Has Biden Made the Right Choice in Afghanistan?

[Tonitrus]

There was still a pretty formidable resistance to the Taliban 20 years ago...there will not be any of much significance now (not that is currently foreseeable).

A 20-year delay is still a bit much, though.

[Tonitrus]

[alfred russel]

I voted that Biden made the right decision.  The collapse of the central government has not changed my mind. 

In the immediate case, there is no question withdrawal was 100% the right decision. Imagine he got anything approaching accurate intelligence and honestly conveyed that to the American people:

"My fellow Americans, it has been brought to my attention that after 20 years and trillions of dollars, we have made zero progress creating an Afghan government and military able and willing to put up even the slightest level of resistance. I have therefore recommitted us to the military operation, and am hopeful that success will come someday soon."

[chipwich]

Just imagine how much better Afghanistan would be if that many people fought for goodness.

[DGuller]

Let's annotate this picture with the names and birth dates of everyone while we're at it, no need to waste Taliban's time as it figures out who deserves retribution for disloyalty.

[Berkut]

I voted that Biden made the right decision.  The collapse of the central government has not changed my mind. 

In the immediate case, there is no question withdrawal was 100% the right decision. Imagine he got anything approaching accurate intelligence and honestly conveyed that to the American people:

"My fellow Americans, it has been brought to my attention that after 20 years and trillions of dollars, we have made zero progress creating an Afghan government and military able and willing to put up even the slightest level of resistance. I have therefore recommitted us to the military operation, and am hopeful that success will come someday soon."

Yeah, exactly.

I mean - we learned something, and that knowledge certainly doesn't make me think leaving was some kind of missed opportunity.

[Malthus]

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.

The issue isn't whether the US ought to have gone to Afghanistan in the first place. That's a separate argument.

The issue is, having gone, should it have left; and if so, should it have left in this particular manner, which seems designed to produce disaster, discourage allies, and encourage enemies.

No-one is suggesting that the US go everywhere and fix everything.

An argument can certainly be made that the US, having spent so much, needed a viable exit strategy. Is this particular strategy a good idea though?

[Neil]

Let's annotate this picture with the names and birth dates of everyone while we're at it, no need to waste Taliban's time as it figures out who deserves retribution for disloyalty.

I think those are the people who got on the plane.  If the Taliban is going to go gunning for them in whatever country they end up in, then they're opening themselves up for trouble.

[OttoVonBismarck]

The question is, based on what we know about Afghanistan and our efforts there, how likely is it a departure at any point looks materially different than the departure that we're seeing right now?

[Malthus]

The question is, based on what we know about Afghanistan and our efforts there, how likely is it a departure at any point looks materially different than the departure that we're seeing right now?

Why not simply negotiate a surrender of the nation to the Taliban, allowing an opportunity for those who wish to leave to do so in an orderly manner, and withdraw US equipment, if this collapse was inevitable? No doubt the Taliban would have been happy to get such terms.

[OttoVonBismarck]

The question is, based on what we know about Afghanistan and our efforts there, how likely is it a departure at any point looks materially different than the departure that we're seeing right now?

Why not simply negotiate a surrender of the nation to the Taliban, allowing an opportunity for those who wish to leave to do so in an orderly manner, and withdraw US equipment, if this collapse was inevitable? No doubt the Taliban would have been happy to get such terms.

I don't think the Ghani government was interested in negotiating a surrender to the Taliban. I also don't think a U.S. President can parlay a surrender agreement between Ghani and the Taliban, there are political concerns too.

[Berkut]

The question is, based on what we know about Afghanistan and our efforts there, how likely is it a departure at any point looks materially different than the departure that we're seeing right now?

Why not simply negotiate a surrender of the nation to the Taliban, allowing an opportunity for those who wish to leave to do so in an orderly manner, and withdraw US equipment, if this collapse was inevitable? No doubt the Taliban would have been happy to get such terms.

I don't think everyone knew that this collapse was inevitable. Did you? I didn't.

[alfred russel]

The question is, based on what we know about Afghanistan and our efforts there, how likely is it a departure at any point looks materially different than the departure that we're seeing right now?

Why not simply negotiate a surrender of the nation to the Taliban, allowing an opportunity for those who wish to leave to do so in an orderly manner, and withdraw US equipment, if this collapse was inevitable? No doubt the Taliban would have been happy to get such terms.

That is a dramatically worse idea. We spent 20 years building a military that could stand on its own against the Taliban. Obviously it didn't even begin to scratch the surface of adequate, but the scope of the failure is evident because of the collapse. You surrender to the Taliban and for the rest of your life you are hearing people argue that Biden sold out the Afghan people, and stories of how brave the army was, etc.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Remember that Nixon's Paris Peace Accords were considered a major coup for him and Kissinger. Not because they achieved anything that was a strategic goal of the United States, but because they engineered a political moment where Nixon could take credit for getting "peace with dignity" in Vietnam, as he promised in his campaign (and ignoring the fact he actually spent his initial years in office expanding the war illegally into Cambodia and Laos.) That's most likely the sort of agreement Trump was fishing for, but couldn't find, and to be frank it'd be the same sort of agreement Biden would need as well. It wouldn't matter how it worked out long term, it would just matter that it could be called a win for a year or so.

The issue is unlike the North Vietnamese, who could easily afford to sign an agreement like that, the Taliban really couldn't. The North Vietnamese were a real country with a lot of resources. The Taliban signing such an agreement would put them at real risk of trouble within their own ranks, and would have created a power vacuum that could have seen the reemergence of sectarian warlords and other forces.

[11B4V]

Perhaps their women should done the fighting. Probably would have made better fighters.

The conduct of the Afghan security forces was disgraceful. They deserve what they had the lack of will to fight against. We owe them no apologies.