Afghanistan - Yet Another US Mistake Is Now Happening!

[JKane]

 

 

 

 

 

[vinapu]

9 hours ago, PeterRS said:

And this is desperately sad for the people of Taiwan unless negotiators can come up with some formula that will satisfy Beijing and Taipei.

 

what about  Taiwan absorbing mainland , not other way around ? After all Taiwan's official name is Republic of China

[PeterRS]

6 hours ago, forrestreid said:

That difference between those examples and Afghanistan is, that, unlike in South Korea, Japan, or Germany, the few thousand troops left in Afghanistan were obviously vital for the government staying afloat.

If the USA pulled out all its troops from Germany tomorrow, obviously Germany would be more vulnerable to foreign enemies, particularly Russia, but I don’t think the government would automatically collapse and the country sink into anarchy.

When you have such a situation in place regarding US troops, as was obviously the case in Afghanistan, well, it basically means that the US was in a de-facto colonial position.

So it was all the more necessary that America would have a cold and clear look as to whether it was worthwhile maintaining its troops in Afghanistan. Although casualties were very low since the numbers were reduced, there were still a few, and the American air support was regularly bombing Taliban positions far the Afghan government.

This situation could not have remained Indefinitely.

I agree with much of your comment. But the whole point of going in to Afghanistan was to root out Al Qaeda because the Taliban government had given Osama bin Ladan and his murderers safe haven. Does the USA - does any government - believe that the Taliban has basically changed? It is a hard line group of Islamic militants that has been kept out of power for two decades only because the USA invaded and after about a decade finally managed to get rid of bin Laden - in Pakistan. Is not the presence of a few thousand troops (NATO in addition to the USA) along with some military hardware a small price to pay to ensure that they do not get up to the same sort of destabilising tricks again? Is the difference between Afghanistan and North Korea largely because South Korea is an ally and North Korea has nukes?

I really am clutching at straws as I have no ready answer. As for the disasters of the last few days, I recall a line from one of Shakespeare's plays whose title it is allegedly bad luck to mention. Of the death of the Thane of Cawdor, the King's son Malcolm tells his father, "Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it." With all the time to prepare for all eventualities, what is happening is all so sad and unnecessary.

[PeterRS]

2 hours ago, vinapu said:

what about  Taiwan absorbing mainland , not other way around ? After all Taiwan's official name is Republic of China

I don't think that is the "official" name. It was the title given to mainland China in 1912 after the collapse of the rule of the Q'ing Emperors. It remained as the ROC until Mao's forces overcame those of the then ROC ruler Chiang Kai Shek in 1949. When he quickly fled with around 2 million of his followers to Taiwan, he also took the ROC name with him for it was always his intention to his dying day that he would return to take back the mainland. I believe international law does not now recognise Taiwan as the ROC. Hence the renaming of Chiang's ROC as Taiwan.

As for Taiwan absorbing the mainland, I assume that is merely a joke! China has an active army of around 2.2 million plus a massive amount of military hardware and nuclear weapons. Taiwan has approx. 10% of that manpower and some aircraft. 'Nuff said! LOL

 

[Guest]

On 8/13/2021 at 4:02 PM, vinapu said:

Neither Britain not later USSR and USA achieved their goals in Afghanistan, now it's China's turn to get entangled there ( Taliban supporting Uyghur case? )and meet the same fate. 

Sadly it should be left to Afghan people to solve their country's ills as they see it.

A very good point.

As long as people in Afghanistan do not allow terrorists to threaten other countries, I suspect they will be free from outside interference.   If they allow Afghan based terror groups to threaten other countries, they should expect consequences.

I don't expect China to get involved unless provoked, but if they do, then I suspect China would be prepared to be far more brutal than the US.    As for the Uighur situation, I believe the escalation in Chinese government activities followed terrorist activities which disrupted a visit by Mr Xi to the region a few years ago.

[vinapu]

6 hours ago, PeterRS said:

I

As for Taiwan absorbing the mainland, I assume that is merely a joke! China has an active army of around 2.2 million plus a massive amount of military hardware and nuclear weapons. Taiwan has approx. 10% of that manpower and some aircraft. 

 

who said it must be by force ? USSR's army and all those nukes did not prevent it's dissolution, Czechoslovakia had 'velvet divorce", China ma have 'velvet marriage" at one point

[JKane]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[EZEtoGRU]

Biden had no choice but to leave.  He was boxed in by the Trump/Taliban deal and had to proceed.  Also, leaving is the right thing to do.  Twenty years was more than enough time to learn we couldn't actually change the local culture and have a lasting impact (duh??).   It is and will continue to be messy as we exit.  The images are ugly and could get worse.  The potential for substantial loss of life (of Americans and foreigners) still exists over the coming weeks as our exit proceeds.  It is pretty much dependent on how the Taliban acts as people try and get out.

I am given to understand that many Americans and allies in the country are still not located at the airport.  Will they all be able to get to the airport for safe passage out?  Probably not all of them.

The price we pay as we exit should be a lesson to all future leaders of the cost (in human lives) of wars and limitations that wars actually have.

I support Biden's decision to exit Afghanistan (working within the timing framework set by Trump).  Staying on and fighting would be pouring good money after bad there with zero chance of success.  I hope the further loss of life will be minimal.  I fear it won't.

Oh...and let's stop pretending we can export democracy to far-flung countries that we know little about.  Democracy hardly functions in the USA.  You can forget about it in Afghanistan.   

