Has Biden Made the Right Choice in Afghanistan?

[Duque de Bragança]

reliable allies in the Middle East

As compared to Pakistan. 

[Sheilbh]

The author is missing half the equations: what it costs to not stay in Afghanistan:

I think the talk on costs is very much focused on the cost to the US in staying - I think it needs to acknowledge that there's been growing Taliban control since the US/NATO moved to a more "light-touch" droney presence and that was based on actual fights between the Taliban and the Afghan Army. So we also need to consider in this "low-cost" operation that the number of civilian deaths per year has been over 10,000 for the last six years and it has grown every year as the Taliban fight for and won more territory. There is obviously a moral/ethical consideration there, but I think the authors point is right that it is delusional to think the ANA would turn around themselves - so at some point in order to maintain their low cost presence the US/NATO would need to have a higher cost/heavier touch to roll-back Taliban successes or to defend more and more strategic points.

A key part of the low-cost nature of this wasn't that it was because the fighting had abated, but that the US/NATO weren't doing it.

- increase difficulty in finding reliable allies in the Middle East, in a time where the US is facing increased competition by Russia.
- increase difficulty in getting reliable intelligence on terror networks in the Middle East

In relation to the Middle East the US is stuck with the same old (and to varying degrees) unreliable allies its always had: Egypt, Saudi, Oman, Bahrain, the UAE and Israel. That network hasn't significantly changed in decades - Afghanistan was never a key part of it - and it's not likely to change any time soon (absent another revolution). It has all of the costs and benefits that we know.

In the sub-continent I think there is a shift which will affect US intelligence on terror networks - the old unreliable ally is Pakistan and I think that relationship is changing quite significantly. Afghanistan is part of that, but the bigger force is the rise of China and the move from the US to develop relations with India as part of its wider Indo-Pac strategy, so India are part of the quad. At the same time China is very close to Pakistan and developing that relationship. I don't think Afghanistan is a significant factor in those developments I think the driver is China and those are bigger forces. And again the last 20 years has been the US and NATO with a Pakistani "ally", if the US is perceived by Pakistan to be closer to India (because it's necessary from a competition with China perspective) I suspect that any forces in Afghanistan could face an even more difficult challenge without Pakistan as an "ally" - hard as that is to believe.

- seeing Afghanistan once again become a training ground for terrorists who wants to commit attacks on the West.

Maybe. I think there is a bit of wait and see on this. I think ISIS are right that the Taliban are basically more Islamo-nationalists (even seeing the footage of their military parade today - as grim as it is, it's all about the "dear country" not the ummah or the Caliphate). They might open their country to terrorists who want to attack the West - they did in the past but primarily to groups with links to the fight in the 80s and the civil war (of which there are fewer - except for Uyghurs - in this iteration). But I think there is a possibility they might not (except possibly for Uyghurs at some point - and I don't think it's impossible that in 20-30 years the US is actually considering supporting mujahadeen fighting a Chinese backed government in Afghanistan). I think the risk of that is different than ISIS in Syria or Iraq.

And I think Biden/the US will keep the option of targeting Afghanistan with missiles or special forces in just the same way they did Sudan.

- having China and Russia establish their own foothold in the area, increasing the destabilization of neighboring countries, some in which the US have military bases or agreement to let their planes fly in.

This is the tension of China and Russia cooperating - China wants stability, Russia wants instability.  But again I think Afghanistan is nothing compared to Pakistan in terms of the impact this aspect has.

I also think this is a fundamentally imperialist/great game argument. We have to be there, to stop others from being there. I don't think that's the basis the US/NATO went in and I think if this is the basis for staying then it should be made explicitly by people.

And if we are looking at it from the perspective of great power competition - what is being sacrificed in order to keep a presence in Afghanistan? What are the things we cannot do or the relationships we cannot develop as a consequence of that decision? For example, does it require a level of relations with Pakistan which places a limit on the relationship you can have with India - because, if so, developing the relationship with India in my view is more important to competing with China than maintaining a presence in Afghanistan. The balance may come out in favour of staying in Afghanistan but, again, I think you need to actually make that case and explain it (including the trade-off of things you can't do because of the states involved or the resource cost etc) rather than let it ride on the coat-tails of protecting human rights through the Afghan government and counter-terrorism.

