There's no point in my saying what had already been said so well. If you want to get your head straight about President Biden's correct and courageous actions, read this. Here are a couple of excerpts in case you're too lazy to click on the link.
[T]he great majority of the criticism we’ve seen amounts to ignorance and deflection. Pulling the plug on a failed or misconceived mission isn’t pretty. But it is inevitable. The ugliness is built into the failure rather than a consequence of recognizing it. Most of what we’ve seen is an attempt to deny the failure (mostly hawks) or imagine that withdrawing would be orderly and free of consequences. But with all this reasoning, what parts were handled poorly? What could have been better organized or cleaner? . . .
The airlift evacuation appears to have transported well over 110,000 people out of the country, an astonishing feat under any circumstances and probably unprecedented for a civilian airlift in a kinetic military context and in the context of state collapse.
What happened two weeks ago was that the US-backed government fell. Quickly. And the US President, who had decided to end the US mission in Afghanistan without conditions, allowed it to fall rather than changing his mind. That is the entirety of what happened. Shifting gears to prevent the collapse would have signaled not only that the decision was wrong but also was poorly arrived at in the first place since the collapse of the government was always the probable and most likely the inevitable result of the decision. . . .
Three Presidents understood the futility of the mission. Only one had the determination to end it even at the cost of real political damage to himself. That means he has to own the reality of withdrawal, the acceptance that the mission, as it expanded in the years after 2001, did not work. He has to accept the reality of a Taliban government. He has to accept the reality and images of terrified refugees, masses looking to escape.
But as many have argued this was a reality baked into the futility and failure of the mission itself. There was no pretty exit. That is what kept the US there for two decades. As has been the case for weeks, this is the crux of the ‘there had to be a better way’ crowd’s argument: wanting out of a failed endeavor but unwilling to stomach let alone embrace the reality of that failure and eager to pass that messiness off on someone else.
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This is a distinguishing characteristic of the rightwing, conservative political type: the inability not only to accept responsibility for one’s own actions, but the unwillingness to accept the validity — and even the reality — of responsible actions on the part of anyone else that don’t jibe with the conservative’s hard-baked, intransigent and ill-informed opinion.
The nasty fact which Acela Villagers won't face is that this was always how it would end. Whatever any given afghani might have thought of the taliban, I never met but a handful who thought our quisling regime was legitimate. Hollow states get hollow armies. That's the whole story.
I couldn’t agree more. The degree to which our country has gone to perpetuate lies, from all of our wars excluding World War II to anti-welfare, anti-abortion, anti-mask wearing hysteria, is gobsmacking to me. The media and the racists whip up the yahoos into one big crazy zombie dance, forming armies large and small of death cultists. Who benefits? The oligarchy?
Your points are well-made.
However, they leave out two areas of criticism.
1. Many say: the US withdrew air support too early and too completely: a very moderate amount of air support, with perhaps some further small back-up forces, would have given effective support to the Afghan government for years into the future at a very low cost in men and materiel.
2. Was the airlift and withdrawal planned as well as it could have been? In particular, would maintaining other facilities have worked better e.g. the base at Bagram etc, rather than, or in addition to, the Karzai airport option.
These points have been raised in the corridors of power, but, as far as I know, they have not been adequately answered.
With respect to the first point, it is simply incorrect. In fact the ANA had its own air force and was already carrying out the majority of air operations itself; but air power cannot replace an effective army on the ground. The ANA was a farce, most of the soldiers on its roster were no-shows whose commanders were pocketing their salaries (paid by you), and it could not maintain its own logistics. No amount of air support could have kept it from collapsing.
Bagram is 70 miles from Kabul. Karzai airport was a much better option, and in fact the airlift succeeded. Why people fetishize Bagram is a mystery. It's always possible in hindsight to find something you might have done better, but this is most certainly not the disaster or failure the corporate media decided it must be before they even knew anything.
And I might add the Dump administration had already signed an agreement with the Taliban to withdraw by May 1. If the U.S. kept bombing them, it would have meant continuing civil war in Afghanistan at the cost of tens or hundreds of thousands more Afghan lives. The war is over, that's the whole point.
The problem here, sugarloaf, is that what you described was basically what we've been doing to a greater or lesser extent for more than a decade. All we accomplished was delaying the inevitable while begging the very basic question of "why?" Why be there at all? Why create and prop up a vichy government that no-one respected? Why flush $2T down the pram in a country almost no one could find on a map? Why keep morphing the mission and moving the goal post? Why was the airlift just as much of a clusterfuck as everything else we did there for 20 years?
Because the war machine never intended to leave at all. They built an ANA which could fight, kinda sorta, but could neither move nor supply itself, to keep it wholly dependent on american support. They make contingency plans for the invasion of fucking Canada but couldn't make one for rapid evacuation. They left money on the dresser and climbed out the window at Bagram so smoothly no one knew until morning but never told american civilians to get out. Everything went wrong by the numbers; that requires planning.
Cervantes: Thank you for your reply.
1. As the war was being, day by day, actually lost, it does seem unlikely that a simple alternative policy (minimal but effective air support for ANA) might have been successfully pursued.
2. It is true that “there must have been a better way” is no sensible foundation for a criticism, but Bloomberg reports (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-03/u-s-struggles-to-learn-who-s-who-in-afghan-airlift-of-124-000) that thousands of people who wanted to leave through the Special Immigrant Visa ( for those who had worked for the U.S. and its allies etc) program were left behind. So some improvement in execution might have been useful there.
Overall, though, I agree: The war is over, that's the whole point.
To mojrim:
Thank you for your comment, which I have taken into account in (1) above.
Just one thing: … but never told american civilians to get out.
The UK government advised British nationals to leave in April; the US government did likewise for their nationals: https://af.usembassy.gov/afghanistan-travel-advisory-level-4-do-not-travel-april-27-2021/
Regarding Point 2, that's the Dump administration's fault. They held up all of those visas or the people would have been out long ago. It remains to be seen what the Taliban will do but negotiations are underway to still get people out.
Sugarloaf, the problem is that no one hanging around an afghan village is going to read the state department's website. Those advisories mean nothing to someone who is already on foreign soil. It was the responsibility of our war machine to write and enact evacuation plans for those people. They didn't, nad now the same useless mouths are using that as casus belli to go back in. The american securacracy is a self-licking ice cream cone.
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