I know I'm no competition Fafblog, but I'm working on this joke:
Is it unfair to blame the US puppet regime in Afghanistan for being corrupt when it was a condition of their employment?
I think this is good enough to share: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1429471366747758609.html
Is it unfair to blame the US puppet regime in Afghanistan for being corrupt when it was a condition of their employment?
I saw this essay (via CT comments) which reinforces that point: https://www.sarahchayes.org/post/the-ides-of-august
I and too many other people to count spent years of our lives trying to convince U.S. decision-makers that Afghans could not be expected to take risks on behalf of a government that was as hostile to their interests as the Taliban were. Note: it took me a while, and plenty of my own mistakes, to come to that realization. But I did.
For two decades, American leadership on the ground and in Washington proved unable to take in this simple message. I finally stopped trying to get it across when, in 2011, an interagency process reached the decision that the U.S. would not address corruption in Afghanistan. It was now explicit policy to ignore one of the two factors that would determine the fate of all our efforts. That's when I knew today was inevitable.
I still think Biden is making the correct decision to withdraw, and am also appalled at how much of a mess the whole operation has been.
How much of the bad planning was the natsec apparatus neglecting the work they knew was needed so they could say "Look how much of a disaster it'll be if you pull out now! Just three more months!"
https://www.sarahchayes.org/post/the-ides-of-august
That was a great link NickS. Thanks
One mistake she makes though, is she undersells Pakistan's distribution of nuclear technology. They also sold workable plans for atomic bombs to Qaddafi which to me means everyone who wanted them got a copy.
Is there a withdrawal from a lost war that went well? Like what's the model scenario here? Sounds like Vietnam had similar problems.
Nobody wants to call the war lost. They want to think of it as an, "It's not you, it's me" breakup.
I guess Dunkirk somehow got interpreted as a moment of national pride, but I think it's hard to argue that Dunkirk went more smoothly than Kabul so far. So I guess the lesson is to come close to a bigger disaster so you can celebrate only having a minor disaster.
A core tenet of American patriotism is that America, by definition, Has Never Lost A War. Every actual war we lose then gets retroactively classified as either "not really a loss" or "not really a war." Afghanistan will go into the former category.
I think it's because the US didn't lose in the usual way. (Maybe that's the way it was headed, but it hadn't reached that point.) Afghanistan was barely in the news, but the US just suddenly quit.
Ford Urges All Americans to Salute Our Vietcong Rulers
What would you call it? Carefully planned out and orchestrated, like a hit Broadway show?
Years in the making, with bad faith by many, botched, and messy. but not "suddenly" for fuck's sake. So the opposite of "suddenly" is "carefully planned out and orchestrated"? Only to people who in their heart of hearts did not believe it was actually going to happen. Which apparently was most of the political press probably because they understood the political fallout for the President who did the final plug pulling (including how they themselves would react).
I mean I understand why Tony Blair (and many others) assumed we were lying about this as well, but turns out we did not.
The US agreed to withdraw in February 2020, and set the departure date for May 1, 2021. Biden pushed that back four months.
The "sudden" thing was the negotiated end of the occupation government -- and even that was probably years in the making. If analogies were permitted here, the correct Broadway analogy would be the actor who gets a starring role after decades in the business -- and is therefore an overnight success. The government's collapse has been accurately compared to Hemingway's discussion of bankruptcy: "Gradually, then suddenly."
Is it Panglossian of me to say that this scenario was pretty much the best one available? Maybe it's too soon to be sure, but let us remember that the US planned to have the Afghans to cover our retreat and then endure a couple of years of brutal war before the occupation government's inevitable defeat.
Isn't the Northern Alliance basically reforming right now?
Afghanistan was barely in the news, but the US just suddenly quit.
Slowly, and then all at once.
It will be interesting to see what the Northern Alliance turns out to be. I don't know anything about Afghanistan, but the Taliban and the various warlords seem to be showing an interest in cutting deals rather than fighting wars. And the US, likewise, might be persuaded to support some sort of accommodation.
I mean, yeah, it's hard to go wrong predicting doom in Afghanistan -- or worldwide for that matter. But I wonder ... and I'm still inclined to say that, at least to this stage, things have worked out better than anyone thought was possible. The critics (except Walt!) are primarily angry that the Afghans have not been sufficiently screwed over.
Well the Taliban are now entering the Panjshir valley in force so I guess we'll see.
22. The ex-government might have agreed to something like that, but clearly they couldn't have made it happen. In practice the US and allied forces would have had to fight their way out of the country or hope that the Taliban would say, "OK, you have 48 hours to fuck off, now go!" The second option would be more likely and better, but harder to explain to the folks back home, because it would make the Saigon embassy roof look like a famous victory.
