Graveyard of Empires

[BoSoxGal]

I don’t understand the shock so many Americans are expressing; my recollection is clear that 20 years ago a great many people predicted this very outcome. That we would totally fail to understand the culture and the people - just as we have done.


Fareed’s wisdom on the fall:
https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2021/0 ... TwupZaf3ek


I’m experiencing no surprise, just heartsickness for the girls and women of Afghanistan, the many Afghanis who helped the USA and will be killed for their efforts, and the many Americans whose lives were either lost or traumatized by service in Afghanistan or by loving someone who served there and died or was maimed. Never mind all the lost opportunity in this country thanks to the 2 trillion we squandered there.

How long until terror launches from there to here again? How long after that until we lose our minds and go to war again?

[Jarlaxle]

Afghanistan is not a country...it is random lines on a map. The campaign should have been over in six months.

[Joe Guy]

After the USSR wasted 10 yrs in Afghanistan you would think that somebody in our government would have gotten a clue. Instead, we decided it was a good idea to invade and spend 20 years and trillions of dollars to find and kill Bin Laden, destroy al-Qaeda and stop the Taliban from controlling the country.

What return did the U.S. get for its investment? Somebody was making money or it wouldn't have lasted so long.

Right?

Who should we invade next?

Cuba?

[ex-khobar Andy]

Biden was between a rock and a very hard place. Sometimes, no matter how tragic the results, you have to cut your losses. We learned nothing from the Bay of Pigs, nor Vietnam.

The days of dictators being overthrown from the outside - eg., Napoleon and Hitler - with good and lasting results, have long gone.

Having said that, I doubt that Biden decided, all on his own, that the Afghanis would suddenly choose democracy, and that the Afghan army would hold off the Taliban His military advice must have been spectacularly bad.

[liberty]

The reason Afghanistan fell to the Taliban is that the people of Afghanistan do not value freedom enough to fight for it. Ronald Reagan was right and wrong. He was right when he said freedom is precious but was wrong when he said all people yearn for freedom. Some people don’t, especially people in third world countries like Afghanistan. We allow people with no democratic culture or love of liberty to enter the country. As long as their numbers are small, we can assimilate them, but if they grow too numerous, they can overwhelm culture sell out the system as they did in Mexico, and all will be lost.

[Econoline]

[Econoline]

You fell victim to one of the classic blunders — the most famous of which is, “Never get involved in a land war in Asia.”

[ex-khobar Andy]

Worth ten minutes of your time.

What we got wrong in Afghanistan. By a recently retired colonel who was involved in the 'training' of Afghan forces. From The Atlaniic.

[Sue U]

You don't have to be an expert in Afghanistan's history and culture to know that invasion and war were wrongheaded and disastrous policies from the outset. The only legitimate US objective in Afghanistan was to capture or kill Osama bin Laden and his criminal al Qaeda accomplices in the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. That didn't require a massive military campaign to overthrow the Taliban government and a 20-year attempt to subdue the country.

The Taliban are a factional outgrowth of the mujaheddin who were directly backed by the US and Saudi Arabia in the guerilla war against the Soviet Union -- which, I will remind you, had intervened in Afghanistan to support the secular government -- and the mujaheddin (oh hey, that same bin Laden guy) had always pledged to bring an oppressive and regressive form of Islam to the country and to run it as a theocracy. Where was the concern for the rights of women then by the right-wing noise machine that now pretends to be aghast at the excesses of the Taliban? Twenty years later we are back at Square One, having accomplished the only legitimate goal of killing bin Laden (in Pakistan, not Afghanistan) more than 10 years ago, and having wasted trillions (between 2 and 6.5) of dollars, more than 175,000 lives, and seriously damaging America's reputation internationally.

This whole misadventure was an ill-conceived and poorly executed clusterfuck that can be laid directly at the feet of George W. Bush and the PNAC cabal that gave him colossally bad foreign policy advice.

[Jarlaxle]

The obvious solution in Afghanistan was to simply sterilize the entire country in 2001. Treat it like Carthage.

[Big RR]

Sue, while I agree with you re W's responsibility, let's not forget that Obama kept it going for 8 more years, followed by Trump. Just like in Vietnam, we just poured in good money after the bad without any idea why (except for the ego of the men who did not want to be the man who "lost"). There was never going to be a positive outcome--if the Russians, who are much more ruthless in imposing their will than we are, left in disgust, what did we think we were going to get? I have great respect for Biden for understanding this and not just pouring more moeny in leaving it to the next president to bear the blame.

Like BSG I feel bad for the people, especially the women, and I also think we should take those who worked closely with us out (otherwise how quickly do you think we'll get locals to help us the next time?), but when you looked that an army trains and equipped by us to the tune of trillions of dollars couldn't even put up a fight for a little time (and now the Taliban is well equipped), the futility of the intervention is apparent.

Think how that money could have been used.

[Long Run]

Go back 20 years. The Taliban had just committed an act of war against the U.S. by actively supporting bin Laden and 9/11, among other terrorist acts. Since the Taliban was the government of Afghanistan, this was a straightforward country v. country conflict. This is why many who opposed the Iraq invasion supported the war against the Taliban. It was quite easy to end the Taliban regime, but then came the tough question of do we just leave with the likely result the Taliban return to power, or try to change the character of the country so that it is not a terrorist training camp. Both were loser options without the willingness to sacrifice and pay to be there for generations. And for what it is worth, we have had that kind of patience in Europe 1945-1990, Korea from the early 50s, Taiwan since the late 40s, etc.

