I'm sure I don't understand a lot of the ins and outs of the situation in Kabul, but it does seem weird that they pulled out all the military first and left over a thousand embassy staff there. And now they've sent some different military back in to get them.
I mean sure, the speed of the takeover seems like it took people by surprise, but surely the civilians and non-combat military gradually leave and the combat troops are last out providing security, even if the Taliban advance is slow?
Edit: Or were they planning to leave the embassy open?
The Pentagon had been warning for months that evacuating the embassy would be a logistical challenge (it's one of the largest in the world) and it would be better to start sooner than later. The State Department was worried about the signal that would send - i.e. that the U.S. did not trust that the Afghanistan military could provide adequate security.
Would hate to insult the Afghanistan military on the way out the door as we condemned them to a fight we were 100% confident they would lose. To risk US lives on not wanting to be insulting is unforgivable.
Exactly, so we gained nothing and lost so much more. Why would they fight? We are publicly stating we expect the Taliban to win in a few months. Why fight and die so that the people abandoning you can have an easy time of it? If I was an Afghan soldier I can already see the writing on the wall. Just blend into the crowd and welcome the regime change, its all you can do.
The requirements military action serves are always political. As with software, yes, things would be easier if the requirements were ignored for the sake of implementation, but that misses the whole point of the activity.
The takeover was pretty much planned. This is the expected result. The only "surprise" here is that the Taliban stayed on schedule while we delayed our withdrawal for several months for reasons that nobody seems to know.
Why do people keep saying this was inevitable or that the takeover was planned? Biden literally said in the July 8th press conference that he's confident Afghanistan will remain under control of the Ghani government and that their military is fully capable of managing the Taliban. This was not the expected result. No one would feel good planning to return a nation to the control of a terrorist organization that has a long past history and very recent history of human rights abuses. This was a surprise to the Biden administration. They admitted it (https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-afghanistan-taliban-593...). Biden literally said there would be no airlifts off embassy roofs like in Saigon (https://www.newsweek.com/clip-biden-saying-people-wont-lifte...). But we were forced to do that and we still haven't evacuated all the Americans. None of this was planned or expected - it's just a complete failure of leadership.
If you don't expect Afganistan to fall to Taliban, why would you pull out?
I'm baffled that they made this big of a mistake, but if you operate from the assumption that ANA does not fold, you have no reason to pull out your embassy personnel or civilians in general.
I don't think many people expected Afghanistan to fall. A month ago in a press conference Biden said he was confident that the Afghan government and military could defend against the Taliban successfully. Was he lying to the American public if it was so obvious? I personally think he was just incredibly ignorant and incompetent, rather than lying out of malice. OTHER people expected that Biden's strategy would fail. Military generals and the bipartisan Afghan study group report suggested a slower withdrawal and maintaining a limited force to perform counter terrorism and provide a safety net. But Biden decided to just plow ahead, presumably to be able to symbolically claim that he pulled out before the 20th anniversary of 9/11.
>> I don't think many people expected Afghanistan to fall. A month ago in a press conference Biden said he was confident that the Afghan government and military could defend against the Taliban successfully. Was he lying to the American public if it was so obvious? I personally think he was just incredibly ignorant and incompetent, rather than lying out of malice.
> This is from June 23, with the US absolutely expecting the Taliban to win, just for it to take a little while longer.
That's from 3/4 of a month ago and "revised their previously more optimistic estimates" based the events that occurred during the previous week. They still gave the government six more months when it didn't even last one. I think that's broadly consistent with the GP.
I agree with the GP, a lot of the US government statements I've seen recently about the Afghan military situation just sound clueless and dumb. Like someone who's still taking paper estimates at face value in the most simplistic way, when actual events clearly contradict them (e.g. our numbers show the Afghan military is 3x the size of the Taliban, they can still win!). Also the talk of a negotiated settlement just makes them sound like they have their heads up their asses. Why the fuck would anyone make concessions when they're winning so easily? It makes no sense.
Also, in retrospect, symbolic deadlines should be considered a giant a red flag signaling a bad plan.
Yes but that's not an assessment from Biden or his spokespeople. I guess we're both saying the same thing but we were non-specific in naming who expected what. There were many military generals, advisors, reports, and so on recommending the maintenance of a contingency force to deter the Taliban and lend aid to the Afghan military forces. Those parties expected a collapse if the US pulled out completely. But Biden did not feel the same way - he stated explicitly that it was "highly unlikely" that the Taliban could take over (https://www.foxnews.com/politics/wapo-fact-checker-calls-out...).
