Has Biden Made the Right Choice in Afghanistan?

[mongers]

We've been here before, the Afghan 'special forces' are similar in effective as the South Vietnamese paratroopers/rangers/marines were to the rest of the ARVN; once those units got tied down, exhausted or overrun the majority of the army collapsed, with only a few other units putting up serious opposition to the NVA steamroller in 75.

Except North Vietnam was an actual country with a government and well established political and military leadership, and a huge army. The Taliban is none of those things. The North Vietnamese were also seen as ethnic compatriots by literally everyone in South Vietnam. Some South Vietnamese, probably not even 50%, opposed annexation and Communist rule, but it was still rule by people who had the same ethnic background, cultural background, and spoke the same language. Tajiks being rule by extremist Pashtuns is not anywhere the same. And the resources the Taliban has to stamp out insurgency and internal dissent are probably not even 1/100th of what the Vietnamese had.

Remember Vietnam's People's Army was so powerful right after it finished like a 25 year war with western powers, it rolled right into Cambodia and almost effortlessly removed the Khmer Rouge from power and replaced it with a different regime. About 5 years later it bloodied China's nose and fought it to a stalement along its northern borders. Comparing North Vietnam and the Taliban in ability to project force and occupy territory is akin to comparing Mike Tyson in his prime with YouTube boxer Jake Paul.

Otto, I didn't compare the Taliban to the NVA at all, didn't even mention them; I compared the ARVN to the Afghan government forces.

Also as we're seeing now, the absolute military might of the winning side doesn't matter once the other side is collapsing.

A soldier throwing away his rifle, helmet and uniform isn't bothered if it's a unit of T54s/PT76s attacking or just some guys in a pick-up chasing him, once morale has collapsed and the unit disintegrates it's every man for himself.

[viper37]

Should we stop to consider the possibility that the US military sucks and all the smoke that is blown up their ass the past few decades is bullshit?

The better part of 20 years were supposed to be spent training the Afghan military to stand on its own two feet and the Afghan military folds within 20 minutes against a goofball gang aka as the taliban.

The US military has a lot of firepower but seems unable to concentrate it for long at te same place.  Your special troops seems to be top of the line, though.  But the regulars aren't any better trained than most NATO soldiers. 

In fact, they're probably weaker since they over-relied to airstrikes in the past, and that was a huge problem in Afghanistan, Canadians had to trained them and some other NATO troops to stand and fight before calling an airstrike on an ennemy you can't see.
That being said, no serious military operation could do away with the US troops, firepower and special forces, good or bad.  The army is just too big, and there's a lot of untapped manpower reservoir compared to many other countries, so they can easily replenished their armies when needed, compared with smaller countries, like Canada, Italy, Norway or Denmark.
If Republicans were as good as they think with firearms that country would be invincible.

[viper37]

The failure in Afghanistan doesn't have that much to do with training. There are actually some glaring training and equipment failures we've perpetuated, but they aren't really the reason our mission there failed. It's because there is no sizable, meaningful cohort of Afghans willing to fight for a democratic, free, Afghanistan, one where people they might disagree with or who might be from a different tribe, might win elections and would be their ultimate commander. These people are tribal. The 1980s mujahadeen seized on religious extremism and a powerful desire to push a foreign occupier out. The Taliban didn't emerge out of some sort of magic ether, it was honestly just some nonsense in-fighting between mujahadeen groups, and the Taliban kind of sucked a bunch of supporters away from the other top mujahadeen group. Pakistan moved its support over, and they just kept rolling. The Taliban isn't really any fancy ideological group like ISIS or al-Qaeda, they're mostly just a rebranding of the same mujahadeen that have been fighting in Afghanistan forever. They're always going to be the strongest force in the country because everyone else is too fracture along tribal and ethnic lines. The only way to fix Afghanistan is to actually fix all those fault lines by building up some semblance of a civil society. That just hasn't occurred, nor is it goign to magically happen because you give soldiers good training.

The soldiers aren't bad because they received bad training, they're bad because they aren't willing to fight. They aren't willing to fight because they don't give a shit about protecting an Afghan National Government they never believed in, to them their military job is just a paycheck. It's not something to get shot over.

