the Romans and their walls in Britain is but one example.
In the end Afghanistan was a war of foolish pride with no real exit plan that should have ended when they had a chance to capture Osama bin-Laden for political reasons. I feel for the women there, I feel for all Afghans, I feel for the troops who fought, were injured and died there, but I'm glad it's over.
This boondoggle was always going to end like this and should have come much sooner.
It's shocking to see the commentary right now and how surprised everyone is that this is happening so fast. May I just say, WTF did they think was going to happen! The Taliban have had months to prepare. The brave soldiers that sacrificed their lives is horrible but the number of mangled bodied and minds that are still living with their forever hell is devastating. And all for nothing.
I can't help but wonder if we weren't so marinated in American Exceptionalism, if we would have even been in Afghanistan, or, having gone there, seen this outcome? Seth Dunn, below, speaks to hubris - indeed. I fear after WWII, we started to believe our own PR.
I’ll be listening. There are a lot of comments on here today that are very disappointing to me. We expect the Afghan government to be stronger than the Taliban when most of the country supports the Taliban and that culture? Naive.
What bothers me is this, the Afghani army and government crumpled like a cheap suit. Congressional members are saying, and this is a paraphrase, "Well what do you expect the US military strengthened their spine and when we left, the lost the will to fight?"
I have to call bullshit. The Taliban doesn't have any problem finding the will to fight. There's something wrong here but Biden is right to leave. The withdrawal is not botched, it's what happens in a dysfunctional country. The Afghans have been deserting their army since we first started trying to train them.
The scenes out of Kabul over the weekend were eerily reminiscent of Saigon in 1975.
To me, the Afghanistan War can be summed up in four words: They won. We lost.
My heart goes out to the Afghanis who worked with and for us during our 20 years in the country. We owe it to every one of those individuals to bring them (and their families) here. Every. Single. One. Of. Them.
On the same line, I feel for every soldier who served there. Those who did not perish must be asking themselves why we went in to Afghanistan in the first place.
Yes Ian, this must feel like a betrayal to many who served, those who were wounded and families who lost loved ones. And when Blinken said “ this is not Saigon” I cringed, because it is.
The similarities with the endgame of our Vietnam fiasco are striking. Is it progress that there were far fewer deaths in Afghanistan?
"The U.S. and many other countries are rushing to evacuate their diplomatic personnel and allies from the country, although Russia is not, as the Taliban has guaranteed their safety."
I get the feeling that Putin engineered this whole thing, using Trump as a very useful patsy. Remember the bounties on US soldiers?
So, is Russia the current winner of Kipling's Great Game? That would be towering irony.
Putin really never cared about Trump. He was nothing more to him than an easy target to manipulate. I'm sure he is disappointed.
Pulling out of Afghanistan without a plan stops at Bidens door. Biden could have made a bad situation better by feathering out a plan that helped those Afghanistans that helped the US, as well as journalists that were left to fend for themselves. What is going to and probably already is happening to the women and children is unthinkable. All the shots in all the arms doesn't make this right.
I do have to wonder if the timing of this and the tipping point of the resistance of vaccinations and wearing masks by the GOP will jeopardize the 2022 elections even more. I certainly hope not.
Trump also abandoned the Kurds, and that was another gift. It has been my theory that Putin and Assad plotted, that Assad would bomb his country so Syrians would flee and destabilize Europe. Perhaps Putin's end game is to have a monopoly over the oil, and control the world that way.
Putin is happy, yes....but mostly just glad it wasn't him this time. Afghanistan remains a problem for him too. On this US and Russian interests coincide...containment of the future fallout. On this China will be mostly amenable too.
Caution—beware of wild projections on that wretched Putin (or anyone else). The less you know or understand, the bigger the Bogeyman, the longer his shadow. From such delusions spring conspiracy theories.
I wrote in yesterday’s thread that, while George W. Bush’s retaliatory strike against Al Qaida’s hosts, the Taliban regime, made sense, “the occupation of Afghanistan, the attempt to transform lions into pussy cats, was as absurd and criminally mad as Stalin’s plan to forge the peoples of the USSR into homo sovieticus or President Xi’s trying to beat and brainwash Uighurs and Tibetans until they become imitation Han. Or broken slaves.
The victorious Taliban will be a huge problem for the entire region, but especially for Russia, with its large Muslim minority, its turbulent Caucasus and its many Muslim neighbors. In the longer term, a problem for China, given the regime’s constant attempts to control peoples and religions it does not begin to understand.”
For the time being, the new regime will have more than enough on its hands controlling the territory and containing its own troops (if it can). All neighbors have an interest in coming to terms with the long-expected reality.
My mind goes back to well before the Vietnam war and the blatantly obvious madness of trying to prop up a tree that’s dead and rotting—the Saigon regime.
Another way of putting it: “When in a hole, stop digging.” (British politician Denis Healey’s First Law of Politics). Neither Brezhnev nor the Pentagon seem to have been able to grasp that elementary truth and learn Step 1: Pause and take a coffee break…
Now… pause, take stock of the horrors, take stock of all those decades of madness, meaningless waste, mass death and destruction. The shame of it all. A time for mourning, deep self-examination and humility.
There are the old, far deeper questions that underlie any like these ones that came to me spontaneously and weren’t carefully thought out, questions that each of us must ask ourselves.
(It’s a help to me that Christine should actually have gone a little way to explaining her categorical statement (if not her animus) via you. Maybe it’s straightforward irritation at my manner of expressing myself, in which case, fair enough… I don’t necessarily disagree.)
Q.1 I understand your answer but prefer a categorical YES. In so doing, I’m asking us to try to be, not what we’ve clothed ourselves in, not the shit with which we’ve covered ourselves, but what we really are. So, yes, I’m deliberately implying a deeply positive view of human perfectibility. I don’t have time to spell this out just now, but the political and psychological implications of this and the opposite view are obvious.
Q.2 I’m closer to you here. Let’s say we can “fail better”… Maybe it’ll be paving the road to hell better…
We can at least try, instead of zapping everything that moves, with $$$, with bombs, with bullets.
Q.3 I’m dumb, I’ve not been able to understand your answer here… But it looks to me as though you’re speaking throughout in terms of your own practical experience, and that you are someone who can do that. And yes, we’ll have to struggle to get by, but when I say “we”, I’m thinking of our children’s children, and theirs.
Hope is eternal, Peter. I understand your frustration but mankind is getting richer, cleaner and is living longer but we are still not using much of our frontal cortex...for the common good that is!
Thé USA no longer deserves trust upon the world stage. We have demonstrated our incapacity to comprehend other cultures. We have also evidenced that our corrupt dependence upon ‘contractors’ bodes ill for our collaborators. The corruption of our operations simply mirrored the corruption in Afghanistan. Did I hear something about the emperors’ new clothes?
I appreciate the work of the Biden administration, but this situation was out of control and will be lethal for many. Our collaborators, the women and children of Afghanistan will suffer. We could have done better.
The rest of the world has held this opinion for a long time. Happily it's also starting to sink in at home too. The US has the ressources...the money, the equipment, the technology whatever...but that isn't always what's needed to solve the problem. A little listening and education might go a long way.
We should have done right by those Afghanis who helped us. Those who did not get out will likely all be dead in a month, along with whatever US credibility may still exist in Central Asia.
As to the women and children; should we have moved them all out? To where?
The Afghanistan fiasco started on day one. Why should the last day be any different?
When you say that we could have done better, I wonder how. This was always going to happen upon American withdrawal, and there was no reason to stay indefinitely
In my opinion, the only thing we could have done better *at this point in time* would have been to evacuate all those Afghans who worked with us, along with their families, before we evacuated our own American personnel.
The world has many heartaches, not the least of which is Afghanistan. The cruelty of prehistoric patriarchy takes our breath away, but reality does not change. The melting of the Afghan army is testimony to the fundamental truth why our efforts failed.
These words...."The melting of the Afghan army is testimony to the fundamental truth why our efforts failed" are exactly what need to be repeated over and over.
It feels like Vietnam all over again. Blinken can say it’s not Saigon as much as he wants, but from here “If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, …”
But dang, Betsey De Vos's brother made a packet over the last 20 years, as did all the warmongers who ramped up the production of war machines to sell at inflated prices to the US government, which are now in the hands of the Taliban, and got the government to pay for mercenaries who did f*** all except exploit and terrorize the Afghanis. It was parteeeee time for the people profiting off of war and death. So sad that they are now going to have to find some other sucker to convince to pay for another f***ing war.
What kind of a country unilaterally decides to invade another?
Did the US Congress declare war on Afghanistan?
Of the 19 - 911 terrorists, how many were Afghan? "fifteen of them were citizens of Saudi Arabia, two were from the United Arab Emirates, one was from Lebanon, and one from Egypt"
"In the five years before the war [Yemen] U.S. arms transfers to Saudi Arabia amounted to $3 billion; between 2015 and 2020, the U.S. agreed to sell over $64.1 billion worth of weapons to Riyadh, averaging $10.7 billion per year. Sales to other belligerents in the war, like the United Arab Emirates (UAE), also rose exponentially."[Brookigs.edu]
Exactly how many Americans died in the 9/11 attack on our soil? "A total of 2,996 people were killed in the 9/11 attacks, including the 19 terrorist hijackers" (history.com)
"According to the Costs of War project at Brown University, as of April 2021, the war has killed 171,000 to 174,000 people in Afghanistan; 47,245 Afghan civilians, 66,000 to 69,000 Afghan military and police and at least 51,000 opposition fighters."
The Real Reason for the Afghan War? Share; Tweet; When the United States decided to invade Afghanistan to grab Osama bin Laden—and failed, but stayed on like an unwanted guest—could it have known that the Afghans were sitting on some of the world's greatest reserves of mineral wealth?
Lockheed Martin is by far the largest defense contractor in the world. In 2017, the Bethesda, Maryland, company made $44.9 billion in arms and defense contracts, nearly twice the amount of arms sales at Boeing, the second largest defense contractor. The company makes a wide range of military aircraft, including the F-16, F-22, and F-35 fighter jets, as well as sonar technologies, ships, missile defense systems, and missiles used by the Navy. More than $35 billion of Lockheed Martin's arm sales in 2017 came from the U.S. government, more than the entire budget of the Internal Revenue Service and Environmental Protection Agency combined.
Net sales are expected to have climbed even higher in fiscal 2018. In late 2018, the company was awarded a $22.7 billion contract for 106 F-35 fighter jets for the U.S. military and another 89 for ally nations."