Oh wow, that's terrible. They've worked alongside them for so long and they couldn't predict this kind of an outcome? I guess they could have expected them to fall eventually, but when talking to the press they couldn't really articulate it well enough to avoid projecting a lack of confidence in ANA.
> I guess they could have expected them to fall eventually, but when talking to the press they couldn't really articulate it well enough to avoid projecting a lack of confidence in ANA.
I thought he did a good job articulating that, in the way politicians and diplomatic types do.
> The capture of the city was preceded by Operation Frequent Wind, the evacuation of almost all American civilian and military personnel in Saigon, along with tens of thousands of South Vietnamese civilians who had been associated with the Republic of Vietnam. A few Americans chose not to be evacuated. United States ground combat units had left South Vietnam more than two years prior to the fall of Saigon and were not available to assist with either the defense of Saigon or the evacuation.
When you click the first link, here's what the U.S. Embassy tells you:
> Event: The security situation in Kabul continues to change quickly, including at the airport. U.S. citizens should continue to shelter in place. U.S. citizens seeking assistance to depart the country should complete this Repatriation Assistance Request for each traveler in their group. Spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens in Afghanistan who are awaiting immigrant visas should also complete this form if they wish to depart. Please do so as soon as possible. Please do so only once.
So, in the absence of any better information, a reasonable deduction is that there are civilians left behind.
What I have heard (don't remember exactly where, but likely I read this in the Times or Post) is that there are an estimated 20,000 US citizens in Kabul.
Many US embassies encourage US citizens abroad to register w/ the embassy whether they are visiting or traveling. I imagine that was especially encouraged in Afghanistan.
I think I also read that the Germans want to evacuate something like 10,000 people, including some of their own citizens and some Afghan employees / dependents.
The USA today article at 4 is amazing that they have gall to interview Liz Cheney, who for obvious reasons isn’t going to have an unbiased opinion here, but who finds the time to blame nearly the whole thing on Trump.
There is a lot that Trump did wrong, but Trump/Pompeo negotiating a set of conditions for withdraw, making a plan regardless of how good or bad in theory, then having Biden come in, ignore all of it, withdraw our forces including Bagram overnight without telling our allied Afghan Forces, waiting for no conditions to be met, and it not being clear that if the Taliban didn’t cooperate that we’d hit back hard - is Trump’s Fault - is beyond bias. It’s straight up a perversion of reality.
USA Today should be embarrassed for such an obvious partisan twist, if you’ve been paying attention it would be expected of Cheney who seems to have been broken by Trump. Bad guy who tweeted the mean things or not, this isn’t on him, it’s square on the current administration and bureaucracy. 39 days ago Biden’s own press event completely shrugged this off as even a possibility, the idea we would have another Siagon. 6 days ago the intelligence community we’re told to respect revised a potential fall of Kabul from 90 days, to 72 hours, it fell in less than 24.
Also … Those poor people holding on to the plane. All dead, they were sitting on the landing gear panel, that folds under on a C-117. It’s clear how bad things really are looking at how insecure the airstrip is. It shouldn’t be possible to grab onto a military plane in any scenario.
What were the conditions to withdraw? My understanding is that the terms of the Doha agreement were 1) Taliban stops attacking US troops, 2) Taliban doesn’t shelter al Qaeda, and 3) US military leaves Afghanistan by May 2021.
Were there other conditions that have not been met? The Afghan government wasn’t even a party to the Doha agreement.
Personally I think making a deal with the Taliban was a bad idea. Leaving the Afghan government out of those discussions was a mistake that demoralized the Afghan forces according to our former ambassador (https://www.businessinsider.com/former-us-ambassador-afghani...). But, it does seem like the conditions of this deal were not met and there wouldn't have been an exit on the May timeline, since the Taliban still continues to work with Al Qaeda.
So I’m confused, are you saying that a secret overnight withdrawal of Bagram, this new Saigon situation and imagery, people clinging to transport planes, in the US leaving 10,000 to 20,000 American citizens in a now hostile country happened under Trump?
It basically doesn’t matter what the plan was. Good or bad, it wasn’t executed by the new guy. Instead, seemingly no plan was used and here we are. 20 years and trillions of dollars, effectively wiped out in one month.
Not even getting into the arms an ordinance, Humvees and MRAPs, helicopters and drones we left that are now Taliban owned. It’s not all bad, I’m sure we left a stack of 4473 forms so there would be background checks for the hundred thousand or more actual assault rifles we just handed out.
I asked a question, which you did not answer. I did not say anything about whose fault it is.
EDIT: FWIW, I think it is manifestly obvious that Biden and the current administration is responsible for the current situation. No need to convince me of that.