- giving Russia a win.

I don't mind that.

But for me the really key point is that in 20 years the US, NATO, the UN, every NGO in the world etc have failed to build a state with a minimal level of legitimacy. We need to understand why - if we think there's a possibility that this will be the type of mission we do again. But I haven't seen anyone backing staying explain what they'd do differently in the future - so we'd just be propping up the same failure for longer which I don't understand and possibly repeating it because there'd be no attempt to learn. And this isn't a criticism of the US, they're just the biggest, this goes for all the NATO allies, the EU police training mission, the UN, the NGO sector - all of it.

The wider point is that I agree with Benjamin Haddad that Biden's speech on this is actually a strong and eloquent repudiation of liberal internationalism. It was fundamentally very realist - the US is focusing on a narrow description of American interests and focusing on threats to those vital interests (so not just no Afghanistan, but no Kosovo, or Bosnian intervention) and great power competition. That might be the right policy choice and a necessary shift as we're moving from the 90s "end of history" moment to one defined by the rise of China and aggressive Russian power.

I think the bigger consequence is Europe should be listening to that carefully (but won't), because the real risk for us is that actually narrowly European interests may no longer be interpreted in the US as necessarily American interests.

[Habbaku]

reliable allies in the Middle East

Basically just Jordan.

[Sheilbh]

Also Oman! (Maybe)

But, yeah, plucky little Jordan

[Razgovory]

I, for one, welcome Chinese overlordship in Afghanistan.

[Grey Fox]

I, for one, welcome Chinese overlordship in Afghanistan.

They are big into genocide of Muslims, so business as usual for Afghans?

[alfred russel]

There is no general as powerful, wise and farsighted as the Armchair variety.

He called his shot a couple years ago, and nailed it. He may be just an armchair general, but his statements are wiser and more factual than the public statements of our actual generals. Whether that is because he has more wisdom and foresight than our generals, or our generals lack integrity, or some combination, I leave up to you.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/10/opinion/afghanistan-washington-post.html

Lies Have Kept Us in Afghanistan. But the Truth May Not Set Us Free.

In fighting successfully to publish documents showing that United States officialdom has been telling lies for years about our military endeavors in Afghanistan, The Washington Post has shown how little has changed since the Vietnam era — and yet also how much more sustainable, strangely, our own era's quagmires seem to be.

The sameness lies in the substance of the revelations. In the Afghanistan document trove, as in the Pentagon Papers, you can see military and civilian officials feeding the press over-optimistic assessments of a likely unwinnable conflict, conducting clever statistical manipulations to create illusions of success, telling hard truths in private while lying subtly or baldly in their public statements. All quagmires seem to require a similar culture of bureaucratized dishonesty, a similar mask of optimism with the death's head underneath.

The differences begin with the absence of a draft and a much lower American casualty rate, but they extend to the larger political and cultural landscape as well. The Pentagon Papers weren't the first great disillusioning moment of the Vietnam era; by the time they came out, public trust in government had already fallen considerably from its early-1960s high.

But the country had not yet fully lost the capacity to be shocked by official lying, and the political and military establishments had not yet grown used to conducting foreign policy without strong public support. As Americans decided the war was unwinnable and its architects dishonest, policymakers responded by abandoning the war itself. The agony of Vietnam seemed endless at the time, but the American troop presence rose and fell in a simple arc, climbing from 1964 until 1968 and falling thereafter. Three years after the Pentagon Papers were published, we weren't in Vietnam anymore.

The Afghanistan revelations, on the other hand, arrive in an America already so distrustful that it's hard to imagine how it could be disillusioned further. Over 50 percent of the country still trusted the federal government to do the right thing at least most of the time in the early Nixon years; today the equivalent figure is 17 percent. The Washington Post's reporting should be shocking, but in the current environment it's hard to imagine any reader actually being shocked.