Well yes, sort of. Every member of Congress voted to support the invasion EXCEPT, the Black congresswoman Barbara Jordan (no doubt recognizing that Black soldiers would be the first to get shot up).
The Congress did not declare war on Afghanistan. It supported an invasion to look for the Saudi Arabian prince Osama bin Laden and his supporters, and to fight a group of nationalists rebels against the existing national government.
My husband Glen died of ALS last year. The Veterans Administration considers ALS to be a service related illness- upwards of 20% of people diagnosed with ALS in a year are current or former military.
Wheeling Glen’s wheelchair through the VA hospital here in Minneapolis last year was a hellish experience because of COVID. And the incredibly vulnerable, sickly and disabled folks I saw being cared for had to be truly in need to risk a trip - I was praying the whole time, trust me.
The care we received was stellar. Adaptive equipment that helped me care for Glen at home, a van to help me transport him safely and every other week visits from a home health care nurse to check Glen’s vitals helped immensely.
Now multiply my experience across the country with every family caring for a sick or disabled veteran. Millions.
Whatever you need to rant about here concerning American military policies around the world, when completed, please take a moment to think about those paying the ultimate price for those policies - the women and men who comprise the military. And if you are able, support one of the many organizations that support veterans and their families. My personal favorite is Paralyzed Veterans of America but there are many. My gratitude for their help with Glen’s care and help obtaining Glen’s military benefits is endless.
Afghanistan was a debacle, start to finish. The Taliban’s treatment of women is terrifying. But I know, from first hand experience, that watching a loved one die slowly and painfully is also terrifying-and way outside the military’s thought process when planning campaigns. So, by all means write your congress people and share your knowledgeable and thoughtful opinions but please support veterans and their families too.
I am so sorry for your loss, Sheila. My first cousin, also a veteran and 6 years younger than me, died of ALS a few years ago. He was still on active duty when diagnosed. His time with ALS would have been far more complicated without the support he and his wife received from the PVA.
Thanks daria. PVA helps so many folks- they are just amazing. I hope your cousin’s wife is doing OK. ALS is over the top tough to manage.
Most of us who "rant" the strongest are veterans of the imperial wars.
You have the biggest right to rant, TC. Not asking folks not to rant. Asking them to do something in addition to ranting here. Trying to motivate folks. My brother is a Vietnam Vet who rants with me all the time. Then he goes and sits with his buds at the American legion hall and rants some more. After that, he calls his congressman - and the man lives in Louisiana so he's talking out of tune in a red state. After listening to him, I try and figure out what I should do next - something that might make a difference. Don't assume you understand my motivations for doing what I do. I come from a military family top to bottom. I have paid a price for that the others, who have cared for the broken and dying, understand well. I appreciate your perspective and generally learn something from your rants. I hope you learn something from mine. Thanks for being here.
Good for you. And your brother. Doing The Right Thing in Louisiana is hard.
Thank you for this bit of insight. I've had the opportunity to accompany a Veteran friend of mine through several appointments/surgeries/evaluations at the VA in Portland. I see the spouses. I got to sit with 3 young men (in their mid-late teens) while their Dad was in surgery, with the ultimate result of Stage 4 colon cancer. That was heartbreaking. The families pay the costs.
Yep. My father died of Leukemia from Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam
So sorry William. One of the toughest things I’ve witnessed are the multiple effects of Agent Orange on the human body. A tough price for families and veterans to pay for serving in the military.
My father-in-law survived lymphoma from AO exposure in Vietnam. He steadfastly refuses all aid from the VA to this day (he's 85).
William, I'm so sorry.
Sheila, I am so sorry for your loss and for what happened to Glen. I do appreciate your thoughtful post here. Thank you for sharing.
Thanks Annette.
So sad to read this Sheila. Thank you for writing it. It must have been painful to do so. Thoughts go out to you from across the seas too.
Sheila, sending 🤗 hugs. I agree veterans deserve our support
Thank you for sharing your experience and perspective. I’m sorry for you loss.
I'm a member of a military family. I do indeed support veteran groups and veterans. Not sure why you think we who "rant" have not lost loved ones to war and its consequences. I am very truly sorry about the tragic death of your husband. But it doesn't help others who may be mourning their own losses to impugn their motives.
This reminds me of something I wrote almost 20 years ago: http://www.greendelaware.org/?p=10285
It was always about the oil. But I did not know about "spent" uranium use in our weapons and armour. Despicable. Just despicable. And we taxpayers paid for it, then paid for the veteras' medical bills (and widow benefits). And the environment? Despicable.
Yes, the veterans' medical bills. I don't think Americans have any grasp of what the medical costs will be to treat the current veterans and those now coming back from the Middle East. Every time I call the VA to make an appt. or ask a question, the first thing asked of me is, "Have you thought of harming yourself or others?" That is the VA greeting when a vet calls. The veteran suicide rate is real. I'll bet the government is worried about getting new enlistments when word of those troubles get around.
Actually, it's also about the drugs - Afghanistan's main export is currently opium.
Sheila, I'm very sorry for your unimaginable loss.
What I posted on Lucian Truscott's substack posting this morning:
As always, Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires. But what I find stunningly hypocritical in virtually all media outlets, in the political community and, yes, in the military (especially those 4-star generals NPR loves to interview) is all the hand wringing that is going on now. There was virtual silence and nothing but shrugs when the Taliban started assassinating reporters, female educators and female members of the Afghan assembly, anyone with clear ties to the west. They "didn't take responsibility" for the murders, so all those people now hollering about how horrible it is shrugged and said "we don't know who killed her" (which is bullshit and we know it). It reminds me all too much of Shrubbie Bush discovering, after 9/11, that Afghani women were being oppressed--who knew?! I'm sickened by the whole thing, especially by the hubris of the US government and military leadership in thinking that they are so special they can change an inevitable outcome. Why did the Taliban win? Because they had never really lost.
Over the last several days I've found myself screaming at the interviewers on NPR. In one instance, a person representing the view of the Biden administration was trying to explain the rationale for the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, now. He was interrupted, talked over, and pushed back on every point with but "what about the humanitarian disaster?"and never really given a chance to fully articulate Biden's position, nor even to respond to the interviewer's questions. In another instance, a republican congressman, from Ohio , I think, was allowed to spout a completely erroneous 'blame Joe Biden for this mess' diatribe with no questions asked of him. He just had a megaphone to the NPR audience all to himself, as though he were on Fox being egged on by one of those nut jobs. I'm finding NPR's coverage of this stage of what has been a 20-year long fiasco to be as one sided and inaccurate as the Republicans who are rewriting its history. All I can conclude is that knee jerk liberals can be as tendentious as knee jerk reactionaries.
Overall, the coverage has consisted of emotional hand wringing rather than informed analysis..like no one seems to know anything at all about Afghanistan. And yes, I am sending this to NPR....
Please do send it to them and demand a response. I listen and donate to my local NPR stations but have noticed this happens too often, giving a megaphone to republican officials with no pushback or deep questions at all . Your description of giving them a megaphone is spot on. Many times in the last five years I wondered what the hell they were thinking. Even Adi Cornish this weekend kept jumping in and interuppting to challenge Maura Liasson's commentary on the situation in Afghanistan. Very rude to say the least.
Got a canned response. But here's the link for others to express concerns: https://help.npr.org/contact/s/contact?request=Ask-the-Public-Editor-about-ethics
Sent ...
It's not just NPR. Through all of Tя☭mp's presidency, through all of COVID's first (and now second) wave, through everything else we've been through, I never felt the need to turn off the TV news until now. Covering Afghanistan and what is happening now, and throwing the blame to Biden, has finally done me in.
I've noticed the same thing. I loved what Heather wrote about this and already knew most of it and agreed that although it is sad what the people in that region are going through, we can't be the cure. Evidence abounds. So, before wee let too many more of the confused people who live in our own country go down any of those terrible paths here, let's focus on our own citizens in that regard now. One of the things we've learned over the years is that if you want to change the health of a baby, start with the grandmother. Look at how it takes two generations before "our ways" become normal for people who immigrate here. And it is "normal" for the grandchildren, not the grandparents. The older often soften as the kids come into their own maturity. *sigh* Complex stuff. No denying that!
Carolyn, I agree. I have had to turn off the NPR news coverage because I have been so upset by how they are approaching it.
Be not surprised. NPR has become a "nice" Republican outlet. Seriously, that was one of the many "infiltrations" a few decades ago, along with school boards and local elected offices to stop the dastardly liberals. (I am facetious with that last part.) Their complaint was the federal tax dollars being spent to support a voice for the left
Certainly not facetious about local school boards or elected offices...we see it here in the (2nd?) bluest state, especially on school boards which hire superintendents. About 8 years ago I wrote a scathing letter to the editor of our local newspaper calling out the school superintendent for his blatantly racist speech at my daughter's graduation. He left town to go back to his red state where his rhetoric was appreciated. Only recently have dastardly liberals been able to successfully challenge and oust some local decision makers. We're hoping and working for it to continue, having realized we've been asleep at the switch.
We have been asleep at the switch! Good comment.
Good. They need the feedback. I may copy this, reformat it a bit (so it isn't obviously a copy) and send it to them.
It’s all about the establishment and the establishments politicians, both democrat and republican. And the establishment politicians include pretty much all of the republicans and a large swath of the democrats, including Biden ( although I am surprised at some of the good things he’s done and is advocating) , but he did vote for the Iraq war, along with Hillary and others to make a point. As far as I’m concerned the best set of politicians the U. S. has is the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. We had that wing of our political system in place once before In this country and the country by and large did pretty good, and that political wing was FDR’s government.
In fact it was so good that after WW2 ,Western Europe , the Scandinavian countries mainly, but Germany, Holland all adopted a reasonable facsimile of FDR’s government, and look where they are today as compared to us.....
I just watched Andrea Mitchell’s show on MSNBC today, and my thoughts about her Afghanistan coverage parallels your thoughts about NPR’s Afghanistan coverage.
Carolyn, I, too often find myself screaming at NPR for their shallow reporting.
NPR doesn't give "informed analysis." Like most of the other networks, they mostly read the censored reports. They also have have time limits for to which they must adhere. Their reports on Palestine/Israel just give us the Israeli lies. The local NPR station here in south central PA does carry BBC radio from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., when most of us are sleeping. That is unfortunate, since BBC, which is usually very prejudice, does often carry "informed analysis" of some stories. These stories are broadcast in England at Greenwich Mean Time, which is five hours ahead of us in Easter Time. If it is 11 p.m. here, it's already 5 a.m. the next day in England, so their broadcast is in the morning rush hour there.