Lots of people were willing to fight for Southern independance in 1860.  Much less in 1864.  Northern desertion was also much higher in 1860 than in 1864.  There were a lot more of Nazi collaborators in occupied France in 1941 than in 1944.  And a lot more French resistance members in '44 than in '41.

People flock to the winning alternative, the one that offers stability.

The Afghan govt has been corrupt since the beginning and we haven't really smacked down the hammer on them, preferring them to the alternative of having warlors fighting with the Talebans against NATO coallition troops.

[The Minsky Moment]

There's a lot of bad places on earth

How many places on earth are (a) as bad off as Afghanistan, and (b) could and would obtain the same level of benefit from the presence of a relatively small number of US military?

Maybe Yemen or Libya?  Not that many.  But even then to make a difference in one of those places would require a much bigger investment of lives and money than in Afghanistan where the US had already taken its lumps and established itself in country.  That's not a sunk cost fallacy, it's a reality that continuing on involves incurring ongoing operational costs and not the up front set up costs of establishing bases from scratch, relationships with key players, local know how etc.  The US can't intervene everywhere, but it did intervene in Afghanistan, and one consequence is that if it chose to stay on longer it could continue to get a better humanitarian result per man and per dollar than it could be intervening elsewhere.

[Berkut]

Thank goodness Canada was there to train the US Army how to "stand and fight"!

A disaster narrowly avoided!

Could you guys send some of your stand and fighters down south to our basic training camps, so we can learn how to "stand and fight" right from the start from the experten?

[alfred russel]

I think a case can be made that the US did a pretty good job training the Afghans.  The commando units were able to perform effective operations and the US helped trained thousands of them.

There are practical limits to training.  As I indicated the bulk of the ANA is a jobs program for otherwise unemployable men.  Just one example: the majority of the soldiers - including a big chunk of the officer corps - are illiterate.  It makes perfect sense in this context for the US to pick out the most suitable and motivated individuals and focus training efforts on them.

The US military left Vietnam in March 73 and Saigon didn't fall until April 75. The US military effort in Vietnam was generally considered a massive failure and led to fundamental reforms. North Vietnam was of course getting significant Soviet aid and was an organized country, unlike the Taliban.

You are really going to argue the US military was effective in Afghanistan?

[Admiral Yi]

How many places on earth are (a) as bad off as Afghanistan, and (b) could and would obtain the same level of benefit from the presence of a relatively small number of US military?

Maybe Yemen or Libya?  Not that many.  But even then to make a difference in one of those places would require a much bigger investment of lives and money than in Afghanistan where the US had already taken its lumps and established itself in country.  That's not a sunk cost fallacy, it's a reality that continuing on involves incurring ongoing operational costs and not the up front set up costs of establishing bases from scratch, relationships with key players, local know how etc.  The US can't intervene everywhere, but it did intervene in Afghanistan, and one consequence is that if it chose to stay on longer it could continue to get a better humanitarian result per man and per dollar than it could be intervening elsewhere.

Purely humanitarian missions are bullshit to begin with and made even worse if there's no end game.

We bombed the Serbs to get them to back off on Bosnia.  We got nothing out of the deal, but at least it happened quickly.

[DGuller]

Whether it was our business to begin with is one thing, but once you take it on as your business, you feel like you own the outcome.  It may be a fallacy of human thinking on a logical level, but that's the way it works. 

If you adopt a dog from a kill shelter that was about to be euthanized, but then you return it because it was a pain in the ass to take it for walks every day, you're not really changing the fate of the dog.  Had you not adopted it in the first place, it would've been euthanized, and now it would be euthanized anyway after a brief chance at life, but the way you feel about it is different.  In the first case it would be just a sad thing that happens that you wouldn't think about too much, but in the second case you would feel like you killed the animal.

I fear that the same thing will happen with Afghanistan.  Before 2001 the treatment of women there was just a sad thing that happened in barbaric places.  After 2021, we would feel complicit about the bad things that happen to the women there.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I think a case can be made that the US did a pretty good job training the Afghans.  The commando units were able to perform effective operations and the US helped trained thousands of them.

