I want to keep our withdrawal (which I think has been inevitably going to turn out like this all along and should have happened almost immediately) separate from the way we've treated US employees and others who have been trying to get visas or claim asylum (which is horrifyingly shameful.)
The first, I think Biden's doing the right thing. The second I don't see any excuse for.
Someone walk me through what a sane response to 9/11 would have been. Was this particular fight off the rails from day 1, or did it go off the rails at a certain identifiable point, or was it a slow descent?
I know I've been here this whole time, but I am a bear of little brain, and long wars bother me.
I don't remember the timing of the first year. But I think it was at least arguably a good idea for the first ninety days or so -- whenever we had effectively disrupted Al Qaeda activity in Afghanistan -- and after that we should have gone home. But I would listen respectfully to someone who thought the whole thing was a bad idea.
I don't really do counterfactuals, but I keep coming back to Spencer Ackerman and he put this one out there: "We could have had in 2001 the terms US sought in the 2019 deal -- the Taliban offered to demobilize and join a political process if Mullah Omar could be in Kandahar house arrest . . . I don't know [if they would have abided by those terms], no one can know, but what we know for absolute certain is that that was the height of our leverage to get them to abide by it." That's mildly interesting, but I get too frustrated by counterfactuals -- playing the game where the characters are the actually (formerly) existing Bush administration but they all make good decisions seems absurd. The "if Gore had taken office" version is slightly more appetizing, but not much more.
Yeah, that sort of thing is exactly what I was thinking of.
LB's 1 matches my general impression, though I haven't been following carefully.
Thanks, LK, for 4. I knew I'd seen that before, but couldn't find it.
The other big early mistake was antagonizing Iran, who was essentially working with us in Afghanistan against the Taliban and AQ, before Bush stabbed them in the back in the "Axis of Evil" speech. Having both Iran *and* Pakistan working against you in Afghanistan is not a sustainable situation.
The gist of Biden's speech seems to be "Fuck Afghanistan;" I had to turn it off. More rage than I expected.
I can't remember where I read this, but didn't he spend the eight years of the Obama administration arguing that we weren't doing any good and should pull out? That could lead to a certain amount of built up rage.
For the withdrawal to be so bungled it seems to me like Biden must have been getting some really shitty intelligence.
I think there was a genuine belief that the Afghan army would have the ability hold out in Kabul for at least a good while. And sure, they probably had the ability... but how did nobody recognize that they weren't really interested in doing that?
After twenty years in the country we should have maybe understood the situation better.
You have to figure that our military was bullshitting about the capacity of the Afghan government and army to stand up, because if they were as hopeless as they have turned out to be, the whole endeavor has been pointless all along.
20 years of cluster fuck coming to a cluster fuck end.
the whole endeavor has been pointless all along.
Unless you are a defense contractor in which case you've made out like a bandit.
I'm visiting Northern Virginia right now and I'm kind of amazed at how the place seems much more opulent than I remember.
11: This thing really has been deluded on scale comparable to Vietnam. Not as big of an encounter and far smaller US presence, but I think the military read on it has been arguably worse. I did see someone talking about how some IG (not sure attached specifically to what) had repeatedly sounded the alarm over the years that there was no there there for Afghan military, but I guess people thought there might be at least 6 months worth of it.
The Taliban certainly seem to have organized for this quite well. They obviously are pretty vile on many levels but not sure they are now the demons painted in the media. We'll see I guess.
If local authorities have been signing agreements with the Taliban where they give up their arms and prepare to cede control peacefully when the time comes, and top brass planning was made in ignorance or denial of that fact, that seems like a massive military/intelligence failure, and one probably pretty explainable as the epitome of bureaucratic CYA.
Yeah, Northern Virginia has gotten gold-plated since 9/11. The traffic that everyone complains about is surprisingly largely comprised of expensive cars.
Eh, that was true even 25 years ago, when I was driving my beater around the Beltway. Mr. Lexus thinks twice before cutting off the Datsun with no bumper and a red-Rustolem-inflamed front quarter panel.
On topic, a thought I've seen batted around is that "better planning" for this on our side has to involve the military, who can use it as an excuse to prolong and prolong things, so the alternative to "leave quickly but badly" is "leave.... maybe later if at all", not "leave quickly and competently".
AIHMHB, I'm in daily contact with a friend in Kabul that I've been trying to help get a SIV. He's promised to send daily updates -- today, it was about Taliban fighters going through the neighborhood asking what everyone does for a living, and who has guns, and confiscating cars and apartments left behind by people who left with the government. Rumors are rampant, of course: does one present oneself at the airport, visa or no, and hope to be on a plane? A mob of people think the answer is yes.
The US govt position, for months, has been don't call us, we'll call you. Then, you can't call us because it's the weekend, and we're not working (although there's a huge backlog of applications). Then, you can't call us because we've hauled down the flag and fled to the airport.