Its not only NPR - it appears that our "main stream media" - you know, the places that have to show the "two sides" to everything political? When on one side its lies and misinformation & on the other side -TRUTH!! But they appear unable to say that. I imagine its the bottom line of their organizations, but the responsibility lies as much with them as it does with Faux, OAN or Newsmax. I guess a lot of us here are old enough to remember actually listening & watching the NEWS all those year ago! And I'm sure most of us here knew exactly what to expect when either Biden did pull our military out or did not.
By the way - did you see that the RNC removed the page on their website that bragged about TFG's magnificent deal with the Taliban?????? Yup - took it down. Quite frankly they are a bunch of chicken-s__ts! Sorry if that perturbs anyone - but its true.
And the Halliburton Boeing etc military industrial complex that W brought into his administration. (Cheney et al) profited billions while working class American military and Afghans were murdered Ann maimed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century
The New American Century was founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan in 1997, and its stated focus watt "to promote American global leadership.” In the above Wikipedia link, the organization stated that "American leadership is good both for America and for the world," and sought to build support for "a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity.”
From Wikipedia: “In 1998, Kristol and Kagan advocated regime change in Iraq throughout the Iraq disarmament process through articles that were published in the New York Times. Following perceived Iraqi unwillingness to co-operate with UN weapons inspections, core members of the PNAC including Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, R. James Woolsey, Elliot Abrams, Donald Rumsfeld, Robert Zoellick, and John Bolton were among the signatories of an open letter initiated by the PNAC to President Bill Clinton calling for the removal of Saddam Hussein. ..... Stating that American policy "cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council," the letter's signatories asserted that "the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf"
All of the above characters would advise Pres. Bush, and they led America into the Iraq War, with the cheerleading of the military-industrial establishment. When I read of “our vital interests” in a foreign land, I want to immigrate to France.
All about the oil.
Afghanistan's principal export is opium - it is the main source of supply for the world's heroin producers and sellers.
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
Yes, and now today I read that Liz Chaney, who for all her support of an investigation into January 6th, has been criticizing Biden for his handling of a situation made worse by her dad.
Yesyerday, I also heard Cheney, on NPR, say that the former guy was to blame, along with Pompeo and Rand Paul. The Taliban had been invited to Camp David, hadn't they? Of course, she also blamed Biden....shared blame, she said.
Have to say, I agreed with her in that instance. Seems like the whole removal of Americans & the Afghans who helped us wasnt handled as well as it should have been. Why were they still there? Should we still be there - hell no. But certainly watching that plane take off with people hanging off & dropping to their deaths? Where was the military or security at that point? Or was there no thought given that this would happen? Sure did look like VietNam all over - even down to the helicopter evacuating people from the Embassy. My gosh, I certainly have no foreign policy experience but for the past week or two - we all could see the advance of the Taliban!
Sorry dont mean to pile on with all the naysayers, but really?
I can't say I disagree with her.
And don't forget Erick Prince's Blacwater mercenaries the U.S. government under all administrations since W who were hired to fight in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places. Prince, brother of Betsy DeVos maid oodles of money.
Yes he did. Eisenhower addressed this in 1961.
Spot on Linda.
Sad, Linda, and true.
Precisely!!!
The Taliban are pushed from the rear by Putin and a network of mean oligarchs and drug cartels. Lots of money, lots of antipathy for the West, and lots of motivation to humiliate Biden. I am rather certain that Trump called for our military withdrawal to take place during the Biden administration because Putin told him so, just like we removed most of our military from Syria under Trump so Russia could dominate. "Praise Allah and pass the ammunition!"
I feel the only solution is to NOT engage then. A”fight” takes a willing partner.
You are absolutely correct, Sophia! Religious zealotry is an impossible foe to conquer.
Dr. Richardson,
Thank you for one of the most brilliantly written summaries of the Afghan war in light of today's events that I have seen and, I am certain, that will be written.
First, the NY Times, where I get most of my news, a news source that was pro for American invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, is saying that the Afghan war cost a mere $86 Billion dollars. That is an outrageous lie. Your estimate of one trillion may even be low. The amount of infrastructure the USA built in in Afghanistan, had it been built in the US, I once read, could have built a new American public High School in every town in America. Or, it could have built a new Hospital in every town in America.
Second, the NY Times has Bret Stephens today, a Republican who often obscures the actual past to create a false look at the present, does precisely that in his lengthy blame of Biden for what happened. Your writing here clearly delineates Donald Trump's role in the US pullout after Trump's agreement with the Taliban. Although Trump was probably being told what to do by Putin, I completely agree with pulling out of Afghanistan.
The entire Republican party is trying to wash away the fact that Bush started the war, and failed to find Osama Bin Laden, even though the 911 attack was sponsored mostly by Saudi Arabian citizens. They are also washing away that fact that Trump, probably operating under Putin's instructions, had negotiated the removal of all American presence with the Taliban.
Biden is doing EXACTLY the right thing here after 20 years of the USA sponsoring a textbook case of how to create a disaster in another country by wantonly killing innocent Afghans with contractors and sometimes the US Military. Including killing almost all of the 12 year old boys in an Afghani village who were gathering wood outside the village. A 50 caliber machine gun from a US Helicopter killed them all but one. Can nobody remember the past?
My hearty congratulations to Joe Biden for having the courage to do what no other President would do. Biden has implicitly admitted our mistake, which was invading Afghanistan in the first place, and then corrected it by getting our boys and our money out of that country.
George W. Bush, a Republican, should go down in history as the most corrupt, worst President in US History, for his failed wars.
Biden should go down in History as a mature, right thinking American for removing our incompetent presence.
Joe Biden is an American hero today.
Your otherwise phenomenal post was blemished by the reference, "getting our boys . . . out . . ." You must realize this is how women's contributions are erased from history. I do not wish to be unkind but please update your mindset. After all, it is women and children who have the most to lose now that the Taliban has taken control.
I agree. My reference to "our boys" was inappropriate but, as far as I can tell, I cannot edit it at this time.
Mindset updated. Thank you.
No edit function except "delete" and I'm glad you did not delete the post. I am 65 and have lived a lifetime of professional sleights. I understood there was no malice in the comment and have been guilty of my own outdated comments. We have to help each other recognize the problem. If only Andrew Cuomo had listened and understood he was living an outdated mindset!
I will be careful in future thinking and in communication to represent the contributions of women to the American military.
To edit, copy your response, paste it to another page (e.g. Word document on computer, Samsung Notes on my phone), correct it, copy edited version, post it again, then delete original. Convoluted, but possible.
I do it almost every day at least once! Easy peasy.
Thank you!
While I actively protested this war from the beginning, I’m shocked at the lack of strategy in our withdrawal. djt set up the failure by excluding the Afghan government in the negotiations, but, Biden’s administration could have gone back to the negotiating table. At the very least they should have removed sensitive personal before withdrawing troops.
We were never going to win this war. We have only added to the Afghani’s suffering.
I completely agree with you. What’s happening to all of the Afghanistan interpreters that allied with us, and who should have been protected, is a disaster. And what about the women and girls who were encouraged to take positions of leadership and self autonomy? Many of them were given assurances that they would be “supported” and they are reaching out for help. Do we just abandon those we have promised to protect?
Ms. Love,
It is shocking how fast the government in Kabul and the Afghani soldiers that we were paying and equipping gave up and ran.
Biden cannot be blamed for the fact that the USA spent $100 Billion equipping and training the locally born people of Iraq to fight for themselves, only to find them unwilling to do so.
I think the Afghan collapse occurred rapidly due to the well known and widespread disdain the Afghan people held the government of Kabul with.
I think Biden was probably misinformed by someone about the corruption, deceit, lies and downright criminal behavior of the Afghani government.
As one person noted today: The US supported Afghani government would shake down people during the day and the Taliban would do it at night.
At any rate, thanks be to Biden that we are out.
Afghanistan, not Iraq. Long day.
Mike, I wholeheartedly agree it was long past time to be out for many reasons. My only criticism was that knowing we were withdrawing troops, we owed it to Afghanistan translators, drivers and support personnel, we promised to protect, an orderly evacuation.
I listened to Afghanistan veterans talk today about their extraordinary effort to help those they promised to protect by providing the administration in May with detailed extraction plans, only to be ignored until after troops were withdrawn this week.
They talked about the moral injury soldiers would carry because of this betrayal. We are leaving 10s of thousands behind who risked their lives for our soldiers.
Yes, we (yes, us) appear to be leaving them behind without regard for their contribution.
However, we, the USA, did exactly the same thing in Vietnam. There is a famous photo of the last American being lifted off the top of the building surrounded by the Vietnamese who helped them up to that point.
I do not believe that is Biden's fault. I believe that the fault lies with all of us.
We, all of us, allowed a dim witted, corrupt, man to push us into war where none was needed. We did this knowing that invading an entire country just to find one man was dumb. Then, to keep the war profits going, we allowed them to keep that war going.
We should have known how it would all end because, we have done this before.
Mike, there was a pretty similar picture from Kabul a day or so ago! Whats the old saying? Insanity is doing the same thing over & over and expecting a different outcome! Seems to be an American trait!
These stats are from an AP report I came across this a.m. (Sorry for no cite - can't find it now)
Amount President Harry Truman temporarily raised top tax rates to pay for Korean War: 92%.
Amount President Lyndon Johnson temporarily raised top tax rates to pay for Vietnam War: 77%.
Amount President George W. Bush cut tax rates for the wealthiest, rather than raise them, at outset of Afghanistan and Iraq wars: At least 8%.
Estimated amount of direct Afghanistan and Iraq war costs that the United States has debt-financed as of 2020: $2 trillion.
Data reported by the AP is from Linda Bilmes of Harvard University’s Kennedy School and from the Brown University Costs of War project. Because the United States between 2003 and 2011 fought the Afghanistan and Iraq wars simultaneously, and many American troops served tours in both wars, some figures as noted cover both post-9/11 U.S. wars. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-cost-of-americas-two-decades-in-afghanistan-01629071727?mod=mw_more_headlines
The sad thing is hearing how many fathers AND sons have fought in this war - at various times! Its definitely past time to pull out.
😔
Reposted. Thank You. Horrid.
I don’t disagree with the withdrawal. I disagree heartily with America’s engagement in the first place. I remember that even in the wake of 9/11 there was tepid criticism voiced by a few. Why not a limited police action, multinational in scope, to simply catch and deal with bin Laden? With that mindset America would assuredly not have attacked Iraq. And the police presence in Afghanistan would have not lasted 20 weeks, let alone 20 years. Whatever happened to American isolationism?