Sorry, I didn't understand how questions you asked were relevant, no offense. They never came to fruition under Trump. IIRC, his timetable had big mile markers for major withdraws in June, he was out in Jan. While not ignoring you with a "At this point what difference does it make?" esp when that was said, the answer was actually "all the difference". In this case, I thought you were asking rhetorically.
My point was it is beyond-the-pale to blame Trump's plan that wasn't followed by Biden, IC, and Bureaucracy failures here. Biden spent a year saying this was his choice and his plan. Him and his press secretary are on vacation this week, so we'll have to wait and see if that's still the case.
I think a difference I'm seeing in my head is that during Vietnam, we were pushing UH-1 Hueys helos into the ocean to make room for evacuees on our carriers. In these linked videos, we're leaving people so desperate they clung to a C-117 and are almost certainly all dead now, and leaving 10-20k American citizens behind at this moment. I know literacy and formal education among Afgans is low (but was getting a lot higher), but you have to understand you can't hang on to C-117 or sit on the landing gear panel for a minute let alone hours. The cruise speed for a C-117 is ~200 knots (200-250mph depending on model).
Not to mention that the young generation in Afghanistan, up to 25 years old or so, have never known anything but US protections. That just changed in 1 week.
To ignore all that and instead use your platform to "blame Trump", Liz, and USA Today, that's disgusting to me. Vile and deceitful, even considering the last 5 years of reality bending nonsense for political effect.
How is this any different than Trump's sudden departure from Syria, abandoning our allies, the Kurds? That happened so quickly, the Russians were able to overrun our bases and get access to our intel.
I'm usually one for "let's not blame all of the world's problems on Trump", but Trump (or his admin) negotiated a May pullout of Afghanistan with the Taliban. I'm not sure why you're asserting that Biden "ignored all of it" and "pulled out overnight". What conditions were or weren't met? In what ways did the Taliban not agree to the Doha Accord? Be specific.
And what do you think telling the commander of Bagram that we were leaving was going to accomplish? First, they knew we were leaving. Obviously we're not sending them an invitation to join us. And if they didn't do anything and were "surprised" by the US pulling out... I mean did he not notice forces packing up? Incompetence. You can't fix that. Second, do you think this would have changed the entire ANA folding? No. It's a boogeyman with no consequences whatsoever.
> Also … Those poor people holding on to the plane. All dead. It’s clear how bad things really are looking at how insecure the airstrip is. It shouldn’t be possible to grab onto a military plane in any scenario.
Well it's either that or the US forces unleash machine gun fire on civilians. Many more would be dead. The truth is there's no scenario in which you can secure a perimeter that large without massive forces when a population decides to just storm the fence, unless of course you want to just indiscriminately kill people.
Anyway. My real "enemy" here is the exact same media who has for years been complaining about Afghanistan, publishing article after article about US imperialism in Afghanistan, how it's a failed war, all of that and then when we say fine you're right, they turn right around and start talking about how pulling out is the wrong move blah blah blah. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Might as well save money.
The geopolitical ramifications are overstated too. Yet again MSM working on trying to drum up war scenarios. This frees US attention from Afghanistan and the Middle East to worry about other areas. Afghanistan has no way to extract resources. There are no ports. No roads. No mines. No machines. All of this "China is going to get all the resources" stuff is just fear-mongering nonsense.
We spent 20 years and $2 trillion+ trying to get Bin Laden and create a good government in Afghanistan. It didn't work. The government collapsed in a week. Spending another 10 years there would have changed nothing. Should have left earlier anyway.
-edit-
Re: Saigon pictures. You know what's funny? People were talking about getting those exact pictures to make the comparison before the evacuation even began. Gotta get those clicks!
I voted for Biden very willingly and if pressed would do it again over the other option at the time. With that said, this is a colossal failure. How do you not evacuate US staff and the afghan workers who helped them before pulling out the troops. Intelligence expected the Taliban to win, just for it to take 3+ months for it to happen. If this was publicly available information and you are an Afghan soldier why the heck would you fight? Just surrender and join the Taliban, why die fighting the inevitable? Of course the Taliban swept through with very limited resistance. To risk US lives because you did not want to insult the current doomed afghan regime is insane. Absolut failure and a monumental loss to US standing in the world as well as the morale of US troops. I would call for the resignation of all intelligence leaders involved in this assessment. I might go so far as to call for Biden's resignation.
"a monumental loss to US standing in the world"...
I'm sorry, but that has been long gone since trump.
Anyone who served over there knew what was going to happen when the states pulled out, none of this is terribly surprising.