For years, Afghan soldiers wouldn't wear their uniforms on the trip home to see their families, or while home. Anyone who's surprised that the people who are safest from retribution wouldn't want to go out in a blaze of ineffectual glory, well, have they MET people?
I'm no expert in this but I have precisely zero confidence that any deal with the Taliban would ever have been worth anything at all.
They couldn't have started a true mass evacuation before the Taliban took Kabul -- this would have undermined the Afghan government even faster. They could, however, have increased the pace of approving applications, and gotten an extra planeload or two of people out every day from March 1 to the present. And present it not as a loss of confidence in the Afghan government, but as a repudiation of Trumpian anti-immigrants-of-color ideology.
It is to my eternal shame that I did not protest the war in Afghanistan at the time. I believed in a criminal-justice model rather than a military-led Scary Terrorist (tm) model for dealing with Bin Laden, but I remember keenly feeling the level of fury of Americans and how that needed some outlet.
I was torn -- even when that famous essay by Tamim Ansary circulated just a few weeks after 9/11. ("Don't bomb us back to the Stone Age -- we're already there" was the basic message.) I knew enough to protest the looming Iraq War a few months later, but I sat on my hands for Afghanistan.
Biden is absolutely right to pull us out now, IMO as a member of the public who knows nothing about military strategy.
He is very, very wrong at the level of refugee preparedness, IMO as a someone who knows a great deal about immigrant and refugee issues. Right now our response is horrifyingly inadequate and it is NOT for lack of clear, vivid warnings by well-informed people for months now.
The SIVs are just the tip of the iceberg. From visa application processes to third-country agreements to transport to sheer arrival numbers, we are nowhere near our actions at the end of the Vietnam War (as a comparison, we resettled 130,000 SE Asian refugees starting in May 1975).
Biden should be granting parole FAST to tens of thousands of people, bringing them to safe locations and only then sorting out the details of visa status -- not futzing with absurd paperwork requirements on the buggy State Department website in the middle of a catastrophe. We have a foreign policy that is so damn petrified of getting a false positive (admitting someone who is not 'eligible') that we are instead happily implementing a system guaranteed to for thousands of false negatives, even at the cost of their lives. It is a shame and a stain on our national conscience, even over and above the shame of the war itself.
24.1: but the protests did nothing apart from moderating the interior flux of shame, pride, smugness, etc., within the people doing the mustering. I was strongly opposed to the war in Afghanistan at the time, I either went to whatever tiny protests materialized or kept eating at the Afghan restaurant downtown definitely not out of self-interest at all while thinking dark thoughts about the coming war, but it's all worth literally, utterly, nothing. Nothing. I turned away for 19 years like virtually every other civilian. Fuck interiority. Jesus I'm mad. (Not remotely at you, though, Witt, you're a good person -- I just think you shouldn't feel shame, let alone the eternal kind!)
I also still feel deeply guilty about not supporting Feingold's 2016 campaign for Senate, so there's some hypocrisy here.
22.last -- yeah, I basically agree, but that might well be too cynical.
The protests did nothing to stop the war, but that is not the only reason for protest.
I have hosted international guests for dinners in my home for more than 20 years. Many of the most powerful and emotionally vulnerable conversations have been about what it feels like for them, watching from abroad, seeing members of the American public resist our government's foreign policies; and what it feels like for us, here in the US, furious and impotent, knowing that there are millions of people in other countries whose view of us will be forever shaped by those policies and hoping against hope that at least our signals of resistance would break through the miles and touch human beings on the other side.
Humans are more than our nation-states. We collectively have more power and more wisdom than any political leader or indeed any terrorist. I do the work that I do -- professionally and personally -- because I believe in and care about people.
This would be a good time to reread Flashman. I do think this is a world-historical hinge: the tide turning on US soft power as well as on hard power.
And our government has been every bit as racist, petty and incompetent in its treatment of refugees. The fact that the woman in charge. Priti Patel, is herself the daughter of Indian immigrants doesn't make her any more humanitarian.
Sorta in response to heebie at 2, I remember what I said on Bavarian tv the night of 9/11, which was that the attacks were an act of war and would be treated as such. You want to see a German tv moderator blanch even under all of their makeup, say "act of war" in front of a live camera. But that was incredibly obvious and was indeed what happened.
Once the Taliban refused to yield bin Laden, any US government was always going to knock them over. The list of countries the US wouldn't have invaded to grab bin Laden is very short and almost entirely nuclear-armed. (Saudi Arabia at the time might have been an exception.) For pretty much any petty nation, the US would have taken out the government for good measure while grabbing bin Laden pour decourager les autres. For a non-petty nation -- like in some weird timeline where bin Laden holes up in Argentina -- the US would probably just not give a good goddam about collateral damage and go and nab him.
