Betty mentioned this earlier, and I am hoping Adam will have a long discussion about it because he will know more than me, but it looks like we are FINALLY withdrawing from Afghanistan:
President Biden will withdraw all American troops from Afghanistan over the coming months, U.S. officials said, completing the military exit by the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that drew the United States into its longest war.
The decision, which Biden is expected to announce Wednesday, will keep thousands of U.S. forces in the country beyond the May 1 exit deadline that the Trump administration negotiated last year with the Taliban, according to a senior administration official who briefed reporters Tuesday under rules of anonymity set by the White House.
While the Taliban has promised to renew attacks on U.S. and NATO personnel if foreign troops are not out by the deadline — and said in a statement it would not continue to participate in “any conference” about Afghanistan’s future until all “foreign forces” have departed — it is not clear whether the militants will follow through with the earlier threats given Biden’s plan for a phased withdrawal between now and September. The Taliban has conducted sputtering talks with the Afghan government, begun under the Trump deal, since last fall. It was also invited to an additional high-level inter-Afghan discussion in Turkey later this month.
We’ve been there for 20 years. We have been there longer than this website has existed. Colleges and universities are filled with juniors and seniors who have lived their entire lives while we have been at war in Afghanistan. We have been there so long that stories of fathers and their children both being deployed at the same time are common.
In 1941, Hitler invaded Russia as Operation Barbarossa started. The Russians were decimated, knocked back on their heels, but in less than two years they rebuilt multiple armies and defeating the Nazis at the two most important battles in World War II, the battle for Stalingrad and the defense of the salient at Kursk.
We’ve had 20 years. Bin Laden is dead. Call it a win and leave.
Jeffro
(who wants to tell him?)
Good point about Barbarossa, though Cole! It’s like if the Nazis were still in Russia in 1961, or something.
David Fud
It is definitely time. If there is fault to be had, we should have called it when Obama led the effort and killed OBL in Pakistan. Would have been a good fig leaf for this pig.
West of the Rockies
I am NOT saying we should stay. But I do think it’s going to be utter hell for females and gay people and anyone who is not a male religious fundamentalist.
John Cole
@West of the Rockies: This is undeniable, but was not why we went there.
gene108
One reason the USSR prevailed over Nazi Germany is because Stalin & Co. did not care about how many lives it cost to achieve victory.
Stalin was under the belief Soviet troops would fight harder, if civilians were still in encircled cities, so he delayed in ordering evacuations, which caused higher than necessary civilian deaths.
The Soviets had no qualms about using
slaveprison labor to tear down factories in the west, and move and rebuild them in the East.If we had the callous indifference to human suffering, which the Soviets had I think we could’ve inflicted losses that the Taliban could not have recovered from.
Or we could’ve copied the British in Malaysia, and forcibly resettled 10% of the Afghanistan population to undercut local support for the Taliban.
Poe Larity
But we can still courtesy bomb, right?
gene108
@West of the Rockies:
Gays already have a shitty life in Afghanistan, little will really change. They still have to hide who they are.
satby
@West of the Rockies: The only people who can change the Afghan culture are the people themselves. We can’t do it at the end of a gun.
Mary G
Do a fuckton of fast vetting, issue visas to everyone who helped us, and go home. They don’t want to leave the 9th century, leave them to it. Bush should’ve declared victory and brought the troops home as soon as they had broken up the training camps and lost Bin Laden in the wilds.
West of the Rockies
@John Cole:
I hear that, and fixing a country that did not ask to be fixed (according to our standards) is a fool’s errand. It’s just vile that so many innocent little humans will be born into that fundamentalist hellscape.
West of the Rockies
@satby:
Yup. Prime Directive. I know.
sab
My dad’s nurse’s aide has a daughter in the Army married to another army guy. He is on his fourth Aghanistan tour, and every time gets worse. What are we risking his life for?
Roger Moore
@gene108:
The Soviets obviously understood they were in a battle to the death and were willing to do whatever it took to win. But Stalin was also a monster who adopted harmful policies because they sounded tough and provided an excuse to get rid of people he wanted dead. As Patton famously said, nobody won a war by dying for his country; he won a war by making the other guy die for his country. The USSR would have been a lot better off if they had taken Patton’s view to heart.
gene108
The U.S. has about 3,500 military personnel in Afghanistan, and NATO countries have a total of around 10,000, which provide training to the Afghanistan military and police forces.
I don’t think any NATO forces have participated in any active combat roles for several years now.
