Has Biden Made the Right Choice in Afghanistan?

[Valmy]

Where this is really damaging, is to perception of the US willingness to support allies. The Trump administration abandoned the Kurds without a qualm, and the abandonment of Afghanistan proves this isn't just a Trump thing - the lesson is that you can't depend on the US alone for your security, you had better have alternative allies lined up, presumably in your region (and so who care whether you fall or not). Otherwise, your existence depends on the whims of US politics.

Well we supported the Kurds since what? 1991? 1992? We poured billions and put our lives on the line to support this Kabul regime since what? 2002? 2003? That is whimsical to you? And are we really allies? We provided all this equipment and training and they refuse to fight. Almost every time our "allies" run away when ISIS or the Taliban or whomever shows up. Some allies. Maybe before you expect us to be your staunch supporters maybe you should be ours? How about that? Yes that doesn't really apply to the Kurds but likewise I am confident they can take care of themselves and I don't think we have really abandoned them. If they are in serious trouble we will probably swoop in again.

The whole fucking point was to provide these people with the resources they needed to defend themselves.  Fuck this. You cannot trust the United States! They will only pour endless resources in your direction with few strings attached for 20 or 30 years then fuck off! And no you should not depend on the US, or anybody, alone for your security especially for internal enemies.

And lastly all this international shenanigans the US keeps doing has never been popular among the American people. Ever. We have to be scared into it by red scares and terrorist hysteria. And since we are supposed to be this Democracy I think that should be warning enough to anybody who thinks we can be reliably counted upon to endlessly expend our lives and treasure in distant lands where our supposed friends are corrupt and refuse to fight for their own cause. We do not want to do that. Maybe Russia or China or somebody else will but not us.

The bottom line is Afghanistan does not want us there. They see us as foreign occupiers. They vastly prefer the Taliban to us. So how is this really betraying an ally? Afghanistan was never our ally. If they were our ally and had our interests as well as their's at heart we would have already left years ago because they would be able to stand on their own.

I would expect to see a lot more regional deal-making, along the lines of the David Accords.

Which is exactly what I want. Clearly our presence has done nothing but harm regional stability by holding back these kinds of agreements.

[Malthus]

Where this is really damaging, is to perception of the US willingness to support allies. The Trump administration abandoned the Kurds without a qualm, and the abandonment of Afghanistan proves this isn't just a Trump thing - the lesson is that you can't depend on the US alone for your security, you had better have alternative allies lined up, presumably in your region (and so who care whether you fall or not). Otherwise, your existence depends on the whims of US politics.

Well we supported the Kurds since what? 1991? 1992? We poured billions and put our lives on the line to support this Kabul regime since what? 2002? 2003? That is whimsical to you? And are we really allies? We provided all this equipment and training and they refuse to fight. Almost every time our "allies" run away when ISIS or the Taliban or whomever shows up. Some allies. Maybe before you expect us to be your staunch supporters maybe you should be ours? How about that? Yes that doesn't really apply to the Kurds but likewise I am confident they can take care of themselves and I don't think we have really abandoned them. If they are in serious trouble we will probably swoop in again.

The whole fucking point was to provide these people with the resources they needed to defend themselves.  Fuck this. You cannot trust the United States! They will only pour endless resources in your direction with few strings attached for 20 or 30 years then fuck off! And no you should not depend on the US, or anybody, alone for your security especially for internal enemies.

And lastly all this international shenanigans the US keeps doing has never been popular among the American people. Ever. We have to be scared into it by red scares and terrorist hysteria. And since we are supposed to be this Democracy I think that should be warning enough to anybody who thinks we can be reliably counted upon to endlessly expend our lives and treasure in distant lands where our supposed friends are corrupt and refuse to fight for their own cause. We do not want to do that. Maybe Russia or China or somebody else will but not us.