Any US government was going to do those things in response to 9/11. Where I think the Bushies went off the rails was in diverting resources towards Iraq already in 2002. I don't think that was widely known at the time; at least I think I remember being surprised and pissed off when I found out about it some years later. Their pre-existing commitment (as is now known) to attacking Iraq let bin Laden get away for the rest of Bush's time. It took resources and high-level attention away from Afghanistan, which in turn let the Taliban regroup. As has been mentioned above, the Bush people also gratuitously antagonized Iran.
I think that once the Bush administration made those choices the pooch was well and truly screwed, and some variant of the current ending was bound to happen. (I don't think that my alternative requires the Bush folks to make good decisions and give everyone a pony, it just requires them to abstain from making needless and terrible decisions. Unfortunately, even that low bar was too much for them to clear.) Kudos to Biden for finally pulling the plug.
As for the act of pulling out, two things from elsewhere: One, the director of the Afghan central bank wrote on Twitter about how surprised he was by the speed at which president skedaddled. If the top ranks weren't willing to stay, why should the folks further down? Two, at LG&M someone wrote that it's very difficult to plan a mass evacuation without creating the circumstances that cause a mass evacuation.
On a slightly cheerier note, the Taliban may find that the local leaders whose loyalty was so readily bought may not stay bought.
I wonder how the Taliban will govern a population that has mostly grown up in the past twenty years. Something like half of the population is under 15, so it has never known a different regime. They have smartphones now. It may be much harder for the Taliban to hold the country than it was the last time. What are they going to do? Come in and tell a nation of people under 20 to give up their phones for Islam?
27. Let's be clear, Patel is the daughter of refugees from Idi Amin's Uganda. But that doesn't stop her enthusiastically pulling up the ladder away from anybody who might be in a similar position, because she's a profoundly evil piece of shit.
Where I think the Bushies went off the rails was in diverting resources towards Iraq already in 2002.
Of course, I agree this was terrible, but mostly because invading Iraq was such a terrible idea.
But I don't think there is any scenario in which the US could have been more successful at nation-building in Afghanistan than in Iraq.
Once the Taliban refused to yield bin Laden
Multiple sources have reported that the Taliban privately offered to turn over bin Laden in fall 2001, so this very much begs the question.
It's pretty easy to see how the Taliban of fall 2001 might believe their interests well served by a public show of defiance and a private deal to rid themselves of an arrogant, independent, high-profile foreign actor.
28 I don't agree that 'act of war' is the right frame. I do agree that going to get Bin Laden was absolutely unavoidable, and would have happened under any Administration. It went off the rails even before the military operation, imo, when GWB decided that they needed to remake Afghanistan to prevent recurrences of this. (His Sept speech to the joint session was telling and chilling.) Once you decide you want to change Afghanistan, you run into the problem every empire has faced there.
It's a coalition, and there are certainly the elements that cared about mineral extraction, and those that cared about defense contractor profits, but I think, based on little actual evidence, that the core of the problem here was religious. Too many zealots with too much power (including, I think, GWB himself) thought there was a divine sanction for their efforts to defeat radical Islam. As I've said before, once you think you're acting on divine instructions, then setbacks become divinely ordained tests of your personal faith. You have to either push on through, or fail God.
32 Multiple sources have reported that the Taliban privately ...
This is new to me, and I'd be genuinely interested in reading and learning more. What I remember seeing was offers to hold "an Islamic trial," which I always understood as a long form of "lol, no." (A very quick search turned up a Guardian article with a headline along the lines of "Taliban offers to turn over bin Laden" but a text that said the Taliban wanted evidence and would in any event only turn him over to an Islamic third country that would never feel pressure from the US, so in other words a long form of "lol, no.")
31 But I don't think there is any scenario in which the US could have been more successful at nation-building in Afghanistan than in Iraq.
I think a lot of the nation-building crept in during the Bush years to cover their failure to get bin Laden. If the US had succeeded in nabbing him in 2001 or 2002, I don't think there would have been a temptation to stay and do as much. As has been said, the US had to do three things in Afghanistan: get in, get bin Laden, and get out. Failure to do #2 led to a reluctance to do #3.
Well, here's a bit of not-as-bad news - apparently the Kabul airport is continuing to be held, the Taliban is letting people in, and the US continues to run flights out. No improvements on whether we'll actually admit refugees in morally justifiable numbers, but it's something. (Where does someone go when they need to flee but can't get authorization? Are we letting asylees on planes?)
What I saw agreed with 35 against 32. I mean, as we saw, handing him over to Pakistan would mean less than nothing.
Failure to do #2 led to a reluctance to do #3.
How does that explain 2011-2020?
Is it crazy to hope that the current iteration of the Taliban will be Pakistan-level bad rather than 1990s era Taliban bad?
I looked back to the articles at the time. Quite a tell that Bush was willing to say on the record, "There's no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he's guilty." Maybe the Taliban's offer expected rejection, but we certainly weren't willing to talk about it like adults in any case.
Also, Pakistan contains multitudes. Letting Bin Laden hide out with connivance from their intelligence services seems rather different from holding him in publicly acknowledged custody. I could imagine with an actual observed trial them coming to a just conclusion.