And now here we are. This is a seminal moment in American history. I disagree thoroughly that Biden is a hero here. He has done the right thing the wrong way. What could have been an orderly devolution from war to peace has instead become a panicked withdrawal.
Was there no intelligence predicting the speed with which the Taliban would move? Or did Biden defy intelligence warnings?
He has done so well so far and this has broken my heart. His Presidency is now irretrievably off the rails. We can point the finger at Trump. We can say that Biden was simply honoring a badly-conceived Trump deal. But that is all stuff for history to sort out.
For now Biden will wear this decision and it must be hoped that the ramifications are limited to what can be seen now. Anything much more complex and the domestic agenda, so difficult but so promising, will be road kill.
This is a bad week for America.
Mr. O'Donnell:
"I disagree thoroughly that Biden is a hero here. He has done the right thing the wrong way."
Do you think that there is, or was, a "right way" to extricate the United States of America from Afghanistan once we invaded, only to learn Osama Bin Laden was not there, but, to continue to kill innocent Afghani citizens?
Reminder -> The USA: A country that directly killed, through war upwards of 200,000 Afghani citizens, people who played exactly zero part in the attack on the Twin Towers?
I submit that the right thing to do was never associated with the invasion of a country, Afghanistan, full of people who had nothing to do with 911.
In fact, the "right way" today, is to get the corrupt, evil, deadly, wrongheaded USA out of Afghanistan as fast as possible.
This has already resulted in one of the world's most corrupt governments, the USA supported "democracy" in Kabul, to flee. A great outcome.
The "democracy" in Kabul was, in all seriousness, a completely corrupt government that, when it looked like no more payments from the US would be forthcoming, simply fled to safety.
Good riddance to both that government and the USA.
Pres Biden has been president for not even 7 months. Other administrations began and continued and negotiated poorly for years.
Eric O'Donnell: I agree with you... and it's shocking to think that the analysts didn't understand that the Afghanistan people have intergenerational PTSD... which no amount of training can change. From the political leaders through the entire military, and the population in general. This should have been foreseen...
Thank you for this.
Mike, Bret Stephens is exactly as you describe him, but he is an Opinion writer not a reporter. Opinion mean his opinion. He also is an editor of an Israeli media outlet and an apologist for that country. Comments from some readers of an Opinion he's written often scorch his self-importance and loose 'logic'.
Thank you for all you said, and also for acknowledging Kelly S. Well done, sir!
From my post "Why We Fail" at my substack blog, That's Another Fine Mess:
In 2008, Ruslan Aushev, a highly decorated combat veteran of the Soviet adventure in Afghanistan who served two tours, first as an infantry battalion commander and later in charge of a full Soviet regiment during nearly five years, gave an interview to the Toronto Globe and Mail:
"Canadians and Americans are learning the hard way. You have been there seven years and you have no prospect of early victory. We knew by 1985 that we could not win," he recalls. It then took Moscow four more years to extricate hundreds of thousands of troops from Afghanistan, while claiming victory on the way out. Afghanistan was plunged into civil war."We could take any village, any town and drive the mujahedeen out. But when we handed ground over to the Afghan army or police they would lose it in a week.”
"The Taliban may not be able to win militarily but they can't be defeated and sooner or later the Western alliance will be forced with pullout," he warned. Support for the insurgents will grow the longer the foreign armies remain in Afghanistan, he said. Although the Soviets deployed more than 100,000 soldiers across Afghanistan and trained an Afghan army three times the size of Kabul's current security forces, it was never enough, Mr. Aushev said. "There will have to be an accord with the Taliban, because at least 50 per cent of the Afghan population supports them. It's impossible to conquer the Afghans. Alexander the Great couldn't do it, the British couldn't do it, we couldn't do it and the Americans won't do it. No one can.”
This morning, amidst the reports of the end of the U.S. Afghan war, NBC News Pentagon Correspondent Courtney Kube gave the best analysis of the actual military situation on the ground I have heard in 20 years of war reporting about Afghanistan.
She pointed out that, no matter how much training and equipment the United States could provide, we could not give the Afghans the will to fight, the willingness to fight to the death against the Taliban. “And throughout the war, the Taliban fighters have been willing to lay down their lives for their cause,” she stated, nailing the essential truth. She went on to point out that while there were Afghan special forces that had been fighting very competently for several years, “The average soldiers, they’re out in the rural areas, and they get told that the people who have been supporting them are leaving in a few months. That means no more medevac, no more air support, no more logisitics - the simple things like providing food and fuel and ammunition regularly. No more air control to tell the air force where to provide support. You have to understand the corruption there in the government, in the military, they’re unable to provide just those absolute basics.. That loss of support led to a loss of morale. And the result was they stopped fighting because they couldn’t see a way they could win.”
No world power has succeeded in imposing its will on Afghanistan. Not Alexander, not the British, not Russia, not the US, not nobody no how. One cannot expect W or Trump to have known better, since neither knows anything, but the military brass should have known better, and Obama should have known better. Bin Laden was found by a covert intelligence operation. The war had nothing to do with it and may well have impeded it. Obama knew enough to get that part right. Too bad he let the military brass bamboozle him on the rest of it, but that's not a real surprise either. They're experts at using the ignorant bellicosity of the American electorate to bamboozle presidents into allowing them to prosecute continual war. MacArthur bamboozled Truman, Westmoreland bamboozled Johnson, Petreaus and the rest bamboozled Obama. I presume there were numerous earlier bamboozlings but I don't know enough pre-WWII history to put them on the list. It's a little different with W and Trump. They bamboozled themselves on every front, but the American electorate, they're a constant fountain of ignorance. A warmongering pack of rabble from way back.
Rex, you are correct. And Obama also fell into the the chasm that is filled with the hubris of presidents, thinking that they actually can change an inevitable outcome.
Hubris. Power. False belief in “certainty” remember what the Maginot Line failed to do in 1940
'Obama should have know better' would be an appropriate evaluation in other situations, although, what it really spells are his failures, his weaknesses -- not a truly good politician -- not a politician in any sense.
Obama had plenty of political skill. He got the ACA passed. Clinton and many before him, since Teddy Roosevelt, failedto do that. Then backlash set in and has never subsided. Obamma would have had to be a genius politician on the order of Lincoln, FDR, or Lyndon Johnson to overcome that. I think his weakness was in assuming he was dealing with reasonable people.
Examine Nancy Pelosi's role and input with ACA. I don't think that it would have happened without her.
True, but Obama set the priority and did not waver. Pelosi got it done. Obama chose the right person to depend on.
Rex, He didn't choose her, the House did.
Did she have another option but to support the President?
The whole deal started off with a backroom giveaway to Big Pharma and a lack of courage to offer a Public Option. Obama wavered a lot during the course of the process.
I think his goal was to just get something/anything passed. It did bring insurance to a lot of people but it's been getting watered down over the years. A lot of the initial "Have to do's" have been changed. Like complete annual physicals, now it's every 2 or 3 yrs where on the off years it's more like an interview/health assessment. And we're still being robbed blind by Big Pharma.
It's not universal healthcare like the other major industrialized countries. It's still driven by private companies taking 15% off the top. This is why we have copays and other fees. We paid for the insurance but the company took a big cut so we have to pay again.
It wasn't so much genius as it was schmoozing and capitulating to the insurance and pharmaceutical complexes.
All true, but he got something workable done. Nobody else did in a hundred years of attempts, so second-guessing his compromises is borderline hubris, at least.
Yes, that he did, no question about it. Then it was hard to gauge but the Obama we know today has left an obvious trail.
It's like Michelle said in an interview when her husband was running the first time if he'd run again if he didn't get the nomination. She said, in all honesty, they would because they'd be wealthy by then.
He's the perfect example of the rags to riches American dream and good for him. His actions speak louder, however, than his words sometimes.
All we can do is second guess if he doesn't come right out and say it. It's all part of the American Soap Opera. ;-)
We can revisit this when Stacey is the first Black FEMALE President. That's the real test.
And he allowed the Republicans to draw it out and water it down, when he had the votes to pass the original bill. So much for bipartisan participation.
At the time it still seemed logical, kinda, sorta. Many thought, and I was hoping, the GOP could be pulled back into a reality where compromising wasn't a 4 letter word. He just kept trying too long relying on his office to have absolute leverage.
He should have wised up when Mitch promised to make him a one term president. Barack had the last laugh there for sure. #sweet
Christopher, We are finally in agreement. It looked as though this would happen but it has. Salud!
En français s'il te plaît. A broken clock is right twice a day!
Yes, Obama didn’t realize how absolute their opposition was until too late. McCain’s blindside was the only reason the ACA passed.
And let’s not forget, the ACA was a version of the Republican plan Bill Clinton rejected and Mitt Romney later implemented in Massachusetts. And still they wouldn’t take “yes for an answer.”
Nonetheless, I’m deeply grateful for all the ACA has accomplished.
Precisely. He assumed that reasonableness and cooperation would work. He was naive in that respect. And then, there was the issue of his race. . . .
We so wanted to love Obama and his beautiful family that we ignored his passivity in the face of any opposition. We needed someone to fight for us and he never did.
Well, we can always say he was better that the GOP alternatives.
Hear, hear, Christopher…and will ALWAYS be infinitely better in most every way than the diabolical iDJT (hard for me to stomach much negativity about Obama these days, in such fresh, stark contrast). Plus, Obama “gave us” Joe Biden!
Say it again! How quickly we forget the last five years.
Ashley, Barack did not give us Biden. Remember when he favored H. Clinton over him? Biden brings Biden. In terms of Obama, I have not noticed him taking a bashing. Some columnists have continued to underrate him in a nasty way, but I don't have a general sense of that. Obama was a big disappointment from my point of view. We are on to other much more important business, so I will not take the time to lay it out. I posted a couple of negative comments about him, which were from reputable sources and not personal in nature.
Yea, and Biden's team is pumping up a war (like) attitude toward China and more money into the Pentagon to build a nuclear bomb many more times powerful that those laid on Japan...and, I seem to remember, ordering 600 of them.
"The US is building a new $100bn nuclear missile based on a set of flawed and outdated assumptions, a new report by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) will say." (Google)
Not to mention also, increasing sanctions on that mammoth
island of Cuba. Biden's no prince of peace or good will.
Holding that as a frame, obscures the lethal realities of Obama. Straight truth helps illusions and delusions disintegrate. Have we learned yet that suave talk and cool handsome in black, brown, yellow, pink, purple, white or green packaging (skin) doth not mean a person walks their talk nor furthers the welfare of those with economic, educational, sex/age and class circumstances different than their own "kind."(especially, level of wealth and "elite" education).