I’m not sure how much of a difference our presence will make either way right now.
raven
@sab: His buddies.
raven
Unass that mofo.
gene108
@West of the Rockies:
Afghanistan absolutely was asking to be fixed after the Taliban were driven out.
The Taliban never controlled the entire country. They were wearing down the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance forces. The Taliban scored a major success by assassinating the Northern Alliance’s top commander, Ahmad Shah Massoud, in September 9, 2001, but the NA still did not collapse.
The Northern Alliance was primarily supported by Iran, and India.
Afghanistan may never become liberal secular democracy by Western standards, but they sure want a hell of a better future than the Taliban has to offer.
One thing Lenin figured out is that a small focused group can impose its will on the majority, even if their policies are unpopular. The Taliban is in this mold.
Do not conflate the fact that the Taliban exists with the idea that they are extremely popular.
dnfree
I remember Biden advised Obama to pull out of Afghanistan. I wonder how many lives lost since then.
raven
And hold on to your hat
piratedan
copied from the earlier thread regarding same subject but was when it was mostly dead:
while I am happy to the idea that we’re leaving the region to its residents, I hope that conversely, anyone who wants to leave and start over in the US is allowed to do so. I continually loathe the thought that we show up, get people to help us and then we abandon them. If they worked with us and want to come to the US, fine, let them. They want to bring their families so that they aren’t held hostage, fine, include them too.
The GOP wants us to honor our agreements, then this should be tenet #1.
Ohio Mom
Twenty years ago, right after Ohio Son was diagnosed with autism, we hired a young women interventionalist to work with him.
When the US invaded Afghanistan, she was beside herself — her sister had enlisted and was in basic training, and she did not want her in a war zone.
“Oh, don’t worry,” I said breezily, thinking back to Grenada and the (first) Gulf War. “We don’t do long wars anymore, we just go in for a few weeks to act big and then we leave. She won’t have time to get there before it’s over.”
Not one of my better predictions…
craigie
@gene108:
Huh. What other country does this remind me of?
MisterForkbeard
“Finally Pulling Out”?
When is Adam going to show up and yell “Phrasing!” :)
guachi
9/11 is the reason I enlisted. I’m glad we’ll be out of Afghanistan before I retire. We should never be at war so long that if the war were a person it could enlist to fight in itself.
gene108
Maybe I’m wrong, and maybe I’m being overly optimistic, but I don’t think the Taliban will just roll over the entire country.
Even with Pakistan’s military support, in the 1990’s, which gave the Taliban distinct advantages over opposing forces, they still could not conquer the entire country in 6-7 years of fighting.
I think some sort of peace can be reached.
gene108
@craigie:
Reminds me of the Republican Party. Knowingly or unknowingly, they adopted some parts of Leninism after Obama got elected, especially with regards to gun legislation.
Mike in NC
@MisterForkbeard: If only Fred Trump Sr. had pulled out that one time it was important…
Ken
You mean the tough Soviets who fought the Nazis in the 1940s, not the namby-pamby Soviets who invaded Afghanistan in the 1980s, right?
Edit: Invaded in 1979, left in 1989. So did they learn twice as fast as the U.S.?
Anoniminous
Invading Afghanistan was the keystone of the Neocon Project for a New American Century. And like all Neocon projects – and the Neocons themselves – remarkably stupid, ignorant, and divorced from reality
jo6pac
@gene108: There’s 30,000 Amerikan contractors there and I haven’t heard if their leaving.
Humanities Prof
@raven: One difference that I’m seeing in this case, though, is that there’s not really a larger Cold War context within which the “loss” of Afghanistan could be cast.
The McCarthyite bullshit about “losing” China only got play because of the Soviet Union, the Cold War, and fears of global communism. It was what “losing” China seemed to symbolize (losing ground in the Cold War) that caused a lot of people to freak out.
Who would be the natural audience for the “Biden lost Afghanistan” argument? I’m not seeing where there’s a large constituency clamoring for that argument.
Not saying that it won’t be made. It will. I just don’t know how well it’s going to resonate in the absence of some larger, overarching threat.
JustRuss
That doesn’t include the 18,000 contractors we have there.
Baud
@Ken:
Depends how you look at it. According to wiki, they lost 15,000 troops in their war, 7.5 times as many as we did.
Major Major Major Major
I will sadly only believe it when I see it.
Baud
@Humanities Prof:
It’s the Republicans. Their argument will be that Hunter Biden lost Afghanistan.
Ruckus
@sab:
I’m going to answer in my best military voice.
Not A Fucking Thing.