41: Well of course one should be scared that it's going to be terrible, and Pakistan-level is already quite bad. That said, the article seems to acknowledge that the Taliban has become less uniformly extreme on these issues.
No amount of looking back at the then public record is going to tell you about what was going on that was intentionally not made public.
The Taliban had been happy to have AQ as foot soldiers against the Northern Alliance. Once it was clear that the survival if the Taliban regime, and the individuals making up its leadership, was genuinely at stake, they'd have no reason at all to choose protecting OBL. Obviously, though, once he was out of Afghanistan, they couldn't even secretly hand him over.
The official word from the US government is don't call us we'll call you, and don't come to the airport. So naturally the people who get out will be the ones who went to the airport, while the people who followed the supposedly only way to legally get to the US are going to be fucked.
[My friend sent his daily end of day report at 11:17 am Mountain time yesterday. We'll see what happens in the next hour or so.]
Finger's crossed for your friend. That's frightening.
The public offer is well sourced: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.terrorism5, I'd memory-holed that. I believed Hersh and others had thinly sourced reporting of a more detailed private negotiation, but I can't find references, so retract the claim.
Obviously the offer to turn him over to a third country with evidence is conditional, dealer's choice if you interpret that as a sincere starting position or an insincere effort to dissemble and buy time. Fair to say though that publicly turning him over to e.g. Pakistan for some sort of trial is a very different affair than privately smuggling him into a secret compound in Pakistan.
As for the Taliban takeover and the anticipated humanitarian and strategic disaster for US soft power: our only remotely effective moves at this point are to dispense with the extraordinarily prolonged visa process and accept as many refugees as want to come, and to end the war on drugs, undercutting the Taliban's primary source of revenue.
We will, of course, do neither.
We should certainly announce that being a woman in Afghanistan is, per se, grounds for asylum. No other proof or argument required.
At best - at absolute best - a Pakistani court would have put him in a Pakistani prison, from which he would have escaped. Come on. If after the last 20 years you still trust any part of the Pakistani state to do the right thing with regard to Afghanistan, I don't know what to tell you.
39 I think that is crazy. They may not try to erase 20 years of heresy, treason, and hedonism at a single stroke, but everyone knows who did what, and the amount of suffering that came along with the occupation, especially among the Taliban and their sympathizers, isn't going to be forgotten.
51 Exactly. Even if there had been a play to make in November or December of 2001, up until whenever it was that he left Afghanistan, we were already committed to remaking Afghanistan.
But the on the ground deal making was letting OBL get away (from Tora Bora) to save bloodshed of Afghan soldiers, rather than some sort of deal that would favor us. There are a number of Afghans who have died, and will yet die, for the values we sought to reinforce there, but they're educated elites, not rank and file Afghan soldiers.
Yeah, I don't think 20 years of ground war and indiscriminate drone strikes is exactly a moderating experience.
I wish we would figure out some sort of refugee convoy system - enough military support to protect transports rolling through any town or village, pick up whoever wants to leave, and take them to asylum. Obviously many wouldn't even when given the physical opportunity due to consequences for other family or friends, but many of those in the most danger would. We should make an effort to help people even if they don't happen to be in our zone of control.
I saw today, via Twitter, a table showing that in some years during the Soviet occupation, as much as 1.6% of the Afghan population died in the war. In today's population, that would be more than 500,000 dead within a year. Overall, the report (from a 1989 article in Orbis) concluded that 9% of the population died in fighting during the Soviet occupation. A comparable contemporary figure would be on the order of 3.5 million dead in the 2011-2021 period. My gast was pretty flabbered.
Fingers crossed for your friend, Charley. As to 33 in reply to my 28, I'm not entirely sure that "act of war" is the right frame either, but it was clear to me that's how the Bush team would see it (along with a lot of the public), and I still think that's how they saw it.
I honestly don't know if receiving bin Laden would have been enough. I mean, historians still debate whether Austria would have accepted Gavrilo Princip.
The article referenced in 48 is the one I saw and didn't think indicated an actual offer of turning bin Laden over. Mileage obviously varies. To say nothing of classified materials that will come out in 35 or 50 years or whenever.
[It's after midnight in Kabul and no email. Probably just a connectivity issue, right?]
Maybe he's on a plane and the next email will be from someplace else?
The reason is simple: Afghanistan was never a US strategic priority. A strategic priority is something which you give up other strategic objectives to achieve. So, "stop the spread of communism" was a strategic objective for Churchill but he gave it up because the priority was "stop Hitler". The US strategic priority in the region is "oppose Iran". Has been since 1979, will be for another 20 years. The DATE centres on Iran as the threat. Sorry, "Ariana".
And the key allies against Iran are the sunni powers: Saudi, UAE, Pakistan. Those unfortunately are also the Taliban's allies. Treating "win in Afghan" as a priority would have meant annoying one or more of those: perhaps even mending fences with Iran. That could not happen. So Afghan was sacrificed because ultimately maintaining the actual priority objective meant doing a half hearted job in Afghanistan. It was an operational priority for the armed forces but never the strategic priority for the US.