There are practical limits to training.  As I indicated the bulk of the ANA is a jobs program for otherwise unemployable men.  Just one example: the majority of the soldiers - including a big chunk of the officer corps - are illiterate.  It makes perfect sense in this context for the US to pick out the most suitable and motivated individuals and focus training efforts on them.

The US military left Vietnam in March 73 and Saigon didn't fall until April 75. The US military effort in Vietnam was generally considered a massive failure and led to fundamental reforms. North Vietnam was of course getting significant Soviet aid and was an organized country, unlike the Taliban.

You are really going to argue the US military was effective in Afghanistan?

Yes. The U.S. military in Vietnam had serious issues because it didn't know how to fight an insurgency and was trying to fight the war like it was WWII. The military in Iraq and Afghanistan came out on the other side being probably the world's premiere insurgency fighting force, at least that tries to broadly follow some semblance of the Geneva Conventions. As I mentioned there are some training and equipment failures involved--we trained the Afghan National Army to be a mini version of our own, meaning way too reliant on complex weapon system and air power. Both require educated and better trained soldiers. We likely should have focused on trying to stand up a military like pre-Iraq war Saddam's army or Iran's military, which is much more reliant on mass manpower and simpler conventional weapon systems. But while there is something to learn there, even that path wouldn't change the outcome. The core issue is the people of Afghanistan do not have a political consensus that they want to participate in a national army (one that would be lead by people who may not belong to their ethnic or tribal group, and one where their fellow soldiers might not either.) You're basically asking Pashtuns in the national army to fight other Pashtuns when you send them against the Taliban. They aren't willing to do so because they don't care about the concept of "Afghanistan" which is not a nationstate but just a random country name. Making people have some belief in a national society worth defending isn't something I think you do with the military.

The way we could have "won" in Afghanistan would have been a different political perspective. Probably one in which we resurrect the Afghan monarchy and empower an absolutist with lots of money and weapons to kill anyone who is getting out of line in the provinces. We then structure the country around local rule handling most issues--which is the reason all these tribes were mostly behaved under the King's rule before the mid-1970s. Going in to these places and telling people how to live and what to do isn't a good recipe for success. A feudal strongman who mostly lets the tribes run themselves and who just has enough military force to kill people who get too out of line is honestly the only likely stable situation Afghanistan could hope to find. This feudal strongman would likely need to be allowed to do things we morally oppose, things that violate the modern laws of war, to stamp out insurgencies when they flare up.

[The Minsky Moment]

The US military left Vietnam in March 73 and Saigon didn't fall until April 75. The US military effort in Vietnam was generally considered a massive failure and led to fundamental reforms. North Vietnam was of course getting significant Soviet aid and was an organized country, unlike the Taliban.

You are really going to argue the US military was effective in Afghanistan?

What does one have to do with the other?   Why not bring in Stillwell in the CBI?

[Habbaku]

Stilwell would just run away and abandon his men again, so it seems apropos to bring him in here.

[grumbler]

It might help people understand Afghanistan if they think of it as a miniature Soviet Union or Russian Empire:  there is a core state consisting of one ethnic group, the largest in the empire, and then some attached provinces of different ethnic groups who feel no attachment to the empire/country as a whole, because they think of the empire/country as a foreign thing run by foreigners for the benefit of foreigners.

It might be best to simply allow Afghanistan to disintegrate, and then encourage the neighbors to watch out for their own ethnic groups there (which is going to happen to some extent anyway, since an Afghan Tajik is the same as a Tajikistan Tajik).  Lots of potential for ethnic cleansing with that scenario, though.  More, even, than in the Taliban victory scenario.

It should also be remembered that the group seen by Pashtuns as their big enemy isn't the US or The Tajiks, but rather the Punjabis back in Pakistan.  One could hypothesize that one reason that the Pashtuns support the Taliban is because they want to use Afghanistan as a base for freeing the half of Pashtunistan that lies in Pakistan (or at least strengthen its autonomy). 

[The Brain]

What is this? A Soviet Union for ants??!?

[grumbler]

Stilwell would just run away and abandon his men again, so it seems apropos to bring him in here.

Revisionist history is best history!

[grumbler]

What is this? A Soviet Union for ants??!?

Giant ants.