I don’t see one thing we’ve gained in 20 yrs of warfare. We have military personnel with, as you say four or more tours in the middle east. It has garnered a huge amount of troops with PTSD, which repetition of stress is a big part of, people with limbs lost – Tammy Duckworth, we have gained what in the world, besides a military stretched thin and a tax bill that is massive, with nothing positive to show for it. WWII involved us for 4 yrs, with massive battle zones half way around the world, we spent well over a decade officially fighting a war in Vietnam, how did that turn out, and now we’ve spent 20 yrs in the middle east with what to show for it? We have fewer dead than Vietnam or especially WWII but then it’s medical care that made most of the differences. Go visit any VA hospital and see the people walking with one leg or even none. See the people without an arm(s). We’ve learned how to keep people alive so it looks like the war isn’t as big a deal. But it is. Even if it doesn’t involve as many people as previous wars. I’ve never been involved in warfare, no one officially shot at me when I served, but I’d bet, because I’ve sat and talked with many who have, that war is far worse than hell. You only spend time in hell when you are done here, in warfare that’s not true. The military/VA have massive issues with people who’ve been recycled many times through the middle east war. They’ve often spent so much time at war, that they have often a huge and very difficult time reentering normal life. The trauma can easily get to be overwhelming.
So we either need to stop having war, like a year round baseball season and year after year or we need to figure out how to send politicians who vote for war, to war, so that they learn the simplest lesson, that war should be the very last resort, never the first.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Baud:
was it on his laptop? did he not back up?
Hunter Biden was on Marc Maron’s podcast last week. I haven’t listened yet, but it was the longest Maron’s recorded in a long time, and according to the twitter comments, it’s a bracing conversation about addiction and recovery between two guys who have been through both. I’m saving it for a weekend cause I want to listen to the whole thing.
Yutsano
@gene108:
Afghanistan was actually one of the more liberal countries [WARNING: FTFNYT link] in central Asia up through the 1970s. The dominant strain of Islam was more spiritual in the Sufi tradition and was nowhere near the harsh Wahhabi fundamentalism you see there today. Then the Soviets invaded in 1979 to support the Communists who had seized power in a coup. To counter, we supported the muhadjedin. This allowed fundamentalists from Saudi Arabia to bring their strain of Islam to Afghanistan. We were already as guilty as the Soviets of creating the conditions there as it was.
We make so many assumptions about a country because of the lens we see it through. Afghanistan could become a self-sustaining economy based on what it has under its earth right now. It may need to find its way to that chance but it won’t be under our watch.
{EDIT: added details to round out the blame, such as it is.}
Ben Cisco
@Ruckus: I see it every time I go to the VA, and you’re abso-fucking-lutely right.
Steve in the ATL
@Baud: just like he lost his laptop. Sad.
HumboldtBlue
I found this two-part documentary on the history of Afghanistan and the woeful history of Westerners in Afghanistan very interesting.
cain
@Yutsano:
So essentially western countries have been bringing in fascists to every place they meet.
Pakistan also brought in Saudi assholes and now they have people blowing themselves up.
Stop bringing wahabi worshippers into your country. You’ll regret it.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
sab
@raven: His buddies. That is it. Sounds like Vietnam vets I have known.
Ruckus
@Ben Cisco:
Around LA I see it far more at the hospital than at any of the clinics.
Do you use a hospital or a clinic?
Anoniminous
Is it worth pointing out the US armed and trained the Afghanistan mujahideen?
Operation Cyclone
“Some of the CIA’s greatest Afghan beneficiaries were Arabist commanders such as Haqqani and Hekmatyar who were key allies of bin Laden over many years. Haqqani—one of bin Laden’s closest associates in the 1980s—received direct cash payments from CIA agents, without the mediation of the ISI. This independent source of funding gave Haqqani disproportionate influence over the mujahideen”
I suppose not in 2021.
sab
@Anoniminous: Started with Carter and Zvig. Mika will never mention that.
Mike in NC
This PBS documentary “American Insurrection” is an excellent summation of the rise of white supremacist hate groups under Donald Trump. The GQP is simply an anti-government party. Nihilists all the way down.
zhena gogolia
@Jeffro:
We read his blog so much more carefully than he does.
Jay
@Anoniminous:
@sab:
started 6 months before the Soviet Invasion.
the US basically got tired of competing with the USSR for influence with “infrastructure” projects,
Poe Larity
YT comments are about 90% “about time” or “duh”, 5% “I blame Obama|Biden” and 5% “Lockmart/CIA/Biden changed Trump’s date so he could suck as back in after a false flag”
So I think the foaming masses have gone full surrender monkey.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
@Ruckus: Clinic, but some of the appointments are at the hospital a few streets over.
sab
@Jay: Late Carter. 1979. Pre Reagan. Reagan didn’t take office until 1981.