I don't think that "history" will be very kind to him.
Particularly, if they give Nancy Pelosi the credit she is due for her work on the the Affordable Healthcare Act. That is a big ask, even while there is plenty of documentation of her role and input.
I think he was too much politician and not enough focused on the people he represented. The Pentagon played him like a puppet.
His problem was lack of experience. Had he come to the office with say ten years as a senator, it would have been different. He listened to bad advisors like Vichy Democrat Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod (who might have been a good election advisor, but campaigning is different from governing). Had he gone out and campaigned for the ticket in 2010 the way he campaigned for the office in 2008, history would be vastly different. Every Democrat who understood the political crisis was screaming over the lack of comprehension in the White House about what they faced. Figuring it out in 2012 was way too late.
I still love the guy as a person, and will never forget how good it felt calling people for money (the worst job in politics) and the response I got from people who had never donated to anyone throughout the campaign. But I was waaaaayyyyy wrong when I turned to a co-worker after the election was called and said "We've finally won the election of 1968."
It is beyond me why there is any tangent of discussion about Pres Obama today and “blame” for Afghanistan on a president of less than 7 mos. Yet very little of the former’s negotiations with Taliban thugs with no seat at the table with the Afghan government supported by how many years?
With this kind of discussion, the Repubs will have to do little to scrub their clamor and support of Trump “ending” the war and then constant discussion of Biden “continuing” the war when the former lost. The politics is disgusting to me when really nothing can be said or criticized until all Americans get home and any others that will need shelter.
Think someone else might’ve shared earlier; a good, quick read:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/after-sunday-its-even-more-clear-biden-was-right
Love seems to cloud your keen vision in this case. He couldn't get down to the politics of working with representatives and senators. Not a negotiator, and why didn't you name Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers as two more problems? TC, the list is longer, but there are much more important problems inside the door.
As the negotiations and the vote-getting on raising the debt ceiling dragged it became clear that Obama really was not a good negotiator. Several times, just as a deal seemed imminent, the discussions collapsed—and very publicly.
'... when it comes to schmoozing with those of different political ilk — a key ingredient for a successful policy persuader — he’s sorely equipped said Chris Matthews.
'The fundamental flaw of the current National Security Strategy, a flaw it shares with all its predecessors, is that it ignores concessions, tradeoffs, and hard choices inherent in American foreign policy.' (Christopher Hemmer)
'Paralysis by committee. One of Obama’s greatest failures as a leader is the homogeneity in perspectives and attitudes of those closest to him. His economic advisors — Larry Summers and Tim Geithner — share a similarly orthodox economic mindset. Numerous eminent economists have complained vociferously about being frozen out — they can’t gain access to Obama. Sound familiar? It should: organizational closure is the same mistake Dubya made — he surrounded himself with neocons, and when their ideas failed, so did his presidency, and the nation.' (Harvard Business Review.)
'Let the burning platform sputter. Where is the Obama administration’s burning platform — not merely for health care, but for the multitude of challenges facing America? Where is the burning platform for education, finance, transportation, manufacturing, energy — to name just a few 21st century challenges? Great leaders ignite burning platforms — and never let them sputter.' (Harvard Business Review)
He was aloof. Kept his distance from legislators and without the temperament and skills to legislate. There is a lot more fault with Obama as not a politician, but points have been made.
He wanted to be loved and run with the cool kids as was made clear at this year's bday bash. Disinviting the ones who brought you to the dance is not "going high".
He is a talented writer. I cannot tell whether his level of drive and depth in that arena are strong enough. Security and luxury may be more in keeping with his instincts.
I do know that Roosevelt was bamboozled into refusing aid to the European Jews, and that led to 6,000,000 of them dying in concentration camps. I don't know whether he was shouted down by advisors, generals, or perhaps he was aware of our "Christian" citizens' anti-semitism, but the result was the same - they were murdered.
Courtesy of Katya Partan's post on HCR's Facebook:
"...we built an Afghan National Army for a nation that simply doesn't exist...the Taliban proved how you fight in Afghanistan. And it's about the long term, really in-depth knowledge of local politics and the ability to understand which levers to put pressure on and how to isolate and work around in a very methodical manner local power structures. We never had any time for that."
from Don Gonyea's interview with military analyst Jason Dempsey on All Things Considered: https://www.npr.org/2021/08/15/1027952034/military-analyst-u-s-trained-afghan-forces-for-a-nation-that-didnt-exist?fbclid=IwAR3xQulK73Z8lr7eontbqYzrpi2lPTscoO4g-bxFNxhQp6WeXLOo7VVoyY0
Afghanistan is defined, at least by the external world if not by themselves, as a distinct geographic area. The lines on the map effectively mean nothing in the minds of the people. This mountainous region is a collection of "kingdoms" and peoples ruled by traditional and/or opportunistic War Lords and this is not going to change even with the Taliban. Coalitions and adaptations amongst them are made, regrouping those with common interests which maintains the traditional priviledges of the leaders and the horrendously patriarchic and brutal nature of their society. The War Lords and the Taliban leaders share the spoils while the people mostly only survive as they have done for centuries. Like in the US South, the adherence of part of the population...the men... is assured by showing them that another part is worse off than them ...the women. Both in reality live precariously in a state of fear as they have done since time immemorial. The Clock never applied to this mountainous backwords of humanity.
I would agree with much of this sharp analysis, but the scorn for a world not based in the rapacious nation-state disfigures it. I’m surprised by that—scorn for the people who live between the lines drawn by the West and called Afghanistan is of course rampant as we abandon them to the hell our interfering ignorance has caused, but you are an intelligent and thoughtful person so I’m disappointed to see it here. Disappointed as well to find there seems no limit to HCR’s approval and defense of Joe Biden. My friends who work with people in Afghanistan are sleepless with fear, grief and shame for the human beings Biden has taken off our list of responsibilities. This president ran on a platform of Niceness, touting an expertise in grieving and fellow feeling that I hadn’t seen a lot of outside his grief for his own family members, and fellow feeling expressed in encounters with individuals undergoing exactly similar personal losses. Maybe the Afghan people have the usual problem—not quite White enough to grieve with? The Pentagon has developed a special program though, to help Afghan interpreters who managed to get out before the fall of the cities grieve the beheadings of their colleagues left behind. So we are off the hook for grieving too.
Surprising - how gullible we seem to remain about our "true" intentions for our invasion of Afghanistan - as if we care more about the status of women and the other downtrodden there more than we care about the profits the USA war/weapons industry makes. How many billions have we spent on insuring all our own people of their right to vote? How many billions have we fueled the IRS to force the Big Rich/Corporations to fork over their fair share in tax dollars to help fund infrastructure and creative production to mediate climate warming/catastrophe?
Selina yes, have you read this by Alexader Cockburn? https://spectatorworld.com/topic/pentagon-rich-afghanistan-military-budget/
Mary, there is no scorn in my thoughts or words. I'm just realist, have an understanding of some of the forces shaping events and a great respect for history. Life on earth is not necessarily governed by niceness and consideration for the other
Agreed. My words on Biden’s Niceness were bitter. I found his emphasis on it tacky and insulting to our intelligence. But the lack of any sense of the moral tragedy now, the lack of foresight and imagination in his management of the bad hand left him by Trump, is to be deplored. And feared.
What would you have him do?
Brilliant, Stuart. I might add, Therein lies the nugget of current governance, greed, that must change lest we perish from the earth.
When a sentence pulls the threads together, 'The Clock never applied to this mountainous backwards of humanity'. It need not be mountainous, the land could be flat or hilly, too. Thank you, Stuart.
We could not bomb Afghanistan forward to the Stone Age.
and what are you suggesting, Pulman? That is not a solution, nor did it occur to me.
I am suggesting 2 things:
1. The mountainous backwards of Afghanistan have a paleolithic morality
2. You cannot bomb people into morality.
(Sweden)
Well, most of The Middle East could be described in similar terms, and Mohammed was called for as a negotiator by War Lords exhausted from fighting each other. In my understanding of this region there is the early circumcision of little boys, creating an artificial strengthening of clan loyalty, but not leaving the potential soldiers with as deep a trauma as when the same operation is done to teenagers, as in subsaharan Africa. Both Moses and Mohammed understood that this practice could not remain tribal since the tribes would then continue to fight each other, so it was made "religious", and thereby created a wider unity capable of fighting "the others".
Assad's Syria, Gaddafi's Libya, and Hussein's Irak were all states based on balancing the different tribal powers against each other, and tyranny instead of generally accepted central power. The US attack on Irak has created a turmoil in Syria where all different groups, with strengthened clan loyalty, have turned against, or been made to fight each other; maybe avoiding The Clash of Civilisations, where Muslims would join against Jews and Christians; along the lines of Samuel P. Huntingdon.
The establishment of accepted central power in Afghanistan remains to be seen. The Chinese are said to make contact with the Talibans. Their huge business interests and sense of central power may accomplish what other empires did not, or just confirm that Afghanistan is where empires go to die.
Olof, Fascinating. The dramas of power and subjugation, and they go on. We are in the midst of them. You tell the tales. Thank you.
or 'backwoods'...
T'was my intention but.....
Morning TC. The lesson was already, given our epoch's short memory span, perfectly clear in Vietnam. The same thought, like 'em or hate 'em, dynamized the Viet Cong.They were fighting for the "freedom" and survival of their country. The leaders of the South were fighting for the maintenace of their personal interests and priviledges. The US never really had an idea of what they were fighting for other than a stupid and irrelevant nonsense in terms of political thought....the Domino Theory.
The Domino Theory, initially underlined by Eisenhower in 1954, was a left over of 1945 and the panic concerning the overly rapid advance of Stalin's troups well beyond Berlin and the rigid application of the Yalta agreement. We have paid dearly for the "Reds under the beds" incomprehension and the idea that ownership of the means of production by the "people" is in total contradiction (McCarthy et al) with the capitalist system. In reality the wealthy capitalists understand well and work closely and very profitably with "state capitalists" masquerading as communists....they understand and appreciate monopoly power and market fixing when they see. The capitalist critic of the "democratic" system is that they are not more like the state ownership systems as we stop them enjoying total spoiliation rights....unlike their state system partners. And they have the nerve to call the Democrats "Socialist"!
Why are the Taliban promising not to harm the Russians--give them the illusion of another bit at the apple in exchange for money deals and arms?
Basically quite simple but short term, Elie. "Our enemy's enemy is our friend" on the one hand and on the other Putin has been doing what the CIA were previously doing funding and arming the Taliban to the extent of his limited means...tit for tat between fair weather friends and enemies! It certainly won't last longer than the final flight out.