I think 59 overestimates the strategic coherence of US foreign policy. How does the invasion of Iraq fit in with this?
57: Do they have consistent power supply?
Turn iraq into a democracy, it naturally becomes a US ally against Iran.
62 They really had to be a special kind of idiot to believe in that. Remember how the new Iraq was going to be an ally of Israel?
This is a thing that drives me back to my religious explanation above. Only religious faith can explain the suspension of disbelief required to think this was going to work out.
Two members of my TA's immediate family in Kabul have had visas for India for a few weeks, and despite going to the airport ever day have not been able to get a flight out. A fellow alum of my grad program is desperately trying to find some way to get his sister and her children out of the country (she worked in politics). I know these very small personal connections shouldn't make so much of a difference to me but I've been fixated on them nonetheless. In the former case, at least, the family thought they had a few more months before the capital fell.
Only religious faith can explain the suspension of disbelief required to think this was going to work out.
I buy this. Plus their was that whole Gog ang Magog thing.
Here's a link to the SIGAR thing I mentioned in 14.1 (Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction). A lot of it anyone really paying attention knew, got some press coverage but not a lot. Also the WaPo thing on the "Afghanistan Papers." All of it worth a good sober look back and if we had a functioning government something they would undertake. There should be one on the immediate stuff as well (and I think there are 4 committees scrambling to do so) but the longer term one would be potentially more valuable but even it were to happen it would probably be doomed by the same groupthink that led to the last 20 years*.
*Boy did I hate how everyone held up the freaking 9/11 Commission as a great model for government inquiry during debates about a Jan 6 investigation. I did identify some issues that were valid, but not the real important ones. I got a speeding ticket while driving while enraged listening to John Ashcroft's "testimony."
Of course I hate the media coverage but that is a given and quite boring by now. But, boy howdy, you know the fat is really in the fire when all the mighty media lights are banging the same drum and editorializing freely. Peter Baker to Richard Engel to every Chuck Todd to every fucking one. In some ways it reminds me of the coverage of the national debt during stimulus debate (and after) where very report had to state how bad the debt was a if it were just a factual matter. I mean this is in fact a missive fuck up and everyone is entitled to their shot*, but the timber of the "elite" discourse is absolutely in the context of forever war soft and hard American power projection.
Not to mention the the fucking people who outlets are turning to: Atlantic has motherfucking George Packer opining on Biden living in infamy, not mention David Even more motherfucking Frum saying how we blew it by not getting OBL in 2001 (maybe he was vocal on that at the time, but who cares, what a douche). I saw some stuff from Rove about "indelible stains" and assumed it was Fox (and yes, they get to take their shot, but now they seem to have pivoted quickly to keeping the refugees out) but no it was in Politico and then CNN has on John Bolton.
Charles Pierce had a good short take on this today:
The 'Anonymous Sources' Are Engaged in a Monumental Ass-Covering Campaign on Afghanistan
Almost everything you're reading on this topic in elite publications is an effort by somebody somewhere to duck out of their responsibility for 20 years of fantasy and illusion and outright lies.
*It's a story with a few searing visuals and some good prior soundbites from hell for the administration.
Although:
1) The helicopter/Saigon bit was a bit overdone (bit of course irresistible). As someone pointed out helicopters between the embassy and the airport have been common for 20 years... which in and of itself something to think about. (And of course much more of it over the weekend) The plane being chased was more the Afghan-specific image which will endure I think.
2) Back in 2003 the media seemed quite reluctant to spotlight similar "gotchas" involving Bush/Cheney. Although "Mission Accomplished" was too obvious to ignore--and once again a good visual.
And all the various Iran angles. Holy shit, I know it mostly a symptom rather than a cause, but the fixation on Iran is the weft of the grand tapestry of American soft and hard power decline over the past 40 years.
The Iranians haven't gotten their hands on this many American weapons since that time back when Ronald Reagan sold them planeloads of missels and used the proceeds to fund Nicaraguan death squads.
68 yes definitely. And to 60, I don't think the whole picture has to be one seamless and consistent policy narrative, but not doing anything that might undermine the anti Iran effort is definitely a constant theme.
The plane being chased was more the Afghan-specific image which will endure I think.
I think the people falling out of the wheelwells may end up being more iconic. For one thing, it has a certain grim parallelism to the jumpers from the World Trade Center. Bookends to an epic catastrophe lasting half a lifetime (specifically, mine).
Charley -- Any news from your guy?
I was adamantly against the Iraq war at the time but ambivalent about Afghanistan. It was clear that Bin Laden had to be apprehended and Al Qaeda eliminated from Afghanistan but it's been a complete shit show for the last 20 years. There was no good time to leave and no good reason to stay. But the refugee visa situation is infuriating.