[Sue U]

I'm not giving Obama a pass on this mess either. After killing bin Laden, he should have taken the opportunity to declare victory and leave. But from the beginning, because this was a military invasion bent on "regime change," there was never a viable exit strategy that didn't require re-building an entire country and its governmental, military, economic, political, and social institutions from the ground up. And nation-building is simply not the remit of the US military (nor should it be). So with those responsibilities left to the non-Taliban leadership, and that leadership more interested in pocketing US aid dollars for themselves, protecting opium farms for the international illicit drug trade and indulging themselves in all the corrupt practices available to those in power, there was simply no genuine local buy-in for the New Afghanistan Project. With nothing to believe in, and certainly nothing worth dying for, all the training and equipment poured into the Afghan army couldn't create an effective defensive force without heavy supplementation by American forces. No matter who was president, US withdrawal from Afghanistan was going to leave a mess, but I think Obama was overly optimistic in hoping that with enough troops and money some form of national authority would take root. Maybe now a reconstituted Northern Alliance (remember them?) can generate sufficient tribal/ethnic/regional loyalty to keep the Taliban somewhat in check in at least some areas of the country, but no part of Afghanistan is going to look like the model of a democratic nation-state that the smart guys at PNAC fantasized about.

[Big RR]

I don't know Sue, I think Obama was more concerned with his image than a real believer in believing something good could come out of it. The peace with honor types are always just concerned with the image. The death of bin Laden did give him a potential out, but I think he just didn't want to take the chance; and this was a man who was smart enough to appreciate what he was doing.

The northern Alliance; who knows, but change has to come from within, not imposed upon a resistant population. It isn't exactly like we were ever trying to achieve this "model democratic nation", more like trying to replace one dictatorial regime with another more friendly to us and our interests. And we usually suck at that.

[Sue U]

If Obama had been solely about political calculus, he could have announced that in killing bin Laden the US had accomplished what it set out to do, and could have legitimately blamed fallout from withdrawal of US forces on Bush. He had no problem with (and good reason for) blaming everything else in the first year or two of his administration on Bush. (I do think at least part of the reason Bush never got bin Laden was because it was politically useful to him and the GOP to have a boogeyman on the loose to terrorize the US electorate. Some foreign threat -- whether real or imagined -- is always good for generating votes.) True, Obama was nothing if not cautious, and he may have seen continued engagement in Afghanistan as just not making things worse.

I'm not sure the Afghan population is so much resistant to change as demoralized by the lack of it following decades of civil war and "stabilization" by the Americans.

[Big RR]

Honestly, I have no idea what the Afghan population (or any sigificant part of it ) wants; however, I think what they don't want is to have outsiders come in and impose any change, whether benevolent or not. Indeed, this is what most peoples want, and the US never understands (or even cares) that, finding it easier to deal with pliant dictators (who can be bought off with money) than any independent populace.

[MajGenl.Meade]

What some want . . .



Goodbye to the 44th Foot

[ex-khobar Andy]

I think the hope was that a generation of educated people - especially the women - would be enough to plant the seeds of some sort of pluralist society. Maybe democracy per se was too much to hope for, but a bit of live and let live would have gone a long way. But as we have learned in the last few days, hope is not a substitute for reality.

[ex-khobar Andy]

From the NYT of May 8th, 2010:

THE name Gandamak means little in the West today. Yet this small Afghan village was once famous for the catastrophe that took place there during the First Anglo-Afghan War in January 1842, arguably the greatest humiliation ever suffered by a Western army in the East.

The course of that distant Victorian war followed a trajectory that is beginning to seem distinctly familiar. In 1839, the British invaded Afghanistan on the basis of dubious intelligence about a nonexistent threat: information about a single Russian envoy to Kabul, the Afghan capital, was manipulated by a group of ambitious hawks to create a scare about a phantom Russian invasion, thus bringing about an unnecessary, expensive and wholly avoidable conflict.

Initially, the British conquest proved remarkably easy and bloodless; Kabul was captured within a few months and a pliable monarch, Shah Shuja, placed on the throne. Then an insurgency began which unraveled that first heady success, first among the Pashtuns of Kandahar and Helmand, then slowly moving northward until it reached the capital.

What happened next is a warning of how bad things could yet become: a full-scale rebellion against the British broke out in Kabul, and the two most senior British envoys were murdered, making the British occupation impossible to sustain. On the disastrous retreat that followed, as many as 18,000 East India Company troops and maybe half again as many Indian camp followers (estimates vary), were slaughtered by Afghan marksmen waiting in ambush amid the snow drifts and high passes, shot down as they trudged through the icy depths of the Afghan winter.

The last 50 or so survivors made their final stand at Gandamak. (That is what is represented in Meade's picture.) As late as the 1970s, fragments of Victorian weaponry could be found lying in the screes above the village; even today, the hill is covered with bleached British bones. Only one man, Thomas Souter, lived to tell the tale. It is a measure of the increasingly pertinent parallels between the events of 1842 and today’s that one of the main NATO bases in Afghanistan is named Camp Souter.

For the Victorian British, Gandamak became a symbol of the country’s greatest ever imperial defeat, as well as a symbol of gallantry: William Barnes Wollen’s celebrated painting of the Last Stand of the 44th Foot a group of ragged but determined British soldiers standing in a circle behind their bayonets as the Pashtun tribesmen close in was one of the era’s most famous images.

For the Afghans themselves, Gandamak became a symbol of freedom, and their determination to refuse to be controlled by any foreign power. It is again no accident that the diplomatic quarter of Kabul is named after the Afghan resistance leader who oversaw the British defeat at Gandamak, Wazir Akbar Khan.

Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. (Aphorism attributed to numerous people from Burke to Churchill and most in between.)

[Guinevere]

It’s Satayana.