And with the absence of shock, it seems, comes an absence of antiwar energy as well. The newly disillusioned America of 1971 wanted withdrawal from Vietnam and got it within a few short years; the more cynical America of 2019 has favored withdrawal from Afghanistan for almost a decade without getting it.

This disconnect has no doubt contributed something to the instability of our politics; both Barack Obama and Donald Trump, in their different ways, drew on forever-war fatigue in their winning presidential runs. But the permanence of the policy is the more remarkable fact: American disillusionment with the war in Afghanistan has been substantial and stable since 2012, and yet without much domestic controversy, or even much attention, thousands of American soldiers are still there.

Admittedly, our troop presence has declined substantially since the Obama-era surge of troops and the much smaller early-Trump-administration troop increase. So it's possible that in a Trump second term or a Bernie Sanders presidency it will finally trace a slow descent to zero — with or without a deal of some sort with the Taliban — and after 20 years or so we'll finally discover that even endless wars can end.

But it's also possible that in cutting troop numbers the Pentagon is groping toward sustainability rather than an endpoint — toward some figure that's deemed sufficient to manage stalemate, to preserve certain American objectives and prevent the embarrassment of real defeat.

In that case, despite the similar pattern of deception and denial, Afghanistan could represent something very different from the Vietnam experience. Vietnam proved that despite a certain amount of patriotic naïveté, Americans ultimately wouldn't put up with a seemingly unwinnable war founded on lies and self-delusion. But Afghanistan may yet prove that given an all-volunteer military, the right amount of cynical detachment at home and a low enough casualty rate in the theater itself, Americans will accept a war where there is no prospect for victory, and no clear objective save the permanent postponement of defeat. More even than our Indochina debacle, it could bury George Patton's dictum about our addiction to victory, our contempt for defeat, by proving that 21st-century Americans have learned to swallow stalemate.

In which case the documents published by The Post will tell a story of how policymakers lied their way not toward a Vietnam-style debacle but through a strategic transition — one which, when complete, won't require quite so much official lying, because nobody will even be paying attention anymore.

Seen in this sort of hypothetical hindsight, the first 10 years of the Afghanistan War represented a last experiment in conventional war, nation-building, idealistic democracy promotion ... but in the second decade, the conflict gradually became just the largest example of the endlessly multiplying, low-casualty police actions that have defined our grand strategy under Obama and now Trump.

And this strategy, for all its possible defects, has one obvious advantage for national security policymakers: It frustrates popular opposition by never supplying a strong reason — whether in mass casualties or clear military defeats — for antiwar sentiment to leave the rightward and leftward fringes and become a major popular concern. As Samuel Moyn of Yale Law School put it last year in a perceptive essay for The New Republic, the more "contained" American warfare becomes — the more our wars look like Afghanistan in 2019, rather than Afghanistan in 2010, Iraq in 2005 or Vietnam in 1968 — "the more likely it is that the war will continue indefinitely."

You can agree with this diagnosis without fully embracing antiwar anguish or despair. As with other features of our decadence, a Pax Americana sustained by indefinite police actions, indefinitely frozen conflicts and indefinite postponements of defeat is hardly the worst geopolitical scenario imaginable, and definitely preferable to certain bloodier alternatives.

But there is still something unusually grim about reading The Post's catalog of the official deceptions that have carried us through 18 years in Afghanistan, and then considering the possibility that it could be years, decades, even generations before the last American soldier finally dies for these mistakes.

[viper37]

reliable allies in the Middle East

ok, reliable is too strong a word, obviously.

But you'll risk seeing more countries shifting to the USSR, endangering US interests in the region.

[viper37]

I, for one, welcome Chinese overlordship in Afghanistan.

They are big into genocide of Muslims, so business as usual for Afghans?

As long as white guys ain't the ones doing the extermination, the left is usually ok with all this genocide thing.  I remember a lot of protests when the US invaded Afghanistan, and later when they invaded Iraq.  I can't remember seeing any about the current situation in Afghanistan.  I mean, outside of Afghanistan.