I got into it a little with an American defense contractor at a bar here last week, before the big pullout, about Iran. He flipped when I said something along the lines of ajay's above. And flipped even more when I said that Iran is the natural American geostrategic partner in the region, not KSA which has been the most destabilizing force in the region for decades now.
Speaking of 9/11 and RSA, my understanding is that there has been pressure on Biden to release some of the Saudi material re: 9/11. I believe some 9/11 family group indicated he would not be welcome at the ceremony if he does not.
74.1 Was my position as much as I can recall. It is hard to reconstruct as I do think I recall feeling rather unmoored in general. In addition to the attacks themselves, the rapid passing of the already written Homeland Security bill, the way the anthrax thing went down (and was spun--some trying to say it was an Iraqi variant for instance) and the reaction in general all left me very unsettled.
I think I mentioned it before but I recall driving home form work very late one evening at the height of the anthrax thing having worked on a mitigating a nasty virus all day (Code Red? Some SQL thing) and just feeling like it was all coming apart. And it turns out it was, although somewhat more slowly than my dark musings at the time led me to believe.
"Iran is the natural American geostrategic partner in the region, not KSA"
I wouldn't go that far - Iran's government is pretty horrible and its current objectives are to radically change the regional power structure- it is an insurgent power not a status quo power which, if nothing else, makes it a natural competitor of the US. With a different government it could be a natural US partner, but then so could KSA.
Aren't the US's strategic choices better explained by "protect Israel" rather than "oppose Iran"? Iran is Israel's most dangerous enemy, so the anti-Iran moves seem to follow from that, as do the alliances with KSA and Egypt, no?
I would have said that Syria was Israel's most dangerous current enemy, myself. They share a border. Iran and Israel were on surprisingly good terms in the 1980s; Israel sold Iran a lot of arms. And the main enemies of Israel have historically been Arab nationalists (Nasser, Yasser, threebagsfulsser) and Sunni extremists (Hamas) and Iran isn't either. The modern hostility is relatively recent.
Iran as the US Main Enemy goes back to 1979, I think.
Good, angry, post from Timothy Burke
The thing is, you just cannot be telling the history of the American-led war in Afghanistan with full knowledge of just how badly it failed from an early point onward and at the same time be full-throatedly complaining about how it didn't have to end now, it didn't have to end this way, there had to be a better plan, there had to be some way to make all those lives worth something. This is like watching the entirety of Macbeth and saying, "Honestly, Macbeth should just have left the castle before the army got there and then tried to negotiate with Macduff. Plus, if only he'd just struck a deal with Banquo instead of murdering him, that was a mistake." It was always going to end that way once he listened to the witches. That's the point.
Ajay: it's been my impression that the Iranian *people* are much more amenable to being partners of the US, than the Saudi *people* are. Doesn't change that the Iranian *government* is a geostrategic competitor and adversary *today*. But what I mean is, I cannot imagine a change to KSA's government, that would change their threat to Western society; I *can* imagine such a change in Iran. I don't feel like (maybe I'm wrong, really, really wrong) Iranian society is as deeply, irretrievably misogynist (as a stand-in for hatred of all Western ideas) as KSA's society is.
Again, I could be wrong. And their government is still our adversary [which is a pity].
I think this is an unmitigated disaster. It's pretty clear that the Trump administration decided to turn the country over to the Taliban, and the Biden administration decided to go along with it, they just didn't expect it to happen in such an embarrassing fashion. The Trump administration released 5,000 Taliban prisoners, and drew down American troops. The Taliban then spent the time between that and the withdrawal bribing people to switch sides, which was easy to do since the US so clearly signaled that it didn't give a shit. Afghanistan's President, who was basically hand-picked by the US because he sounded like the kind of guy you would hire to run your typical Western NGO, not because he in any way an organically popular Afghani leader, knew the score and fled immediately. The status quo pre-peace-deal wasn't great, but the US deliberately threw away what gains it made.
The whole thing is a collective failure of the country. People blame the military for not leveling with the American people, but the American people -- left and right -- are delusional motherfuckers. They wanted to punish Afghanistan (rightly), and then they wanted to play dress-up state building. Bush deserves the lion's share of the blame, but Obama was President for 8 years. What did the US do? Push for some dude who left Afghanistan for 20 years to become President, because he went to an Ivy League, and mouthed the soothing words that his fellow Ivy Leagers long to hear. I saw right-wingers making fun of the American Embassy in Kabul flying the Pride flag in June, because the date of execution for gay people in Afghanistan had already been set by the Biden administration. And you know what? They were right to do it. The whole thing was make-believe, full of policies that would last about 15 seconds after American withdrawal, like the quota on woman in the Parliament. Instead of coming with a plausible set of institutions that could survive. There probably were no set of plausible set of institutions that could both Afghanistan and the machinations of American politics, which doesn't make the US look better.
