Someone begins to regret the "evil" Trump???

[Stavros]

My biggest issue with Biden is that he seems to be disconnected from reality with everything that is going on with Afghanistan. He has given two Presidential addresses, an interview, and one short press conference and he seems like someone who just doesn't give a shit. As long he is proven right in the end.

Then there is everyone under Biden who also bears responsibility for this mess.

Do you think, as a one-term President, and I think Biden knows this, that his priority is domestic rather than foreign policy, and that his mission is to restore credibility to US Government, to at least try and re-build some form of the bi-partisan consensus politics that he once was part of in the US Senate, but that he has not got the best people to help him, while Trump's party of Sedition, Sleaze and Lies is dedicated to rejecting everything Biden proposes?

Does it mean the Biden Presidency will go down as being weak on foreign policy, and a failure at domestic political renewal?

What will the mid-term elections reveal about the direction the US is heading?

[filghy2]

I still believe it was the right decision to leave Afghanistan. But did it really need to happen this year. Trump withdrew the United States from the Iran Nuclear deal and the Paris Climate Accords. Was anybody really going to give Biden shit if he decided to withdraw from a deal with the Taliban and start over from scratch.

I'm curious to know why you think that waiting another year or so would have made a fundamental difference. What could have been achieved in that time that was not able to be achieved in the previous 20 years? It's hard to see how the factors that caused the Afghan army to collapse would have changed. The only way to avoid a Taliban takeover would be to stay there forever.

The real problem was the inaccurate assessment of how long the Afghan army could hold on, which led to complacency about evacuating people. That seems to be independent of the actual timing of withdrawal. If they'd renegotiated the agreement to impose more conditions they would have faced the same problem at the end, and the same problem of enforcing adherence.

The reality, as in Vietnam, is that when the other side knows you want leave you are in a weak bargaining position. They know they can just wait you out and that you will you have limited ability to enforce the terms once you've left.

It's also pretty disingenuous for the Trump administration to say they would have imposed stronger conditions when they didn't do so when they had the opportunity. The responsibility needs to be shared among all four administrations over 20 years. They all engaged in wishful thinking and none of them had a realistic plan for what could be achieved and how it would end.

[blackchubby38]

I'm curious to know why you think that waiting another year or so would have made a fundamental difference. What could have been achieved in that time that was not able to be achieved in the previous 20 years? It's hard to see how the factors that caused the Afghan army to collapse would have changed. The only way to avoid a Taliban takeover would be to stay there forever.

The real problem was the inaccurate assessment of how long the Afghan army could hold on, which led to complacency about evacuating people. That seems to be independent of the actual timing of withdrawal. If they'd renegotiated the agreement to impose more conditions they would have faced the same problem at the end, and the same problem of enforcing adherence.

The reality, as in Vietnam, is that when the other side knows you want leave you are in a weak bargaining position. They know they can just wait you out and that you will you have limited ability to enforce the terms once you've left.

It's also pretty disingenuous for the Trump administration to say they would have imposed stronger conditions when they didn't do so when they had the opportunity. The responsibility needs to be shared among all four administrations over 20 years. They all engaged in wishful thinking and none of them had a realistic plan for what could be achieved and how it would end.

My concern wasn't with the Taliban taking over or nation building. My concern was with a smoother exit and preventing some of the things we have been seen happening over the past two weeks.

Maybe another year wouldn't have been necessary. But extending the deadline until the end of this one would have bought the United States more time to make sure they got this thing right.

[filghy2]

Maybe another year wouldn't have been necessary. But extending the deadline until the end of this one would have bought the United States more time to make sure they got this thing right.

I'm not convinced the problem was lack of time rather than poor decision-making. Anyhow, its now turned into a political disaster with the US troops being killed. The idea that voters would forget about this by election time depended on avoiding US casualties. This is going to be as bad as Jimmy Carter's Iran embassy hostage crisis.

[Stavros]

I'm not convinced the problem was lack of time rather than poor decision-making. Anyhow, its now turned into a political disaster with the US troops being killed. The idea that voters would forget about this by election time depended on avoiding US casualties. This is going to be as bad as Jimmy Carter's Iran embassy hostage crisis.