PJ
@satby: The Taliban will do it at the end of a gun. It’s not like who gets to rule the country and which laws they will apply will be settled by voting.
Another Scott
@Anoniminous: Peter Bergen says that is not what happened.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_assistance_to_Osama_bin_Laden
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
PJ
@Anoniminous: Actually, invading Iraq was the keystone of their Pax Americana. I don’t recall Afghanistan being mentioned in their manifestos they published in the Clinton years.
Ruckus
@Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant):
In the LA area clinics are few and far between so I find the hospital just as easy and I can often make multiple appointments on the same day. Plus, going to an appointment is how I found out that the VA was starting vaccinating, back in January. I was able to make an appointment the day they lowered to my age group and it’s been almost 2 months since my second shot.
Jay
@sab:
yurp.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone
PJ
Another two consecutive posts by Cole tonight! Biden Spring has brought him out of hibernation, on fire, and I am here for it
Jay
@Another Scott:
as far as I am aware, the CIA never funded Bin Laden, directly, and most of the CIA controlled money, was distributed through the ISI,
but there were exceptions, and once the money and arms changed hands, all bets were off. Eg, TOW missiles in Syria.
sab
@Jay: Why we need to be very wary of US interventions. They don’t ever end. Zvig made a stupid choice in 1979. Who would have thunk that we would have contrived to still be thete in 2021?
Basically anyone who has followed our foreign policy since WWII. If we don’t win outright we figure out how to disrupt. If that doesn’t work we invade.
Hopefully we are moving on from this process. Russia, slow as always, is a generation behind and will follow in our stupid steps. Hang on Ukraine.
dnfree
One of the biggest lessons from Vietnam is not to get involved in a country with corrupt or incompetent leadership. And don’t get involved if the military of that country isn’t committed to the cause.
KrackenJack
Is anyone else worried about using the 9/11 as the withdrawal date? I have no doubt that whenever it happens the usual suspects will squeal and the media will frame it as “Biden’s rebuke to Obama” or “Biden’s first military failure” or “Biden’s ‘Mission Accomplished'”. However doing it on that date will get a lot more public attention, make the whole thing more emotionally fraught and easier to demagogue than a quiet ceremony at Bagram AFB on a random Friday in August.
Mary G
Good news!
Poe Larity
There was a strong debate between ISI, State (Pakistan embassy folks), CIA, DIA, DoD and the Charlie Wilsons about who to support. It evolved over time.
Hekmatyar eventually got some direct money because the northerners like Massoud were seen as ineffective weekend/seasonal warriors who followed no coherent strategy and ignored US advisors.. Jihadis got shit done and were more than happy to throw themselves at tanks. Think NVA vs VC.
There’s no CIA check stub cashed by OBL because he had his own money train but he did work closely with folks like Hekmatyar
Another Scott
@KrackenJack: I assume it will be like earlier exits – nobody will be around on the official day (everyone having left at least a day earlier). 9/11/2021 is the deadline, not the day it will happen.
Cheers,
Scott.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
speaking of terrorism….
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Splitting Image
At this point, I think that the best way for the U.S. to help democratize Afghanistan is to get serious about treating drug addiction as a health problem rather than a criminal one.
Afghanistan is very similar to many other countries in the sense that it is very poor with the ability to monetize exactly one major product on the international market. This means that the path to prosperity for them is limited to the people with the ability and lack of scruples necessary to seize control of that one market, and in their case, it happens to be opium. As long as the majority of opium is distributed around the world in unregulated and unsavory channels, the ruling power in Afghanistan is pretty much doomed to be as irredeemable as the people it does business with.
A legitimate opium trade limited to medical treatment where it is actually warranted and a recreational drug trade that is steered away from opium entirely and towards safer drugs would probably do more to help Afghanistan than twenty more years of foreign military involvement.
TS (the original)
I would like an explanation (other than the obvious) as to why Biden can achieve things that Obama tried to achieve – and failed. In this case why did Obama let the Generals talk him into staying in Afghanistan? Why did he not simply announce the troops were coming home?