Of course the jerk-offs have rushed to their microphones with their jerk-off takes, how it always inevitable. The Afghans are savages, who were always going to return to their savagery. I'm sure Timothy Burke is excited to score that final point on the corpse of Michael Kelly after all these years. But it wasn't inevitable. The US did nothing to build a working government in Afghanistan, because it chose to do nothing. It threw money around to make itself feel better, and then when it got tired of throwing money around, it just left.
If we're lucky, then the current Taliban will be more mellow than the old Taliban. 20 years is a long time, so maybe. Or maybe it will play out like the US withdrawal from Iraq, which was shortly followed by the rise of a jihadist mini-state that recruited from around the world, and helped to distablize its neighbors. Maybe it will lead to millions of refugees again, mass executions of collaborators, public stoning of gays and women.
But ultimately, the US doesn't care, because the US never really bears the consequences of its actions. The US can swoop in, cause incredible amounts of chaos, and the only effect on the US is how people can use the chaos to score points on their political enemies at home. Do you know who the US is? It took me a really long time, and living out of the country for a long time, to figure it out, but I finally have. The US is Tom and Daisy from The Great Gatsby. They aree careless people, Americans - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
73 Nope. Which is pretty concerning.
82 I kind of feel like we had a real opening with Iran in late 2001, because we had genuine feelings from Iranians generally. Bush threw it away, of course, because how could he not.
The morning after the axis of evil speech, a colleague of mine was talking about what a triumph this was for Libya.
I think 83 is mostly fair, but I'd emphasize a couple of things. There was no possibility of any kind of viable plan that did not arise from actual complete military defeat of the Taliban, and we were just never up to doing what that would take. Not in terms of genocide, of US losses, of bringing the war to Pakistan is a very real way.
And also, I think one has to take into account the very thin nature of civilian control over the military in 2009. I've called the reversal on some prisoner related policies in May-ish a coup, and I think the writing about the September 2009 stuff about Afghan policy fits that as well. Could Obama have gained control back then? He clearly had his doubts, and I bet he was right. Biden was there and has now admirably told them to follow orders. Obama had to let them take their try.
If you look in the archives, I'm probably in there a decade ago saying that our 2011 policy in Afghanistan, like Iraq in 2006, was to leave without being seen to have been driven out. Biden played the hand that Trump dealt him and we'll be out and the whole thing forgotten soon enough.
82 makes sense but I have not been to either country.
27: I do think this is a world-historical hinge: the tide turning on US soft power as well as on hard power.
I will buy this as part of a 20-year hinge, but certainly not this particular moment. And I think the most recent bigger soft power blow was pulling out of the JCPOA. Given all of the Iran craziness mentioned above I regarded JCPOA as probably the single most surprisingly good foreign policy developments I had ever seen. But of course that there was no hope of formal ratification i the US Senate was a warning sign, Pulling out was truly destructive.
Pulling out was truly destructive.
Tell me about it.
Soft power is more than just diplomacy. The French have truly excellent diplomacy, but not much soft power -- nobody wants to be more like the French. Soft power is the ability to conjure love and admiration for your culture and to make it a mark of high status. Killing the JCPOA was, I agree, a fucking stupid and self-destructive thing to do. But it didn't make an impression on third parties. In the non-political world -- even inside the USA -- it didn't register at all. But this fiasco, more or less live on world-wide television: this will really diminish the prestige and status of the USA.
83: The US did nothing to build a working government in Afghanistan, because it chose to do nothing.
What could the US have realistically done to build a working government? Genuinely wondering. At least if we're talking about building a government that respected human rights and was not highly corrupt. That seems like it would have required some kind of cultural change that the US couldn't have brought about. (And of course we have our own very real problems with human rights and corrupt government; our lack of clean hands is one of many reasons we couldn't have built this kind of government in Afghanistan.)
90: I absolutely want to be more like the French.
I would like better cheese and bread.
73 Day 3 of no email, so I dug up a phone number and called. And he answered! Hunkered down at home basically.
as a counterbalance to hyperventilating:
- the only long term impact to us soft power will result from our disgusting failure to open our doors to afghan immigration. after the last couple of decades not sure what the additive effect will be to widespread & accurate hit we've taken on this one already, so that's horrifying but unsurprising.
- a short impromptu & really incomplete list of factors actually measurably dragging down us soft power: our health care system, ubiquity of guns & mass slaughter, cost of higher education & increasing difficulty of non us citizens to study & then stay here*, decades long underinvestment in infrastructure in general & non-car & plane dependent transportation in particular, world recognized racism as a result of well known system of chattel slavery**.
* suspect this one having a v large impact in south asia & mainland china that will surprise a lot of folks in decades to come.
**bonus points to the french from this one, pretty much the go to arg from fr folks when their own racism pointed out.
all of these*** have substantial domestic constituencies that would be thrilled if progress were made. no secret here to why a us politician would eventually nope out in the military-security-contractor elite plan to stick around forever & never turn off the geyser of $$$.