[Grey Fox]

It is impractical and disingenuous to compare the left of 20 years ago & todays.

[The Minsky Moment]

He called his shot a couple years ago,

You mean 18 years into the war?

[alfred russel]

He called his shot a couple years ago,

You mean 18 years into the war?

Our generals and senior national security leadership were giving assessments just a couple of months ago that can now only be seen as "Baghdad Bob" routines.

Your comment was that "There is no general as powerful, wise and farsighted as the Armchair variety." If it took him 18 years to figure shit out and say it out loud, that is better than our actual generals.

[The Minsky Moment]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/10/opinion/afghanistan-washington-post.html

Lies Have Kept Us in Afghanistan. But the Truth May Not Set Us Free.

Admittedly, our troop presence has declined substantially since the Obama-era surge of troops and the much smaller early-Trump-administration troop increase. So it's possible that in a Trump second term or a Bernie Sanders presidency it will finally trace a slow descent to zero — with or without a deal of some sort with the Taliban — and after 20 years or so we'll finally discover that even endless wars can end.

But it's also possible that in cutting troop numbers the Pentagon is groping toward sustainability rather than an endpoint — toward some figure that's deemed sufficient to manage stalemate, to preserve certain American objectives and prevent the embarrassment of real defeat.

In that case, despite the similar pattern of deception and denial, Afghanistan could represent something very different from the Vietnam experience. Vietnam proved that despite a certain amount of patriotic naïveté, Americans ultimately wouldn't put up with a seemingly unwinnable war founded on lies and self-delusion. But Afghanistan may yet prove that given an all-volunteer military, the right amount of cynical detachment at home and a low enough casualty rate in the theater itself, Americans will accept a war where there is no prospect for victory, and no clear objective save the permanent postponement of defeat. More even than our Indochina debacle, it could bury George Patton's dictum about our addiction to victory, our contempt for defeat, by proving that 21st-century Americans have learned to swallow stalemate.

In which case the documents published by The Post will tell a story of how policymakers lied their way not toward a Vietnam-style debacle but through a strategic transition — one which, when complete, won't require quite so much official lying, because nobody will even be paying attention anymore.
...
You can agree with this diagnosis without fully embracing antiwar anguish or despair. As with other features of our decadence, a Pax Americana sustained by indefinite police actions, indefinitely frozen conflicts and indefinite postponements of defeat is hardly the worst geopolitical scenario imaginable, and definitely preferable to certain bloodier alternatives.

I actually agree with 95% of this. Douthat finds it distasteful; I find it to be a cold acceptance of complex and ugly reality.  There is no glorious victory to be had, nor is there any clean and safe withdrawal with zero fallout.  You pick your poison.  Biden picked the poison of  a messy withdrawal over the poison of messy maintenance or glacially slow wind-down.  It isn't the poison I would have picked. But there were no good options.

[The Minsky Moment]

Isn't that comment sort of his point - is his criticism wrong? And has there been any self-criticism (even self-awareness) or attempt to learn the lessons by the people who were in charge or are in charge now?

Hard to say  - that statement lumps in a lot of very different people in very different context doing pieces of different things over 20 years.

America isn't run by Napoleon; four different Presidential administrations have owned this mess and more cabinet iterations than that; this is before getting into the civil-military interactions and the various responsibilities of the Joint Chiefs, the regional commands, and the combat commands.  You could (e.g.) point a finger at Don Rumsfeld.  But he's dead. And if he was alive he'd say it was never really done the way he would have done it.  Power in America is always divided and fragmented; there are many virtues to that in a democracy, but it does tend to diffuse responsibility.  Accountability is left to elections.  Messy and perhaps unsatisfactory, especially for those who want a few witches to burn, but it's about the best we've figured out for now.

[The Minsky Moment]

Your comment was that "There is no general as powerful, wise and farsighted as the Armchair variety." If it took him 18 years to figure shit out and say it out loud, that is better than our actual generals.

Except that his 2019 article does not really say the same things as his 2021 article.  His 2019 article did not propose a withdrawal and in 2019, he stated the case for sustainability that he seems to reject in 2021.