Baud
@TS (the original):
Obama wanted to leave Afghanistan with a chance of stability. Enough time has passed since then that that’s not a decisive factor anymore.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@TS (the original):
“achieve things”
can you name a second case?
gene108
Read the whole thing. Afghanistan is not just the USA alone. There are other countries that don’t want the 1990’s Taliban to return.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/iransource/iran-taliban-growing-ties-whats-different-this-time/
TS (the original)
@Baud:
I don’t remember that from his campaign. He wanted to get the troops home. I doubt it was a deciding factor. Much more likely part of the GOP plan to stop him doing anything.
Maybe 20 years is the deciding time limit. Vietnam with US troops was about 20 years
TS (the original)
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Getting his desired $$$ relief program through congress, when Obama had to accept a much smaller value than he wanted in 2009.
Edit: I am, and was a massive Obama fan – I just think it was so very difficult for him to implement his program during his time in office.
The Moar You Know
Let’s just get out, stay out, never come back. The human cost has been incalculable. We can at least be a country that doesn’t do this shit.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@TS (the original):
there’s your “explanation”, they have different Congresses
Mary G
@TS (the original): Obamacare was always going to cause a huge backlash, and that alone was a massive accomplishment.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Mary G: also, retconning the ’09 ARRA to failure status 12 years, a pandemic and a trump presidency later is, to say the least, some ahistorical bullshit
Omnes Omnibus
@TS (the original): It isn’t 2009 anymore. Pretending that the intervening years didn’t happen and the only difference is who is president is pointless.
gene108
Another interesting article. Please read the whole thing.
https://www.voanews.com/south-central-asia/taliban-and-afghan-government-attend-peace-talks-turkey
gene108
@TS (the original):
ARRA was groundbreaking in the amount of money it threw at the economy to stave off a full blown depression.
It also showed that it wasn’t enough to save the economy.
Both those things helped get the CARES Act passed, and Biden’s COVID relief.
Mary G
Jim, Foolish Literalist
some perspective from somebody who was there:
It really wasn’t the debate between Christy Roemer and Larry Summers that Paul Krugman convinced so much of the Left Blogosphere it was, or the “Obama was too worried about being nice to Republicans!” myth that still gets trotted out here every once in a while.
Raven Onthill
Another damn loss (except for the execution of Osama bin Laden.) Why do we keep starting wars and losing them?
@West of the Rockies: and, yes, that was my first thought, too. It’s not just a loss for the USA, it’s a loss for the freedom of the Afghan people.
AxelFoley
@dnfree:
You can always Google if you really wanted to know. But, I think you’re not really looking for an answer. You just want to take a shot at Obama for doing the best he could after inheriting a shitty situation.
Viva BrisVegas
I don’t know if Afghanistan was ever “winnable”, but it’s a sure thing that it wasn’t winnable after Bush and Cheney did an about face and decided that Iraq was the place to be.
AxelFoley
@TS (the original):
Glad to see others have slap down this bullshit from you.
Amir Khalid
Or be honest: admit defeat and leave.
Baud
@TS (the original):
Out of Iraq. I don’t believe he campaigned on Afghanistan.
The Moar You Know
The old classics never die, but this one is sticking with me tonight in the hospital:
”who wants to be the last man to die for a mistake?”
Let’s quit signing people up for that position.
Gvg
@TS (the original): Chronology. Biden comes AFTER Trump, Obama, Bush and so everyone, citizens, Congress, media, allies has all the years in betweens experiences which impacts how people will react. For instance, now our side know the Republican arguments are all in bad faith and have to be ignored. We also have given up on the Afghans themselves choosing democracy.
I thought we screwed up their country, and we should give them some time to put it back together but now it is way past some time. It isn’t just Republican voters who didn’t support withdrawal back then, it was quite a few democrats too. Now things are different.
Cermet
The tRump made a treaty and President Biden is basically following through as he should. Lets recall that the Taliban had nothing to do with 9-11; that was basically a Saudi thing (money, people, and planning). So this is as much a rethug pullout as anyone’s- President Biden is simply honoring the Rump’s pullout – just making it a later date. So if the thugs want to complain, tell the asswipes to ask the rump about his treaty/pullout decision
And 45th did make the right call.
Searcher
So if you traveled back in time to 2003 and told your younger self that we wouldn’t leave Afghanistan until President Biden’s administration, how many years would you have predicted that would be?
Nettoyeur
@Baud: Except that the Former Guy had already committed to pulling out in May. They dare not criticize that decision.
pluky
@West of the Rockies: Yes, and there is not a damned thing anyone can do about it. Sometimes reality just sucks.
Jon Marcus
@Amir Khalid: This. I reluctantly agree that we should leave. But calling the hellscape we’ll leave behind a “win” is wrong.