I hate where this train of thought is leading, but did Trump's negotiators actually do the right thing? Leaving Fatarse and his entourage out of the picture, since they presumably knew nothing and understood less, if someone in intelligence realised that the government and the ANA were a busted flush that might evaporate at any moment, then talking to the people who were going to take over anyway makes perfect sense. I feel there are interesting memoirs to be written. And yes, we handed every woman and girl in Afghanistan over to a bunch of mad misogynists, but at least they were still alive for the time being.
How do you do the right thing when the door closed on the right thing fifteen years ago, and we hadn't done it?
13: What do we teach kids about the Vietnam War? I was 12 years old when it ended, and it seemed to me the one thing everyone could agree on was that the U.S lost.
I was taught that we could have won if we weren't to good to commit genocide.
By the time I got to American history, it ended after WWII.
My history teacher skipped WW 1 and 2 so he could give us his take on Vietnam.
I believe Vietnam is a states' rights issue.
I suppose with the kind of wars the US tends to have, there's the always the option to say something along the lines of, "Well, I would have won, but my mom said I had to be home in time for dinner."
did Trump's negotiators actually do the right thing?
The Trump administration bought into rightwing spin that we were in Afghanistan to help the Afghans. Trump, however, opposes helping foreigners. Even a blind pig finds an acorn every now and then.
"I'm taking my bombs and going home. But I'll be selling them tomorrow if you're interested."
Honestly, pig farmers used to bring pigs to the forest to fatten them on acorns. A blind pig would easily find hundreds of them.
As they say, a blind acorn can't avoid a pig.
21: Did the US do anything useful between February 2020 and now? As far as I can tell, they indulged in fantasies for 18 months, and then pulled out. If they had pulled out in March 2020, would the outcome have been any worse than now?
Anyway, for the public, it was just one announcement about the peace deal, and then another announcement that we were pulling out, and then boom, total collapse. Vietnam at least there was bad news for years beforehand. Even there it was two whole years before South Vietnam was defeated militarily.
The one plausible counterfactual I can see here is that the US completely withdraws from everywhere *except* Kabul while keeping a large enough force to hold all of Kabul. Then when the rest of the country collapses much much faster than expected everyone in Kabul knows it's a disaster and has time to evacuate. The time between the fall of Kandahar and Kabul was really quick, and it seems like that might have been avoidable.
(Also more visas for Afghans, but that's not a new issue, we could have been doing that 20 years ago.)
38: Certainly it's been a PR disaster. And I agree that the last 18 months have been wasted, but not in any way that I can usefully distinguish from the way the rest of the last 15 years or so has been wasted. I certainly will sign on to Upetgi's 39.
In a break with established policy, the NYT has a story that supplies a surprising amount of useful context. Afghan history, we find out, didn't begin last month, even if most of the US media were born yesterday.
If they had pulled out in March 2020, would the outcome have been any worse than now?
Seriously? Refugee policy alone is a big enough difference.
I mean, sure, girls in school are going to get sent home (eventually) and that was going to happen no matter when. It has always been clear that we weren't going to make that different, no matter what. And while our willingness to accept Afghans wasn't anything to write home about between Feb and Aug 2021, it's still, right now, very different from the Steve Miller regime.
Processing should have gone faster during the Trump Admin and especially during the Biden Admin. You still have a structure where (a) no bureaucrat gets in trouble for saying either 'no' or 'we need more information' while saying 'yes' and having the guy knock over a 7/11 leads to recriminations and (b) the fear that ramping up a mass evacuation would hasten the end of the regime was reasonable and real. With the latter, it turned out that hastening may not have been material -- although, if we're playing counterfactuals, I think you have to answer for the consequences of ramping up evacuations in, say June, of this year. We have a sudden inversion of the built in incentive structures for the former, but that's only really applicable to Biden himself, at this point, and will revert to mean soon enough anyway.
I think it's really necessary to account for the portion of the 'PR Disaster' is accounted for by various factions' need for a PR Disaster. Remember when Obama wearing a tan suit was a PR Disaster? Don't pay attention to people with no sense of proportion.
I am kind of wondering what the standards are for thinking the evacuation looks okay in retrospect. The latest number I've seen is that we've evacuated 38,000 people, and it's still going, and I haven't seen reports of people being murdered while waiting to get out.
the Steve Miller regime
The forgotten precursor to the Steve Miller Band.
'PR Disaster' is accounted for by various factions' need for a PR Disaster
A key faction with incentives to promote this narrative is the US media.