Probably because they were state backers, where do you think the Taliban got all of their arms and ammunition? They don’t have any industries necessary to manufacture the armaments that they demonstrated to have in such abundance. If you think we pushed in a lot of that stuff you would be right, but the Taliban had a supply line equal to their needs as well.
Ellie, yep.
Rubbing salt in the wounds of the defeated US, most certainly.
Sounds likely
Interestingly, every US veteran who has gone back to Vietnam and met their "opposite numbers" has come away with how much they like them. While I was researching my two books on the war, I was put in touch with Dr. Nguyen Sy Hung, historian of the Vietnam People's Air Force, who put me in touch with retired Lt. General Phu Thi Thai (an ace from the war) and retired Senior Colonel Tu De (last living participant in the attack on USS Higbee and the raid on Tan Son Nhut on april 28, 1975 that shut down the evacuation and has been blamed for 46 years on "renegade VNAF pilots, since they didn't believe the North Vietnames could learn to fly A-37s that fast - another final underestimation of the enemy) and they are excellent people. US pilots who have read "Historic Confrontations," the VPAF official history, say it is more accurate than any of the US "official history" - I was privileged to get the first English-language translation in hardback, signed by all three.
The "other side" was actually "the good guys."
Not only is the corruption and moral of Afghans rubbing off on our troops, but the extremism is too, when you consider how many of our own vets ransacked our Capitol.
Whose corruption is rubbing off on whom? Did we declare war on Afghanistan? Was the real motivation for the war "enlightenment" of the heathen or for USA weapons/war industry to rake in more than a few shekels? If it was"enlightenment" about the virtues of democracy, how devoted are we - in terms of cash outlay - in insuring our own people of the right to vote in our own "democracy/oligarchy" ? or insuring that the Big Rich/Corporations pay their fair share of taxes? Or hoisting our own poor out of misery through jobs training, $15 national minimum wage, free college/trade school? Did Afghanistan invite us in? Under 3,000 911 American deaths. 171,000-174,000 Afghanistan deaths. Were the terrorists from Afghanistan? See the foregoing post about the sizable chunk of change our weapons/war industry is fattened by recent sales to whom? Saudi Arabia? Isn't that the country where most of the terrorists were from?
We never declared way in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is not a country, never was. We declared way on the Taliban who weren’t corrupt, and installed a corrupt, puppet regime and built them a paper tiger army. Glad we’re out, wish it went better.
"Afghanistan (/ æfˈɡænɪstæn, æfˈɡɑːnɪstɑːn / (listen); Pashto / Dari: افغانستان, Afġānestān [avɣɒnesˈtɒn]) is a mountainous landlocked country." [Wikipedia]
I don’t care what your encyclopedia says. That’s just Western propaganda at this point.
Afghanistan is a country according to the CIA Factbook and the UN. But it is not and never has successfully made itself a unified nation state (nor had any country in the world before 1500 or so), and no European or Euro-American nation state seems able to imagine that--because a few lines were drawn on a map by imperial greedhogs a couple centuries ago who believed that was some kind of magic. A magic, practiced across a globe's worth of captured and colonized lands and peoples, that has unspooled a century of war, especially civil war between peoples who didn't/don't share the superstitions of their imperial overlords. I agree with Selina Sweet, but I think you do too! No need for semantic debate. Afghanistan is a region parts of which have had rather powerless "national" governments since its borders were drawn under the influence of the British in their so-called "Great Game." We invaded it, destabilized it, abandoned it, and are now offering the excuse of necessity.
Just curious....in your book, is the USA a country or empire?
I suppose it’s the American companies who corrupt the pentagon and the puppet regimes who corrupt the Afghan army. Our soldiers are corrupted by witness it all. It was a proverbial house of cards.
You write truth.
So there is a limit to American might. It is staring us in the eye from the front page of the New York Times, a Taliban fighter sitting square on the hood of a military Humvee, rifle held upright, backed by two more fighters on the gun turret behind him. These people have a very different view of the world, compared to ours. They reject western hegemony. While I don't want to romanticize their brutal religiosity, maybe this isn't all bad. I feel that America's penchant for casually dominating the affairs of any and all countries we take an interest in has given us an unhealthy confidence in our willingness to meddle. Perhaps this is the high water mark of American Internationalism. Or perhaps not. I might have thought the same of Viet Nam after the fall of Saigon, and now, decades later that country is another manufacturing center in the global supply chain. Regardless, at the moment there is a definite counterpoint to US Corporate capitalism. It amazes me the level of vicious tenacity it requires to make such a stand.
The paradox is that if we don’t meddle, someone else worse will. China and Russia are certainly meddling. I’m not saying we couldn’t meddle better, though.
It's true, you don't stay on top for long by taking it easy.
:’-(
TC, This was the first or second comment that I read early this morning. It is so rich in detail, concise and true that my rattled head full of desperate Afghans running for their lives was stilled by reason, sad as it is.
Those who are informed and aware might want to check out these links:
The Asian Roundabout: Afghanistan After the West's Withdrawal
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ctWx66c9_go
_______
A SPECIAL DAILY MAVERICK LIVE JOURNALISM WEBINAR SUPPORTED BY THE FRIEDRICH NAUMANN FOUNDATION
Join Director of the Brenthurst Foundation, Dr Greg Mills in conversation with Rory Stewart, Former Secretary of State for International Development of the United Kingdom, and Dr David Kilcullen adviser to Secretary Condi Rice and General David Petraeus as they discuss why the west failed in Afhanistant, the prospects for peace, what caused the Afghan armed forces and the government to fold so quickly and much more.
Rory Stewart, Former Secretary of State for International Development of the United Kingdom; Dr David Kilcullen is a former Australian infantry officer, and adviser to Secretary Condi Rice and General David Petraeus; Dr Greg Mills served four assignments with the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan as the commander’s adviser, currently directs the Brenthurst Foundation, and is the author of the forthcoming 'Expensive Poverty: Why Aid Fails and How It Might Work’
Wednesday, 18 August 2021, 6:00 AM
https://event.webinarjam.com/register/473/zynn8b21
... that is 6am Pacific Time ...
And if we stayed there for another six months, or one year or two years, and then left would the end result be any different?
No. It wouldn’t.
If Afghans aren’t willing to fight for their freedom today, they won’t be willing to fight tomorrow.
Biden made the least worst choice.
H. A. Rose, I have been trying to make sense out of all of this, with the ghosts of Saigon embassy and Kent State living in my head. Another ghost is the body of a Vietnamese civilian burned to death in the street, encountered while we were on patrol. We found out that the Viet Cong had burned alive him for being a little too friendly to Americans. Something broke inside of me on each of those terrible occasions that will never be repaired.
However, your brief polemic is the most excellent explanation of the Afghan situation I have encountered so far. It will allow me to keep supporting my president a thousand percent through this nightmare. Thank you.
President Biden, the Pentagon, and the State Department should use your explanation, word for word.
Your last five words are the mantra the will allow me to at least cope with the horror of what is coming to the Afghan people, particularly the women and girls. “Biden made the least worst choice.”
It's what we elect a president to do.
I'll repeat the words of the Navy fighter pilot I interviewed for Tonkin Gulf Yacht Club. They apply to you, me, and every other American who was there:
"We were fighting to survive our tour, and they were fighting for their country."
Four succinct and accurate sentences H. A. Rose. Trump gambled - if he withdrew while trying to get re-elected, the outcome would have been this. If he did it in a possible second term - who cares - MAGA. But he left it to the next president. No one should be surprised at the shitshow happening right now in Afghanistan (and it appears Russia is NOT surprised because they are probably funding some of it.) But we can all have compassion for the women and children who’s lives are forever impacted.
A very good summary if the geopolitical side of the mess, to complete H, A. Rose's post.
Laurie, I would bet my house that Americans were killed or wounded by Russian supplied arms. In Vietnam we were killed or wounded by Chinese copies of Russian AK-47s, better known as 'Chi-Com AKs which we sometimes referred to as just Chi-Coms. Same-same the RPGs -- rocket propelled grenades. Russian. The same weapon (could have been manufactured and supplied by a country other than Russia) that brought down the Blackhawks in Mogadishu, and have killed Americans in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and all recent wars and 'conflicts.' Thank you for helping me understand why the chumpy orange guy passed this hot mess on to our current President.
I seem to recall a Gen. D.A. MacArthur quote from my Dad about Viet Nam: "Never get involved in a war on the Asian landmass"
There has got to be something, somewhere, that says "don't fight to change centuries of conflict that no one before you has been able to change"
Big Mac didn't follow his own advice, rather listening to his collection of suckups, "The Bataan Gang," his long-time staff, and took us into what Sir Martin Gilbert described as "the most thorough defeat of a previously-victorious army in recorded history," the Chinese Intervention in Korea. The day he was asked what he thought of the Chinese warning of intervention if he proceeded, he replied "I would remind the Chinese leaders that no Asian army has ever successfully stood against a Western army." That was the day the first unit of an eventual 250,000-strong "Chinese People's Volunteer Army" crossed the Yalu, completely undetected by US recon. They didn't use trucks or anything modern, each man carried 70 pounds on his back, they moved 15 miles a night through the forest, and no air recon saw them during the day, and on November 24, 1950, they handed MacArthur his head. The Chinese claim they won the war, and they have a good argument - nobody (particularly us) has messed with them since. The memory of that "damn good whacking" colored all our plans in Vietnam ten years later, when we failed to understand China in the Cultural Revolution had no ability to intervene anywhere. "US intelligence" is to actual good intelligence as "US politics" are to actual good politics.
The NVA, moving their entire logistic supply, by BICYCLE, down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Unbelievable. We found American medical supplies, sent by Jane Fonda, in a multi-level underground hospital in the Iron Triangle, shipped via the Trail. How do you prevail against that?
We shouldn't fight Asians or their proxies anymore....
Or any in any middle eastern country with a civil war problem. They, and the Asians, have been at it a lot longer than we have.
The Chinese lost about 1 million soldiers, which was ‘acceptable’ to Mao, but would be absolutely unacceptable to a Western nation.
Yes. And in answer to Biden asking the question about sending my sin or daughter. NO. My son already served in Afghanistan and Iraq, as his father did in Viet Nam. They both returned to live full lives , while so many did not. My only wish, hope, or goal is that the US learns this time. We must focus on healing our own culture not trying and failing to impose our views around the world.
Not even 6 centuries.
Which Afghans, fighting for whose freedom? Many Afghans have been fighting hard for their freedom the whole 20 years we've been there. They just took over the capital city yesterday, with a majority of the Afghan people in support. And the rest of course terrified.
