Has Biden Made the Right Choice in Afghanistan?

[Tamas]

Hundreds of Afghan soldiers fled to neighbouring Uzbekistan with 22 military planes and 24 helicopters last weekend, including one aircraft that collided with an escorting Uzbek fighter jet causing both to crash, Uzbekistan has said.

According to Reuters, the Uzbek defence ministry said an Afghan military jet had been shot down and crashed after crossing the border.

A total of 585 Afghan soldiers have arrived on aircraft and 158 more crossed the border on foot on Sunday, the Uzbek prosecutor general's office added.

Quite simply, the US has been duped.

I am sure there was a portion of the population who wanted to see westernisation happen, seeing education, seeing women risen out of the cattle status given to them by their previous governments and their religion. But I had no idea just how much the majority didn't give a fuck. I don't remember reading about any major engagement during the last two weeks - those soldiers above didn't flee after a defeat - they fled so they wouldn't have to fight.

[alfred russel]

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?

An emphatic answer is "absolutely not". Afghanistan is a tremendously poor and irrelevant country on the other side of the world. Two trillion spent in every such country will bankrupt the US quite quickly. This isn't even a close call.

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

And if it hasn't we can go back, fix the problem, and leave. Pakistan was playing host to Bin Laden for a while: we didn't occupy that country for 20 years or even a day. Way more cost effective than the Afghanistan boondoggle.

[Tamas]

It reminds me reading this book written 2004 or maybe 2010, about the 19th century British involvement in Afghanistan. It was quite excellent. At the end the book claimed that the current (as in 2000s) opposing warlords (then chief of Taliban and the leader of the Afghan government) were from the same two tribes who fought it out as anti- and pro-British forces then.

My impression is, we (civilised countries) go in there apparently completely ignorant of the local situation, or at least unable to manipulate it, and while for sure, wherever we strike and whoever we choose as our local "allies" has a decisive impact on internal politics, at the end of the day we end up being tools used in their own internal intrigues.

A similar thing I read was about Commancheria and the situation with the American west for centuries: Spain and the rest of the Europeans would draw these neat maps of what belongs to them which paid no attention or attempted understanding of the Native American political units and ways of state-building, which bit the Europeans in the ass repeatedly, as their way of political/diplomatic thinking had almost zero correlation to local context.

[The Minsky Moment]

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.

The Kurds met that definition by any fair assessment.  For a very long time they were loyal and reliable partners and effective fighters to boot. And if those are the kinds of allies you want, you need to have a reputation for being a reliable partner yourself.

[Admiral Yi]

One the quality issue Fredo, have you considered that a couple thousand US troops in country was the difference between a national army of 180,000 men fighting and it disintegrating? 

[Syt]

[Valmy]

I like our chances influencing a few elites running a regional alliance than I do of us winning the hearts and minds of the locals.

[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.

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

I bet they cannot maintain anything more complex than a Toyota Hilux and all the expensive equipment will soon become defunct.

[The Minsky Moment]

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.

It shows that either he lied to the American people or was badly wrong about the consequences of the precipitous withdrawal.  I very much doubt the first.

No amount of porcine lip glossing can cover up this policy screw-up.  There is no way that if Biden and his team knew then what they know now, they would have handled things in the same way. They might have still withdrew but it would have been planned a lot more carefully and deliberately.  You can call those details, but they are pretty big and important details.  When human beings who put their lives at risk to align with America - regardless of whether we judge them to be "worthy allies" are not - are plummeting to their deaths after desperately clinging to the outside of a departing jet, that's a sign of rather important details being lost.

One can throw as much shade of the Afghan government as you want; there is no shortage of murk there.  But whether the leadership individually or collectively was "deserving" of the blessings of an American alliance, there was also a real, Afghan civil society that contained ordinary, regular living human beings who in many different ways relied on the American commitment and were encouraged to rely on that commitment.  They will face the consequences of our departure.  And regardless of whether the leaders deserved our support or not, the irreducible fact is that this fiasco of a withdrawal is a very bad look for America and it will impact the perception of America by the rest of the world for the worse.

[Jacob]

Yeah, I think that's about right Minsky.

I believe an orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan was the right course of action. But this withdrawal is not particularly orderly, and there are real consequences for that, including for individual Afghanis who've relied on and trusted the US.

[The Minsky Moment]

I like our chances influencing a few elites running a regional alliance than I do of us winning the hearts and minds of the locals.

The history of the Baghdad Pact would suggest caution in reaching that conclusion.

[Valmy]

One can throw as much shade of the Afghan government as you want; there is not shortage of murk there.  But whether the leadership individually or collectively was "deserving" of the blessings of and American alliance, there was also a real, Afghan civil society that contained ordinary, regular living human beings who in many different ways relied on the American commitment and were encouraged to rely on that commitment.  They will face the consequences of our departure.  And regardless of whether the leaders deserved our support or not, the irreducible fact is that this fiasco of a withdrawal is a very bad look for America and it will impact the perception of America by the rest of the world for the worse.

Exactly like in South Vietnam. We always create these kinds of groups whenever we do this kind of thing which is exactly why we should not do so.

I am all for allowing them to immigrate to the US and doing whatever we can for anybody who legitimately was our friend in Afghanistan. We did the same for many of the South Vietnamese.

As for looking bad I will take a 1975 or 2021 any day of the week rather than 1955-1973 or a 2002-2020. Less Civilian deaths and less money wasted.

[Valmy]

I like our chances influencing a few elites running a regional alliance than I do of us winning the hearts and minds of the locals.

The history of the Baghdad Pact would suggest caution in reaching that conclusion.

Hey I didn't say it was a slam dunk.

[Admiral Yi]

I think the notion of an orderly, deliberate withdrawal is a bit of magical thinkiing.  What reason is there to think that if we had withdrawn 100 men a week the Afghan army wouldn't have collectively decided overnight that it was not worth it to fight?

[OttoVonBismarck]

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.

I bet they cannot maintain anything more complex than a Toyota Hilux and all the expensive equipment will soon become defunct.

This was actually one of the criticisms I was reading come out of some military policy wonk papers being put out 5+ years ago, we built an Afghan military like a mini-American military. Complex weapon systems that require expertise and expensive equipment to maintain and repair, over-reliance on air power etc. Now, that isn't why the government collapsed in a few days--that's because people just straight up accepted money from the Taliban to go home without fighting. But had the Afghan National Government not collapsed in literally days, we were leaving them with a military not well designed for their country.