This guy with a blue check thinks the natsec apparatus assumed until the last minute Biden would back down as Trump always did, and that meant they were not doing the needed planning and contingency work with anything like the right assiduity.
42. I've read about ONE gunfight at the airport with one dead. That's very sad but under the circumstances I'm afraid it probably counts as a win.
45: By traditional US accounting, that one fatality doesn't even count. It was an Afghan soldier. (It's interesting, though, that "Afghan soldier" is still an existing category.)
46: Not even a soldier - a "guard", says Washington Post, and the German armed forces tweet they cite says "Sicherheitskraft" which I believe to be "security guard".
39
The one plausible counterfactual I can see here is that the US completely withdraws from everywhere *except* Kabul while keeping a large enough force to hold all of Kabul.
How much is that actually a counterfactual? In 2020, the US just had 4,000 troops there, not counting mercenaries. Source. I can't find data more recent or detailed than that, but I assume that there wasn't a significant increase in early 2021 and that they were, if not literally completely in Kabul, probably mostly there. I guess they could have had more troops in Kabul because 4,000 probably isn't enough to hold the city, but that would have had problems of its own.
What do we teach kids about the Vietnam War? I was 12 years old when it ended, and it seemed to me the one thing everyone could agree on was that the U.S lost.
As heebie noted, most high school US history classes run out of time well before they get to Vietnam, so mostly we don't teach kids anything about it. To the extent we do, though, I think the general take is "It was going poorly so we got out. Later, the South Vietnamese lost the war for reasons that were totally not our fault."
48: Right, the counterfactual I'm suggesting is more troops *but only in Kabul*. I also don't exactly know, but there must be some reason that the Taliban didn't take Kandahar several months ago, perhaps US funding or air support? So stop doing whatever was propping up the regime elsewhere while keeping a stronger force in Kabul only.
You Kids Nowadays need to consult your elders on this stuff. I was in high school when Saigon fell, and it was generally acknowledged as a US defeat. At that moment, even the stabbed-in-the-back-by-liberals narrative was subdued.
The media actually used to talk about Vietnam Syndrome, which was defined basically as: The reluctance of the US public to support stupid wars. As we have seen, the Republicans found a cure, and history has been rewritten more along the lines of what teo and others propose.
As heebie noted, most high school US history classes run out of time well before they get to Vietnam, so mostly we don't teach kids anything about it
Is that really still true? That would be like not teaching WWII or the Great Depression when I went to high school.
But WWII and the Great Depression had a tidy narrative that everyone agreed on by the time you went to high school.
there must be some reason that the Taliban didn't take Kandahar several months ago
Once the US agreed to depart and Biden agreed to abide by the deal, even if only on a delayed basis, the interests of the US and Taliban were pretty congruent.
I bet that part of the US calculation was that the Taliban would understand that it was not in their interests to inflame the American public by being too aggressive too soon. I wonder the degree to which the Taliban had an easier time than they were expecting, leading to a premature takeover of the capital.
53: Is that how it works? High school history ends with the last historical event we can agree about?
Yes. It's rapidly unraveling to pre-Civil War, as we speak.
I think my AP history class didn't get fully through WW2?
My sense is that this varies a lot from district to district and even from teacher to teacher.
But I did determine that the AP US History exam is supposed to cover US history up to the present.
The present keeps moving backwards, is the problem.
My understanding is that one of the reasons the Afgani government collapsed so quickly is because of Trump's negotiators; Pompeo's actions in 2020 seem to have been have hobbled attempts by Ghani's government to slow Taliban regrouping and territorial incursions.
In a world where problems are generally caused by many complex factors, the Trump administration is a simplifying force by being responsible for so many of them, in easy-to-understand ways.
My dad spent a year in Afghanistan about 10 years ago doing something for USAID and is still in touch with a fair number of people there (Afghan and other nationalities). His comments on the current situation were more optimistic than I expected, including the claim that 2/3 of the population is under 25 and half under 18 (meaning, people who have grown up in non-Taliban conditions) and that lots of them have guns now. He is expecting a long civil war, not just "Taliban rule".
Which is I guess kind of a weird scenario to call "optimistic" but the world being what it is, etc.
61: Saletan is arguing that Pompeo is a hypocrite -- not that he pursued a policy that was noticeably worse than Biden's, or that Pompeo's actions worsened Biden's situation.
Saletan says the Trump administration undercut the Afghan government by withdrawing troops, but Pompeo feigned outrage when Biden did the same thing. Saletan (who is kind of a dope) is onboard with the standard critique of Biden. He just wants to extend it to Trump.