How could the US mess up so badly on this? One of my management saying is that "No decision is made until you know how to implement it." Where was the planning to get translators and their families out of there safely? Where was the intelligence that said the Taliban would likely take over quickly? Where is the consideration of what was going to happen to the women and girls going back to slavery, rape and worse after knowing freedom? The world has lost trust in the US. The Taliban and others will take advantage of that for decades. It's too late for Americans to put their country over their party. Trust once lost is very hard to regain. Where is the Frances Perkins of our time? Where is the woman with vision to bring Americans back to sanity? Where is the courage to do the right thing by each other and Be the Light as Amanda Gorman so beautifully put it at the Inaugural? It's time to hold politicians accountable and to elect people with courage and empathy for others and the integrity and values to do the right thing by all. Power corrupts. Money is not speech. Perhaps it is time for universal democracy not the sham of representative democracy which is in reality an oligarchic kleptocracy . Our representatives do not represent us any more. They are too busy doing the bidding of their donors who only have personal greed as their god. They are too busy obstructing government rather than being the People's government. They are too busy squabbling like two year olds and telling lies and inducing fear to take away the freedom to vote. Re-elect no one unless you are sure they are Americans and for the People above all else. Only vote for candidates not by the R or D by their name but only ones with A by their name. A for American, a person of integrity, values and courage to create Well-Being for everyone.
Colin Powell, way back in 2001, warned Shrubbie Bush that if he listened to the ravings of Rumsfeld and Cheney and then screwed it up, disaster would follow: "If we break it, we own it." QED.
Rumsfeld and Cheney—two “kick butt and take names” guys for sure.
Hot diggity dog, Cathy. Fire and brimstone at this time. You'r right all the way down the line. Go get 'em.
It’s notable how aware the Taliban were of the optics, when taking Kabul today. When the MAGA terrorists took our Capitol they were screaming like idiots, climbing buildings, wearing horns on their heads, and defecating in offices. When Republicans make the Taliban look good like that, it doesn’t bode well for Democracy. Republicans destroying Democracy at home, and that makes it unsustainable abroad.
Perfect comparison between the Trump Mob and the Taliban, Gregory. You have addressed style as no other. In terms of tribal fashion, the Taliban far excels the Mob. On the other hand, I would not group this country's Republicans with Democracy.
The half-page picture on the morning paper features a Humvee loaded w Taliban fighters. A Humvee, brought to the Taliban from the American military industrial complex.
So, they took a pic in a Humvee. It’s the behavior that I’m talking about.
And I’m addressing the delusional thinking of a militaristic solution to humanity’s crises
Point for me is that the Taliban didn’t do anything to make themselves look like idiots. They took the Humvee from the idiots. They don’t look like the idiots, despite the misogyny and murder they’re doing off camera. Now that I have the context of what you meant, that photo does illustrate your point, points to the fact that our Congress needs to change the Pentagon’s mission.
Regardless of how current Washington officials explain Afghanistan or how Trump Republicans rewrite or erase history, this looks a lot like Vietnam. Decades of Washington officials and America military, with US citizen support, propping up a corrupt government in a foreign land that we did not understand.
Vietnam started out as a Democrat war. Afganistan started out as a Republican war. Both ended with the other party trying to win the war, and then withdrawing. Both left the future in the hands of the country that we tried to reshape.
France had colonized Vietnam before the US entry and was driven out. Russia had dominated Afghanistan before the US and was driven out. We can either learn from history or repeat it. We tend to repeat history because of our pro war and agressive too often dishonest politics. The aggressors in our nation draw in our moderates, and our conservatives are never conservative. Our macho leaders like all bullies want to show off their argument that fight makes right.
What troubles me most is that we cannot distinguish between nationalism and extremism. Vietnam was fighting to overcome the centuries of colonial power domination by a number of countries. They had fought Japan in WWII, supported the US and expected the US would support their independence. But we supported France and got hung up on the word "communism" believing all people who tried to free themselves from foreign capitalist domination and got recognition from Russia or China is "communist" and must be crushed. Now we are trading and tourism partners with Vietnam.
The Taliban are an extremist group. That doesn't change our responsibility to allow foreign nations to pursue their own internal governance nor make it anymore appropriate or possible to administer military solutions to their extremism. The fast fall of our propped up modern Afghan society that gave so many average Afghans, particularly women, hope should remind us of how easily the advances of modern civilization can be dashed to pieces and set back what seems like centuries. Our own modern democracy is under siege by our own "Taliban" wing of the Republican Party. They have taken over the Republican Party and are marching into every American capitol taking over in many ways with lies, misinformation, guns and money from wealthy investors looking to eliminate all democratic measures and participation that would limit their power. Women are at risk here in our "Trump World" ie "Taliban" world just as in Afghanistan.
Democracy is fragile. Modern society is fragile. Culture is fragile. Every civilization before and after the Roman Empire has fallen to Huns and thugs. Guns in our society are not for defense. They are for offense. Yes the criminals are the ones who use guns against the defenceless. But we have political criminals in the US just as Afghanistan has them. We need to di a better job of dealing with the political criminals in the US. The ones who say they "can shoot someone ... in broad daylight, and not lose a supporter". The Taliban do exactly this everyday.
Eisenhower got us started in Vietnam. JFK let the domino theory get the better of him and failed to withdraw. Johnson was afraid failing to double down on warmongering would sink his domestic program. Vietnam was a consequence of the domino mythology perpetrated by the Dulles brothers and bought, lock, stock, and barrel, by presidents and the ignorant, bellicose American electorate alike.
I was thinking exactly the same thing (parallels between the Taliban and Trumpism) but you put it far more coherently than I could. The problem throughout the world where there are criminals in or seeking power is that ordinary decent people don't, by their very nature, fight back because they have lives to get on with and are not interested in power grabs: so the bad guys walk over them (as they have done in Afghanistan and are doing in the USA).
I was trying to find the words. Everyday I think about “ Could it be us ? “Never in my long life as a born and raised American even consider the idea of having to do ‘Combat ‘with my neighbor to protect my life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. My Freedom.Do they not recognize Authoritarian control coming like a speeding out of control train at them ?How can they not in the long reach of the media arm ? Everyday it’s right in front of us. I’ve never been this scared . Is it just me ?
No. You are not alone. I am scared for my family and friends who will outlive me for decades. And literally for all of us in this country. Wish my generation could have done better with this place. But that doesn't stop me from trying hard now.
Clear and cogent, pointing out the immediate implications. Thank you for this.
Very perceptive comment. Thank heavens that guns are a bit of a rarity in Oz.
Yes guns are a bit of a rarity in the UK too, as witness the fact that a small mass shooting here recently was headline news for days. It would hardly have caused a ripple in the USA.
Thanks Joe Biden for bringing the inevitable end to the certain failure in Afghanistan. No country, in all of history, has been able to succeed there. We've been living in state of denial of denial because no one wanted to be the President who lost in Afghanistan.
Even if Trump had not started the withdrawal ball rolling, I bet Biden would have done this anyway.
It hurts to admit we failed, and by we, I mean the U.S. Military and it's industrial war machine in the private sector. Maybe if they had tried to fight the Taliban on its own terms there still would never have been a definite end. We've had 20 years to set up the Afghan government and military and they couldn't hold the line for a month. It was never going to change, Biden is right.
History is full of these kinds of failures, the Romans and their walls in Britain is but one example.
In the end Afghanistan was a war of foolish pride with no real exit plan that should have ended when they had a chance to capture Osama bin-Laden for political reasons. I feel for the women there, I feel for all Afghans, I feel for the troops who fought, were injured and died there, but I'm glad it's over.
This boondoggle was always going to end like this and should have come much sooner.
It's shocking to see the commentary right now and how surprised everyone is that this is happening so fast. May I just say, WTF did they think was going to happen! The Taliban have had months to prepare. The brave soldiers that sacrificed their lives is horrible but the number of mangled bodied and minds that are still living with their forever hell is devastating. And all for nothing.
Hubris. Also remember the Maginot Line and how quickly France was conquered in June 1940
I can't help but wonder if we weren't so marinated in American Exceptionalism, if we would have even been in Afghanistan, or, having gone there, seen this outcome? Seth Dunn, below, speaks to hubris - indeed. I fear after WWII, we started to believe our own PR.
Anything beyond bin Laden search and destroy mission was destined to fail.
My podcast (under 5 mins) on this is up https://brrpodcast.libsyn.com. Also Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and wherever you probably get your podcasts.
I’ll be listening. There are a lot of comments on here today that are very disappointing to me. We expect the Afghan government to be stronger than the Taliban when most of the country supports the Taliban and that culture? Naive.
What bothers me is this, the Afghani army and government crumpled like a cheap suit. Congressional members are saying, and this is a paraphrase, "Well what do you expect the US military strengthened their spine and when we left, the lost the will to fight?"
I have to call bullshit. The Taliban doesn't have any problem finding the will to fight. There's something wrong here but Biden is right to leave. The withdrawal is not botched, it's what happens in a dysfunctional country. The Afghans have been deserting their army since we first started trying to train them.
Don't get me started, it's evening where I'm at.
"where I'm at"? Really. My auto-type mode needs a tune-up. Where I'm at is where I am!
Josh Marshall on "Biden Was Right"
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/after-sunday-its-even-more-clear-biden-was-right
The scenes out of Kabul over the weekend were eerily reminiscent of Saigon in 1975.
To me, the Afghanistan War can be summed up in four words: They won. We lost.
My heart goes out to the Afghanis who worked with and for us during our 20 years in the country. We owe it to every one of those individuals to bring them (and their families) here. Every. Single. One. Of. Them.
On the same line, I feel for every soldier who served there. Those who did not perish must be asking themselves why we went in to Afghanistan in the first place.
Your last sentence is the whole question.
Yes Ian, this must feel like a betrayal to many who served, those who were wounded and families who lost loved ones. And when Blinken said “ this is not Saigon” I cringed, because it is.
Diane, I had an old school chum, a Vietnam vet, email me the exact same thoughts about Saigon. I'm sure this isn't helping his PTSD.
The similarities with the endgame of our Vietnam fiasco are striking. Is it progress that there were far fewer deaths in Afghanistan?
"The U.S. and many other countries are rushing to evacuate their diplomatic personnel and allies from the country, although Russia is not, as the Taliban has guaranteed their safety."
I get the feeling that Putin engineered this whole thing, using Trump as a very useful patsy. Remember the bounties on US soldiers?
So, is Russia the current winner of Kipling's Great Game? That would be towering irony.