The bottom line is Afghanistan does not want us there. They see us as foreign occupiers. They vastly prefer the Taliban to us. So how is this really betraying an ally? Afghanistan was never our ally. If they were our ally and had our interests as well as their's at heart we would have already left years ago because they would be able to stand on their own.

I would expect to see a lot more regional deal-making, along the lines of the David Accords.

Which is exactly what I want. Clearly our presence has done nothing but harm regional stability by holding back these kinds of agreements.

You are expending a lot of anger to agree with me. 😄

I'm making absolutely no comment on the relative justice of either course of action. The US does not, of course, have some sort of moral duty to police the rough places in the world.

However, actions have consequences. Having voluntarily taken on the invasion of Afghanistan and propped up a government there, for whatever reasons, abandoning that US creation to its fate sends a clear message to everyone else who, rightly or wrongly, depends on the US.

This naturally will have the effect of encouraging all the enemies of such places. If they only hold on long enough, the US will lose interest.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I think fears about our "allies" need to be tempered with an understanding of what sort of allies we should want, our allies should generally have a naturally mutually beneficial position to our own. Our European allies largely follow this paradigm, as do our significant Asian allies.

Allies that are only our allies because we funnel lots of money to their leaders, but who have either none of the same objectives we do, or actually hold oppositional objectives to our own, are probably not allies we should be supporting to the point of a 20 year military occupation. There's still some geopolitical reason to get in bed with "iffy" allies like that (see: Saudi Arabia, Egypt), but in most of those examples I can think of we at least have some shared interests. As far as I can tell the Afghan Government had no real interest that aligned with ours at all since their only commitment to a democratic, functional state seemed to be so their leaders could collect U.S. money and distribute it to their underlings.

[Berkut]

Yeah, I am pretty much in full agreement with Otto here.

The complete dissolving of the Afghan government doesn't who Biden to be wrong (excecpt in the details), it shows that he was right to bail. It was never real to begin with, just a bunch of smoke and mirrors and lots and lots and lots of money.

I think we need to do a hell of a lot better job picking our allies. I don't know how to do that though - it seems like it is either obvious (Western liberal democracies) or impossible to tell. And of course the ones we need to be able to figure that out with, are the very ones that are the hardest to figure out. Why did this work in Japan, and fail so badly in Iraq and Afghanistan, as examples? It seems obvious in retrospect, but it suggests that there are entire cultural areas where the effort just seems hopeless.

[Tamas]

Why did this work in Japan, and fail so badly in Iraq and Afghanistan, as examples? It seems obvious in retrospect, but it suggests that there are entire cultural areas where the effort just seems hopeless.

Well, I think waging an absolutely unrestricted punitive war of destruction against their entire population causing a massive culture shock and a clear indication that only death was alternative to submission certainly helped with Japan.

[The Brain]

The present day West has a huge carrot but no stick.

[Tonitrus]

Why did this work in Japan, and fail so badly in Iraq and Afghanistan, as examples? It seems obvious in retrospect, but it suggests that there are entire cultural areas where the effort just seems hopeless.

Well, I think waging an absolutely unrestricted punitive war of destruction against their entire population causing a massive culture shock and a clear indication that only death was alternative to submission certainly helped with Japan.

I think another huge factor is Iraq/Afghanistan both behind surrounded by states that are/were hostile to everything we were doing.

[OttoVonBismarck]

If I was King of the United States or whatever with no political checks on my behavior, I'd have crowned the heir to the Afghan monarchy and resurrected it. I would have funneled most of my money to internal intelligence / security agencies in the Kingdom, and to special forces. I would have spent less on some of the advanced weapons systems we gave the Afghans that mostly prepare them for war with say, their immediate neighbors, but didn't prepare them much for war with the Taliban.

I would have made their constitution one with a Federal system and autonomous tribal regions, various elements of the Federal system would have spots at some sort of council or upper house of the legislature to veto constitutional changes if they took issue with it. I would devolve lots of law making to the autonomous regions.