The entire time of occupation, ground level has been saying over and over how much corruption is happening. Just getting peeps in site for more than 8 hours without someone to watch them has been near impossible.
End of the day, this is the expected result when you invade a country and then leave it.
I'm under the impression that this administration was largely just following through the plan that the previous administration set in motion. The Biden admin is flushing when they should have plunged.
Apart from the fact that Biden is president and has ownership over his orders, we should also remember this was NOT the Trump plan. The Trump plan had a phased withdrawal that was contingent on commitments being met by the Taliban and the Afghan government. It was also left very open ended to allow the US to define its exit conditions. The plan was definitely not to just pull out wholesale and let an entire country fall to chaos and lose its democratic process. One of the chief conditions was that the Taliban would several all times with terrorist groups, and work to monitor and eliminate them. A UN report earlier this year confirmed the Taliban still is closely tied to Al Qaeda (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/taliban-has-kept-close-ti...), which would have blocked the Trump plan from being enacted.
Only 4 days ago the US intelligence believed that Kabul would not fall for at least 3 months.
Yet another complete failure of an American institution, after FAA (Boeing crashes), CDC, FDA, the Navy (military ship crashes due to lack of basic navigation skills).
It seems they are so bureaucratic and risk averse that they can't handle even basic challenges anymore.
I expect this will be unpopular with many HN readers, but it needs to be said:
US presidential elections are often ugly, but they're an important vetting process to make sure that whoever wins the election is highly competent. Tech companies went to great lengths to scrub content that was critical of Joe Biden during the last election, and now shockingly, he and his political appointments are demonstrating gross incompetence. This isn't a political left or right issue: we skipped an important step during the 2020 election.
> Tech companies went to great lengths to scrub content that was critical of Joe Biden during the last election
It was there for anyone to see. Bush & Obama Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on 'Face the Nation' [on Biden]: "He's a man of integrity, incapable of hiding what he really thinks, and one of those rare people you know you could turn to for help in a personal crisis. Still, I think he's been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades."
The real issue is that even knowing that and agreeing, it was still pretty easy to vote for him given the alternatives of Trump and Bernie Sanders.
> Tech companies went to great lengths to scrub content that was critical of Joe Biden during the last election, and now shockingly, he and his political appointments are demonstrating gross incompetence. This isn't a political left or right issue: we skipped an important step during the 2020 election.
Biden botched this, but I don't think Trump would have done much better.
I mean wasn't Trump already deep into the D-team of advisors, late in his term, and didn't he have a habit of making impulsive decisions?
This isn't a partisan issue, it's a failure of the American political system as a whole. It's starting to get a late-period Soviet Union feel to it.
"The Republican National Committee has removed a page from the 2020 campaign that says "Biden has had a history of pushing for endless wars" while "Trump has continued to take the lead in peace talks as he signed a historic peace agreement with the Taliban in Afghanistan, which would end America's longest war," The Washington Post's David Weigel noted Sunday."
They created a power vacuum by pulling out in the dead of night, and then willfully ignored rapid advances by the Taliban. Nobody is disagreeing that it was correct to withdraw, but the handling of this has been nothing but sheer incompetence. Saigon didn't have people so desperate that they were holding onto the outside of airplanes and then falling to their death.
Nobody wants to hear it. Everybody wants to believe Trump was the “worst president ever” but this one event is worse than anything trump did or had happen during his administration.
>this one event is worse than anything trump did or had happen during his administration.
You're missing the obvious point (as the British, Russians and innumerable others found out) that Afghanistan is not a nation per se. It's a collection of regions, clans, families and warlords.
We picked certain warlords (the enemies of the Taliban) when we went into Afghanistan and the ones we picked were/are just as insular, corrupt and narrowly focused on their own interests as those who support the Taliban.
We spent 20 years and a trillion dollars "training" the Afghan military and police to support the Kabul government.
And as anyone could have (and many did) told you, as soon as we left, the army and police just melted away and the Taliban took control.
This isn't a surprise, nor is it unexpected. If Bush II, Obama or Trump had pulled out the troops the exact same thing would have happened.
Now it's done and we can let the Afghans go back to killing and oppressing each other as they've done for millenia.
It's not pretty, and many will suffer, but it's not our war and we should never have had any part of it, except to kick bin Laden out of there and make it clear to the Taliban that they need to make sure folks who want to attack the US don't ever take up residence in Afghanistan again.
But instead we went with the failed strategies of the past (nation building) and the inevitable happened.
It's not Biden's fault. It's not Trump's fault. This is all on Bush II. We should have gone in, kicked al Qaeda ass (we did), make sure the Taliban knew we would make them pay for supporting al Qaeda (we did, somewhat) and then went home.