I think you are right to draw the parallels with Carter and the hostage crisis, in part because in spite of the evidence that was mounting in Iran when the demonstations against the Shah became more frequent and violent from 1977 onwards, either US analysts failed to appreciate the vulnerability of the Shah, or chose to ignore it and support the regime to its bitter end, as happened in the UK.

That the Islamic Republic 'guided' by the Ayatollah Khomeini then broke all the rules of Diplomacy and International Relations that had prevailed until then was a shock, and indeed, was one of the key drivers that created a more militant position elsewhere in the region, most notably in Saudi Arabia. It thus fed into a new 'Cold War' in which Political Islam, which up until the siege of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979 had been largely reformist, took a violent turn, and in Afghanistan formed a crucial theatre for competing forces which has been claimed broke the back of the USSR, the US at this time supporting the very Mujahideen that would attack it in 2001.

However one interprets that history, it seems to me that NATO intelligence -specifically the British and the Americans- must -as with Iran in the 1970s- either have underestimated the long term strategy of the Taliban, or just hoped that their worst fears would not come to pass. I find it hard to believe that Humint failled so badly when officers on the ground must have known that soldiers in the regular army they helped to create were not getting paid at the end of each month, that they had no kitchens or basic equipment, and that in the regions outside Kabul, Commanders were claiming salaries for soldiers who did not exist. This is too basic a pool of information to be ignored, so what was done with it? Nothing, I suggest.

It is an important point because Tom Tugenhadt -one of a few MPs who served in the military in Afghanistan- in his House of Commons speech condemned Biden's remarks about the Afghan military running away, because so many died fighting the Taliban and terrorists between 2001 and 2014, but he failed to explain Biden's point, which was bitterly true. What happened in Afghanistan was that NGOs helped create the kind of civil society which gave ordinary Afghans the space in which to live more freely and express themselves, while the NATO mission as charged by the UN which sent it to the country in 2006, failed to create an effective and honest State and State Institution capable of preventing precisely the rampant corruption which alienated Afghans from their Government, and the police and security forces that proved to be ineffective when asked to resist the Taliban, an organization which has more support in rural areas than the British and the Americans want to admit.

As a side note, spare a thought for Dr John Reid, Defence Secretary when 3,000 British troops were sent to Helmand province (the Commanding Officer's first response to this was the potent question, 'Where's Helmand?). Reid grew up poor in a grim corner of Scotland, was a member of the Communist Party in his youth, before becoming a member of the Labour Party and acquiring a PhD in Economic History, evidently not in relation to Afghanistan, as he said at the time ""We would be perfectly happy to leave in three years and without firing one shot because our job is to protect the reconstruction."^[ In the first year about 4 million bullets and 25,000 artillery rounds had been fired by the British armed forces". The word Folly seems apprpriate here, but even at the time some of us were gobsmacked by the man's ignorance.
^{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_R...wan#Background}

Again and again and again, the British and the Americans enter a country with their own agenda and expect the locals to be obedient, Palestine being one good if dismal example for the British. Or, as with the Americans their 'intelligence' leads them to support the 'least worst option' which is often Dictatorship -Latin America since who knows when, the 1920s?- the Shah in Iran in the 1970s, Saddam Hussein in the 1980s (Shukran, Rumsfeld Effendi), Saudi Arabia since Roosevelt- rather than democracy. And when their 'revolution from above' fails to create a Democracy in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Libya, they suffer casualties as happened in Lebanon or Afghanistan, or for that matter in the US itself in 2001.

The only people who benefited from the New World Order were the men making and selling arms to williing executioners. They are still raking in the dollars, and will do so for some time, be it in the Yemen, or Syria, Afghanistan -and of course, in the USA where the proliferation of weapons of human destruction and the States -like Texas- lifting not imposing restrictons on such weapons are paving the way for a potential civil war if Trump does not win the election in 2024. If he runs.

And who wll defeat Trump (again) and save America from itself, Kamala Harris?

[filghy2]

However one interprets that history, it seems to me that NATO intelligence -specifically the British and the Americans- must -as with Iran in the 1970s- either have underestimated the long term strategy of the Taliban, or just hoped that their worst fears would not come to pass.

I'd say the over-optimistic assessment was influenced by unwillingness to admit just how badly the mission to strengthen the Afghan army had failed. It's a common failing.