I'd frankly consider an arrangement like Iran has for the chief executive--elected President but the unelected King would hold a lot of reserve powers outside of accountability to the political system. I'd spend a lot of effort making sure the King stayed a U.S. ally.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I had actually forgotten that the previous Afghan King was actually still alive back in 2002, they should have just crowned him.

[Zanza]

The only mistake the West made in Afghanistan is that we stayed for twenty years rather than twenty weeks in 2001-2002. What colossal waste of lives and resources.

The Afghan military and institutions were obviously not worth anything.

[alfred russel]

Where this is really damaging, is to perception of the US willingness to support allies. The Trump administration abandoned the Kurds without a qualm, and the abandonment of Afghanistan proves this isn't just a Trump thing - the lesson is that you can't depend on the US alone for your security, you had better have alternative allies lined up, presumably in your region (and so who care whether you fall or not). Otherwise, your existence depends on the whims of US politics.

I would expect to see a lot more regional deal-making, along the lines of the David Accords.

That doesn't seem like damage; that seems like progress. Why should the US want allies that thinks that they can depend on the US alone for their security, or don't need to have regional allies lined up?

[OttoVonBismarck]

At the time Bush basically engineered the collapse of the Taliban because they wouldn't agree to hand bin Laden over (they were willing to take him into custody and subject him to a trial under "Sharia law", but would have required the United States to provide intelligence linking bin Laden to the attacks at said trial.) We had general intelligence that bin Laden was hiding out in eastern Afghanistan where al-Qaeda militants were known to be, we actually had special forces operations come pretty close to actually apprehending bin Laden after the invasion.

I'm curious what would have happened if we just deployed to eastern Afghanistan against the Taliban's wishes, made it known if they didn't shoot at us we wouldn't shoot at them, but if they did we'd bring hell onto them, and start conducting special forces operations aimed at going after al-Qaeda / bin Laden. I would liken it to what we did in Syria, when we literally just moved in and set up bases to fight ISIS even though the government of Syria very explicitly said they didn't want us there. There wasn't much they could do about it and they knew trying would just bring more trouble.

If we had taken that approach but left the Taliban in Kabul alone, I'm curious how it would have played out and what the Taliban would have done.

[The Brain]

The only mistake the West made in Afghanistan is that we stayed for twenty years rather than twenty weeks in 2001-2002. What colossal waste of lives and resources.

The Afghan military and institutions were obviously not worth anything.

Hardly wasted. We have provided the Taliban with a LOT of military hardware.

[Malthus]

Where this is really damaging, is to perception of the US willingness to support allies. The Trump administration abandoned the Kurds without a qualm, and the abandonment of Afghanistan proves this isn't just a Trump thing - the lesson is that you can't depend on the US alone for your security, you had better have alternative allies lined up, presumably in your region (and so who care whether you fall or not). Otherwise, your existence depends on the whims of US politics.

I would expect to see a lot more regional deal-making, along the lines of the David Accords.

That doesn't seem like damage; that seems like progress. Why should the US want allies that thinks that they can depend on the US alone for their security, or don't need to have regional allies lined up?

Depends on what the US wants out of this process. A world with a bunch of regional alliances may be a lot less stable than one in which large numbers of countries are dependant on the US. These regional alliances may not uphold US interests. Is the cost to the US worth the influence it buys?

For example - look why the US got involved in Afghanistan in the first place. It was not because the US wanted to buy an ally. It was because lack of US influence in Afghanistan meant the country was a safe haven for Bin Laden. Regional instability may not prove in US interests if it ends up with guys like the Taliban in charge.

Now it may well be that the Afghanistan Taliban has "learned its lesson" and will not host anti-US terrorists again - or maybe not.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I don't think the model of the U.S. trying to mold literally the entire world into our desires is a sustainable model.

There were serious intelligence failures in how 9/11 happened, that could have been addressed if we had a more robust intelligence operation aimed at al-Qaeda and Afghanistan. Preventing 9/11 2.0 didn't require a 20 year occupation of Afghanistan.