It does look like the Afghanistan end game is trump's parting gift to Putin
And Biden took the bait.
Incorrect. Bait is off the hook.
It is now.
No. Putin took it. My oh my, they thought Trump would be in the seat 4 more years.
Putin really never cared about Trump. He was nothing more to him than an easy target to manipulate. I'm sure he is disappointed.
Pulling out of Afghanistan without a plan stops at Bidens door. Biden could have made a bad situation better by feathering out a plan that helped those Afghanistans that helped the US, as well as journalists that were left to fend for themselves. What is going to and probably already is happening to the women and children is unthinkable. All the shots in all the arms doesn't make this right.
I do have to wonder if the timing of this and the tipping point of the resistance of vaccinations and wearing masks by the GOP will jeopardize the 2022 elections even more. I certainly hope not.
Trump also abandoned the Kurds, and that was another gift. It has been my theory that Putin and Assad plotted, that Assad would bomb his country so Syrians would flee and destabilize Europe. Perhaps Putin's end game is to have a monopoly over the oil, and control the world that way.
Another good reason to wean ourselves off fossil fuels as quickly as possible.
Exactly!!
It certainly seems that Putin is the one coming out ahead in all these scenarios.
Putin is happy, yes....but mostly just glad it wasn't him this time. Afghanistan remains a problem for him too. On this US and Russian interests coincide...containment of the future fallout. On this China will be mostly amenable too.
Caution—beware of wild projections on that wretched Putin (or anyone else). The less you know or understand, the bigger the Bogeyman, the longer his shadow. From such delusions spring conspiracy theories.
I wrote in yesterday’s thread that, while George W. Bush’s retaliatory strike against Al Qaida’s hosts, the Taliban regime, made sense, “the occupation of Afghanistan, the attempt to transform lions into pussy cats, was as absurd and criminally mad as Stalin’s plan to forge the peoples of the USSR into homo sovieticus or President Xi’s trying to beat and brainwash Uighurs and Tibetans until they become imitation Han. Or broken slaves.
The victorious Taliban will be a huge problem for the entire region, but especially for Russia, with its large Muslim minority, its turbulent Caucasus and its many Muslim neighbors. In the longer term, a problem for China, given the regime’s constant attempts to control peoples and religions it does not begin to understand.”
For the time being, the new regime will have more than enough on its hands controlling the territory and containing its own troops (if it can). All neighbors have an interest in coming to terms with the long-expected reality.
My mind goes back to well before the Vietnam war and the blatantly obvious madness of trying to prop up a tree that’s dead and rotting—the Saigon regime.
Another way of putting it: “When in a hole, stop digging.” (British politician Denis Healey’s First Law of Politics). Neither Brezhnev nor the Pentagon seem to have been able to grasp that elementary truth and learn Step 1: Pause and take a coffee break…
Now… pause, take stock of the horrors, take stock of all those decades of madness, meaningless waste, mass death and destruction. The shame of it all. A time for mourning, deep self-examination and humility.
Is not mankind worthy of better than this?
Can we not do better than this?
Can we even survive if we go on like this?
Hi Peter.
Q1...mostly
Q2...probably not on past experience
Q3...probably for the above reason
Not funny, i know, but it's the reality.
Right answers.
There are the old, far deeper questions that underlie any like these ones that came to me spontaneously and weren’t carefully thought out, questions that each of us must ask ourselves.
(It’s a help to me that Christine should actually have gone a little way to explaining her categorical statement (if not her animus) via you. Maybe it’s straightforward irritation at my manner of expressing myself, in which case, fair enough… I don’t necessarily disagree.)
Q.1 I understand your answer but prefer a categorical YES. In so doing, I’m asking us to try to be, not what we’ve clothed ourselves in, not the shit with which we’ve covered ourselves, but what we really are. So, yes, I’m deliberately implying a deeply positive view of human perfectibility. I don’t have time to spell this out just now, but the political and psychological implications of this and the opposite view are obvious.
Q.2 I’m closer to you here. Let’s say we can “fail better”… Maybe it’ll be paving the road to hell better…
We can at least try, instead of zapping everything that moves, with $$$, with bombs, with bullets.
Q.3 I’m dumb, I’ve not been able to understand your answer here… But it looks to me as though you’re speaking throughout in terms of your own practical experience, and that you are someone who can do that. And yes, we’ll have to struggle to get by, but when I say “we”, I’m thinking of our children’s children, and theirs.
What I “should” do is none of your business. I’m not a woulda shoulda coulda anyway.
Hope is eternal, Peter. I understand your frustration but mankind is getting richer, cleaner and is living longer but we are still not using much of our frontal cortex...for the common good that is!
Wrong questions.
What questions would you ask, Christine? Many points of view are worth considering here.
Didn’t say they weren’t.
I may not have expressed myself well. I just wondered what you thought were the right questions.
Thé USA no longer deserves trust upon the world stage. We have demonstrated our incapacity to comprehend other cultures. We have also evidenced that our corrupt dependence upon ‘contractors’ bodes ill for our collaborators. The corruption of our operations simply mirrored the corruption in Afghanistan. Did I hear something about the emperors’ new clothes?
I appreciate the work of the Biden administration, but this situation was out of control and will be lethal for many. Our collaborators, the women and children of Afghanistan will suffer. We could have done better.
The rest of the world has held this opinion for a long time. Happily it's also starting to sink in at home too. The US has the ressources...the money, the equipment, the technology whatever...but that isn't always what's needed to solve the problem. A little listening and education might go a long way.
Thank you, Stuart. This cannot be said enough.
"We could have done better."
We should have done right by those Afghanis who helped us. Those who did not get out will likely all be dead in a month, along with whatever US credibility may still exist in Central Asia.
As to the women and children; should we have moved them all out? To where?
The Afghanistan fiasco started on day one. Why should the last day be any different?
“The Afghanistan fiasco started on day one. Why should the last day be any different?” I just feel that needed repeating.
When you say that we could have done better, I wonder how. This was always going to happen upon American withdrawal, and there was no reason to stay indefinitely
Only by staying out in the first place.
Does anyone have an idea of what doing better would look like?
Not interfering to begin with
In my opinion, the only thing we could have done better *at this point in time* would have been to evacuate all those Afghans who worked with us, along with their families, before we evacuated our own American personnel.
The world has many heartaches, not the least of which is Afghanistan. The cruelty of prehistoric patriarchy takes our breath away, but reality does not change. The melting of the Afghan army is testimony to the fundamental truth why our efforts failed.
These words...."The melting of the Afghan army is testimony to the fundamental truth why our efforts failed" are exactly what need to be repeated over and over.
"Cruelty of prehistoric patriarchy." Based on Islam that needs a reformation? 20 years = drop in bucket.
And no, In answer to our president's question, I would not send my son or daughter. There HAS to be a better way?
It feels like Vietnam all over again. Blinken can say it’s not Saigon as much as he wants, but from here “If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, …”
Blinken & Heather - classmates Harvard '84 - I'm imagining a Zoom w/ those two.
I’ll buy a ticket to that!
But dang, Betsey De Vos's brother made a packet over the last 20 years, as did all the warmongers who ramped up the production of war machines to sell at inflated prices to the US government, which are now in the hands of the Taliban, and got the government to pay for mercenaries who did f*** all except exploit and terrorize the Afghanis. It was parteeeee time for the people profiting off of war and death. So sad that they are now going to have to find some other sucker to convince to pay for another f***ing war.
Exactly correct. But, just fyi, the references to the word f*** sort of distract from your message.
I disagree. But then, profanity is my second language. Unless it is sarcasm. They fight, you know.
There are times when a well placed "colorful metaphor" is called for. In my opinion, this is one of them.
Amen.
What kind of a country unilaterally decides to invade another?
Did the US Congress declare war on Afghanistan?
Of the 19 - 911 terrorists, how many were Afghan? "fifteen of them were citizens of Saudi Arabia, two were from the United Arab Emirates, one was from Lebanon, and one from Egypt"
"In the five years before the war [Yemen] U.S. arms transfers to Saudi Arabia amounted to $3 billion; between 2015 and 2020, the U.S. agreed to sell over $64.1 billion worth of weapons to Riyadh, averaging $10.7 billion per year. Sales to other belligerents in the war, like the United Arab Emirates (UAE), also rose exponentially."[Brookigs.edu]
Exactly how many Americans died in the 9/11 attack on our soil? "A total of 2,996 people were killed in the 9/11 attacks, including the 19 terrorist hijackers" (history.com)
Search domain en.wikipedia.orghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_afghanistan_(2001–present)
"According to the Costs of War project at Brown University, as of April 2021, the war has killed 171,000 to 174,000 people in Afghanistan; 47,245 Afghan civilians, 66,000 to 69,000 Afghan military and police and at least 51,000 opposition fighters."
[Search domain dailyalternative.co.uk] www.dailyalternative.co.uk/real-reason-afghan-war/
The Real Reason for the Afghan War? Share; Tweet; When the United States decided to invade Afghanistan to grab Osama bin Laden—and failed, but stayed on like an unwanted guest—could it have known that the Afghans were sitting on some of the world's greatest reserves of mineral wealth?
(usatoday.com) 1. Lockheed Martin Corp.
• Country: United States
• Arms sales: $44.9 billion
• Total sales: $51.0 billion
• Profit: $2.0 billion
• Employees: 105,000
Lockheed Martin is by far the largest defense contractor in the world. In 2017, the Bethesda, Maryland, company made $44.9 billion in arms and defense contracts, nearly twice the amount of arms sales at Boeing, the second largest defense contractor. The company makes a wide range of military aircraft, including the F-16, F-22, and F-35 fighter jets, as well as sonar technologies, ships, missile defense systems, and missiles used by the Navy. More than $35 billion of Lockheed Martin's arm sales in 2017 came from the U.S. government, more than the entire budget of the Internal Revenue Service and Environmental Protection Agency combined.
Net sales are expected to have climbed even higher in fiscal 2018. In late 2018, the company was awarded a $22.7 billion contract for 106 F-35 fighter jets for the U.S. military and another 89 for ally nations."
"Did the US Congress declare war on Afghanistan?"
Well yes, sort of. Every member of Congress voted to support the invasion EXCEPT, the Black congresswoman Barbara Jordan (no doubt recognizing that Black soldiers would be the first to get shot up).
* Barbara Lee, from Oakland, CA, is the lone vote against the invasion
The Congress did not declare war on Afghanistan. It supported an invasion to look for the Saudi Arabian prince Osama bin Laden and his supporters, and to fight a group of nationalists rebels against the existing national government.
Sigh.