I don't have any inside insight into Afghanistan, but I heard the stats that E. Messily put in 63 and thought, 'huh. The Taliban could have a real hard time taking modernity away from 2/3rd of the population who grew up with it and now have the internet.' It isn't the same as last time. Could be more like the Hong Kong protestors or the Arab Spring, which don't seem to have worked, especially.
It kinda seemed to me to be like an inverse of what happened before. (Again, I don't really know.) But didn't the Saudi's fund a generation of conservative Islamic schools to create the Taliban? And now we've funded a generation of schools with our principles.
The Atlantic continues there run of idiocy on the subject with an article by Yasha Mounck.
65: Given how distant the government's conduct was from anything espoused in Western ideals young people may have been taught, I'm not sure how much that will change the fundamentals.
Was it from a link here, or something else I read, where some local leader was quoted: the Taliban strike us on one cheek, then the government on the other?
65- that's what my dad's take is, based on what Afghan people have said to him, more or less. That the Taliban is not popular and that the country is now full of armed young people who will fight against them, which was not the case last time they took over, I guess. "We have guns this time" was a related direct quote, although I don't know how accurate of a quoter my dad is. The gist is probably correct.
And he said a couple of cities have already been taken back? But I don't remember the details and haven't been following that story very closely the last few days due to the drama I related in the other thread.
I said "but don't the Taliban have all the US military's stolen/lost equipment" and my dad said "not all of it- other people have a lot of it too" so, yay for that, I guess
68.2: Yes, from the link in 3.
Two decades ago, young people in Kandahar were telling me how the proxy militias American forces had armed and provided with U.S. fatigues were shaking them down at checkpoints. By 2007, delegations of elders would visit me -- the only American whose door was open and who spoke Pashtu so there would be no intermediaries to distort or report their words. Over candied almonds and glasses of green tea, they would get to some version of this: "The Taliban hit us on this cheek, and the government hits us on that cheek." The old man serving as the group's spokesman would physically smack himself in the face.
I'm not even thinking about fighting necessarily. But 2/3rds of the country under 25yrs old is an insanely big demographic bump and introducing all of them to strict fundamentalist rule seems real hard. The Taliban still has to govern for a few years to show that they've won.
Poorly secured military ordinance, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
It seems like also neither "the government" or "the Taliban" exist in reality as organized groups behaving in consistent ways.
But 2/3rds of the country under 25yrs old isan insanely big demographic bump
Do we know this is significantly more than in previous decades?
According to this World Bank estimate set, 46% of the population was 0-14 in 1980; 49% in 2000; 42% today.
I thought it was more that the US has been managing things for the past 20 years (changing the probable expectations/mentality of the population) than that the demographics had changed but I don't really know.
I mean, I thought the point of pointing out "hugely young population" was that that population's experience of life has not been similar to what the Taliban seems to be proposing, not that the numbers had shifted.
60- I saw one of those "x is as far from y as y is from z" the other day, and it was today is as far from 1980 as 1980 was from the start of WWII and, we'll, shit.
That was autocorrected from "well, shit" but we'll shit also works.
78: Could be. I was confused by the term "demographic bump" which makes me think of metaphors like Baby Boom.
Even if, (a) a lot of this young population is in areas that have been controlled in whole or in part by the Taliban already, and (b) just living in a non-Taliban environment doesn't necessarily inculcate you with new values. People stuck in shitty circumstances not infrequently go in directions that are also shitty but new.
It's true, there are many potential outcomes. I guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens!
The moon is really red. That's maybe not a good sign?
Some one got eaten by a bear in North Carolina. That's not a good omen.
Unless it is. I guess I'm not an omener.
As has been made clear ad nauseam for the last 20 years, you can't impose your rule on Afghanistan if you don't have broad popular support, no matter how much shiny kit you have. So either the Taliban won't hold to power, or they will, and either way no problem.
Re: The Atlantic (which has a *second* George Packer piece up, even more hysterically hyperbolic* than the first) I quite appreciated this tweet by Felix Gilman**:
the Atlantic is going to carry out a coup to install Tony Blair as interim regent of the US tasked with getting troops back into Afghanistan
*Mentioned earlier but Josh Marshall's "bonfire of hyperboles" was quite apt (for this and other media pile-ons).
**Who I find to be a great Twitter follow: @flglmn
87.last Seconding that. He's hilarious.
The barbarous tribal Afghans are now being blamed for negotiating a virtually bloodless transfer of power. However, no adjustment of stereotypes will be required. The memory hole was established for exactly this kind of event.
The barbarous tribal Afghans are now being blamed for negotiating a virtually bloodless transfer of power. However, no adjustment of stereotypes will be required. The memory hole was established for exactly this kind of event.