*** excepting welcoming non us scholars, but that's a no brainer on sooooo many other metrics.
- anyone banging in about what us should-could have achieved in afghanistan (except first point above re immigration) needs to stump up with the plan for pakistan first.
93: So, not good but not disastrous yet. Would it do anything if everyone asked our Senators about this guy?
90: well, that's part of soft power. But so is economic might and implied the-alternative-is-the-actual-power. I can't see it as a hinge. Whatever the story about Afghanistan being the graveyard of empires (one? two? Do we just ignore world wars when talking about Britain? It seems like an oversight.) - look we're unfortunately spoiled for choice. Handling of the pandemic? Electing a cutrate fascist? Failing to lead on climate change?
So ended a war begun for no wise purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, and brought to a close, after suffering and disaster, without much of glory attached either to the government which directed, or the great body of troops which waged it. ... By the destruction of their chief towns, and the devastation of their villages and orchard, the Afghans were taught that England is powerful to punish as well as to protect. And in all the encounters with the armed men who resisted them, our soldiers proved themselves to be both dauntless and enduring. But not one benefit, either political or military, has England acquired by the war. Indeed, our evacuation of the country resembled almost as much the retreat of an army defeated as the march of a body of conquerors... Nevertheless, the gates of Somnauth were carried back to teh land whence Nadir had removed them; and British India proclaimed, what the whole good-naturedly allowed, that we had redeemed our honour, and were once more victorious.
GR Grieg, 1843, on the First Anglo-Afghan War. (I originally copied from a magazine article, then went further back on Google Books and found it had been clipped extensively, including intra-sentence.)
Of course, no magazine photographers then. Might have been harder to pretend to victory as little as twenty years later.
what the whole world good-naturedly allowed
First Afghan War, of course, didn't end with the Retreat - it ended a year later, after the British had reinvaded (with the Army of Retribution, its actual name) beaten the Afghans in the field, captured Kabul, smashed it up a bit and wisely gone home, ending on a high.
I suspect that's what your man is referring to.
bonus points to the french from this one, pretty much the go to arg from fr folks when their own racism pointed out.
Some Haitians would like a word.
101 & like allll of n africa ...
Charley, super glad your friend is okay. I know you said there's nothing we can really do, but keep us apprised if that changes.
There is a disappointing lack of energy/urgency for demanding changes in refugee policy. I think people need to be a LOT louder. However, I am clawing my way out of a local acute depressive bout and am going to spend the entire day being proud of myself for getting the dumb car smogged rather than lying face down, so the earliest I can plan a protest is probably tomorrow.
Irrelevant comments:
101, 102: Hey, I'm bogged down in this completely fascinating book, to which I have developed an aversion because following all the twists and turns is a drain on my overloaded writing brain. Along very similar, and similarly brain-draining lines: Cousins and Captives was fantastic, teo, thank you so much for the rec. Really impressive work of narrative synthesis.
dq, if you are somehow idle and bored enough to indulge me here, what are your favorite sources for keeping up with French news, with particular interest in audio but anything is welcome?
Cousins and Captives was fantastic, teo, thank you so much for the rec. Really impressive work of narrative synthesis.
You're welcome! Really glad you liked it. Definitely one of the most influential books on my own thinking about history and identity.
Eh, if we were truly getting out of the war-mongering business, millions of people would be out of work. That whole quarter of the world is so benighted with rich fucks who want to get richer by seeing regular working people murdering each other, and their puppet masters, East and West, that there's never going to be anything like peace. Not as long as everyone is making money.
They're capitalists, what do you expect? The only things they can understand are money and force. As long as they make money, and are not opposed by any force, why would they ever stop?
Someone down the street still has a "Raytheon: make ventilators not bombs" sign on their porch.
105 last - hi lk! i'd search a podcast format-app what are they called anyways? for fr radio stations - rfi, rfl, france inter, etc., & newspapers? altho fr newspapers have i think been more successful in general than anglophone ones with effective paywalls so not sure what is out there free. used to occasionally listen to this slooooow radio show that interviews the same person for a whole week, best was isabelle huppert's growing boredom & impatience, most horrifying was obviousness that catherine millet would have gone on forever & ever & ever wow that lady's interior life yikesorama. on va déguster on france inter is short & always puts me in a good mood but not news.
Thanks... wow, I think I can imagine French public figures who would be more horrifying than Millet over a week of talk, but it all seems pretty dire.
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The Afghan national cricket captain playing in an English domestic competition.
How the hell are you supposed to concentrate on a fucking sport in these circumstances?
Also, his team got obliterated.
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Guy got to the airport, but it like going back stage at a Rolling Stones concert, someone has to have put your name on a list. We're searching our networks for people with the power to do so (apparently, this power resides primarily in Kabul itself.)
Is it unfair to blame the US puppet regime in Afghanistan for being corrupt when it was a condition of their employment?
Discuss.
(I hope all the refugees get out safely.)