By the time Obama took office, we were completely entrenched in the corrupt regime in Kabul.
tl;dr: This was never going to end well and it's about time someone had the guts to pull us out. Now the same folks who were in a lather about "Obama's forever war" are complaining that Biden ended it. Feh. It's just political posturing and bullshit.
> We spent 20 years and a trillion dollars "training" the Afghan military and police to support the Kabul government.
> And as anyone could have (and many did) told you, as soon as we left, the army and police just melted away and the Taliban took control.
I get the impression that one of the mistakes there may have been that the US was trying to train the Afghan military to use the "modern system" of warfare like the US (lots of training and high-tech gizmos), when they may have only been capable of the "static system." I don't know any actual details, but all the officials in US press conferences emphasizing how "well-equipped" the Afghan Army was gives me this impression.
> It's not Biden's fault. It's not Trump's fault. This is all on Bush II. We should have gone in, kicked al Qaeda ass (we did), make sure the Taliban knew we would make them pay for supporting al Qaeda (we did, somewhat) and then went home.
I agree, but the temptation of nation building is just to great to resist it seems. The PhD's and think-tankers look back at the 'Wise Men' of the post-WWII era, basically inventing the modern world order and want to have a go at it. They want to point to the killing and destruction and say no it wasn't just revenge and deterrence, but that something good was created out of it.
I truly believe it's well intentioned but it's hubris of the worst sort.
No, sorry. Trump owns the pandemic. He could have been sane, followed scientific advise and acted more quickly. Instead, try snorting bleach. Get some UV light inside the body. Hundreds of thousands dead and a good amount of that toll could have been avoided.
Nope. The pandemic was a no-win situation. When trump cut off travel to China he was called xenophobic, and then later it was said that he didn't act soon enough. The politicization of the pandemic (on both sides) was not appropriate and now we've got Republicans avoiding the vaccine out of spite.
Some of his off the cuff comments were stupid and ill-conceived, but he never actually told anyone to do anything with bleach.
His biggest mistake in the pandemic IMHO was having daily press conferences to in order to look like he was in charge and things were under control. So many things go wrong when people worry about appearances...
> When trump cut off travel to China he was called xenophobic, and then later it was said that he didn't act soon enough.
In this particular case, those statements aren’t precisely contradictory.
The travel ban was criticized because it was wholly inadequate for the purposes of preventing infected persons from entering the country, as American citizens (and their immediate (?) family IIRC) could enter freely. “Xenophobic” might have arisen out of the targeting of foreigners while leaving Americans alone, though I offer no opinion as to whether that is an accurate label.
Even if the ban were effective, it was too late since IIRC there were already cases in the US, so that criticism is accurate unless I am remembering incorrectly.
A no win situation is not one with no wrong answers; Trump’s approach [0] was equivalent to handling the Kobayashi Maru by heading a maximum warp to the nearest Federation colony and bombarding it with photon torpedoes.
[0] notably, but not limited to, obstructing early state access to emergency supplies and distributing federal supplies based on political affinity with the governor rather than need, with a deliberate strategy of maximizing the impact in Democratic-governed states and leveraging it as an election issue.
From what I can tell, I think you're mixing stories.
Trump's initial action was to restrict travel to China, not outright ban flights. US citizens and their immediate families were still allowed to fly. Whether this action was "quick" is at least somewhat debatable.
The only outright ban on flights I could find was something from June [0], well after the initial restrictions were put into place, and that was in response to China refusing to allow more flights into China from US carriers. It was also (partially) lifted just a few days later [1].
Agreed. Trump was telling us that the virus would just disappear. He was holding huge campaign rallies and gatherings with no masks and no distancing. This was very much a failure and it caused him to lose the election to even a lightweight candidate like Biden.
> this one event is worse than anything trump did or had happen during his administration
The US spent 20 years in Afghanistan, supposedly building up institutions that $2 trillion were poured into as 2300 Americans were killed.
That the US would continue funding and arming Afghanistan, but would remove US troops was announced in mid-April. Within four months, the Taliban completely took over the country, a month before the final US withdrawal date scheduled for next month. It shows how much support these American-built initiatives had.
This is not one event, it is 20 years of failure. I commend Biden for cutting US losses even if it invites criticism, 20 years is enough. This is the first good, tough decision Biden has made in my opinion.
I mean sure, the speed of the takeover seems like it took people by surprise, but surely the civilians and non-combat military gradually leave and the combat troops are last out providing security, even if the Taliban advance is slow?
Edit: Or were they planning to leave the embassy open?