 

 

[PeterRS]

5 hours ago, EZEtoGRU said:

1. Biden had no choice but to leave.  He was boxed in by the Trump/Taliban deal and had to proceed.  Also, leaving is the right thing to do.  Twenty years was more than enough time to learn we couldn't actually change the local culture and have a lasting impact (duh??) . . . 

2. Oh...and let's stop pretending we can export democracy to far-flung countries that we know little about.  Democracy hardly functions in the USA.  You can forget about it in Afghanistan.   

1. I am sure you are correct. But I do not agree he was boxed in. He still had a choice as to precisely when to leave. After all, Trump had said he would pull out everyone considerably earlier. Also, Trump did not invite the Afghan government to these talks. It was as though he were the pro-consul acting on behalf of the entire Afghan people.

That said, though, Biden has to bear all the blame for the disasters of the last week. He has said on several occasions that he had full faith in what was in effect the US installed Afghan government and its armed forces which the US had spent years and billions of $$ training up. When he made his announcements in April, he had had months to consider it (after all, it as a campaign promise) and to obtain advice from supposedly the best experts in the world. The CIA estimated it would take the Taliban a minimum of 6 months to gain control and as much as a year. This is the same CIA which got things so wrong in Iran, so wrong in Vietnam, so wrong in Iraq! One wonders why there has not been a total clear out of many of its top officials in that agency. I have no doubt it does considerable good. but when it comes to the US disasters in its overseas invasions, someone has to be accountable.

Amid all the Republican's trashing of Biden's mishandling of the departure, I I notice that the Republican National Committee has deleted a webpage hailing Trump's peace deal with the Taliban! But Business Insider still has a screen shot. Note that Trump's so-called agreement permitted the CIA to stay on in Taliban controlled Afghanistan! Did anyone seriously expect that would ever be allowed to happen? Trump's deal making another fiction!

https://www.businessinsider.com/gop-removes-page-hailing-trump-taliban-deal-2021-8

2. That successive US governments have thought they had some God-given right to spread democracy around the world is one reason for its foreign disasters since the end to World War 2. Democracy means different things to different peoples. But you cannot impose it on peoples who for centuries have remained clan and tribe based and have little idea what the word means. It has to come from within. Hopefully all countries will pay heed to the this in future.

The following is part of the webpage from the RNC which was taken down 2 days ago. 

PRESIDENT 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 

• On February 2, 2020, the Trump Administration signed a preliminary peace agreement with the Taliban that sets the stage to end America's longest war.
  • Under the agreement, the U.S. will withdraw nearly 5,000 troops from the country in 135 days in exchange for a Taliban agreement to not allow Afghanistan to be used for transnational terrorism.
    • Time Magazine reported that other components of the agreement included an agreement that U.S. counterterrorism forces stay in the country, permissions for the CIA to operate in Taliban-held areas, and details of how the Taliban's promises to reduce violence will be monitored and verified.
  • The deal has been called the " best chance to end this conflict ," a " decisive move " towards peace, and " the best path " for the United States.
  • The war in Afghanistan is the longest in U.S. history, a conflict that has killed more than 3,500 U.S. and NATO troops and cost U.S. taxpayers nearly 900 billion dollars.
  • As part of the peace agreement, the Taliban and the Afghan government recently began historic peace, talks which would end decades of war that Afghanistan has consumed.
    • The negotiations will cover the terms of a " permanent ceasefire, the rights of women and minorities, and the disarmament of the country's many militia groups .

[PeterRS]

17 hours ago, vinapu said:

who said it must be by force ? USSR's army and all those nukes did not prevent it's dissolution, Czechoslovakia had 'velvet divorce", China ma have 'velvet marriage" at one point

You are the eternal optimist @vinapu!

[vinapu]

8 hours ago, PeterRS said:

You are the eternal optimist @vinapu!

Sometimes it's very hard but yes , I'm. 

[EZEtoGRU]

9 hours ago, PeterRS said:

That said, though, Biden has to bear all the blame for the disasters of the last week. He has said on several occasions that he had full faith in what was in effect the US installed Afghan government and its armed forces which the US had spent years and billions of $$ training up. When he made his announcements in April, he had had months to consider it (after all, it as a campaign promise) and to obtain advice from supposedly the best experts in the world. The CIA estimated it would take the Taliban a minimum of 6 months to gain control and as much as a year. This is the same CIA which got things so wrong in Iran, so wrong in Vietnam, so wrong in Iraq! One wonders why there has not been a total clear out of many of its top officials in that agency. I have no doubt it does considerable good. but when it comes to the US disasters in its overseas invasions, someone has to be accountable.

I think it is far too soon to judge how well or poorly the exit from Afghanistan was handled.  It's still going on as we speak so we need to let it play out.   We (the public) don't know all the facts yet surrounding this exit mission.  How much wiggle room did Biden actually have from the deal Trump negotiated with the Taliban?   Trump himself said in a speech this year something along the lines of having boxed in the Biden administration on getting out of Afghanistan.  He openly boasted that was the case.

In the fullness of time, we can make a judgement about how things have been handled during the exit (given the constraints of the pre-set agreement with the Taliban).  For now, everyone involved needs to be focused on making the rest of the exit as successful as possible and minimizing further loss of life.  

I am all for accountability.  If the exit is fairly judged to have been handled poorly, let's hold the appropriate people responsible.  If people need to resign or lose their jobs...so be it.  

 

 

[caeron]

I think it is wishful thinking to imagine the exit could have gone better.

It was always going to suck. Putting it off just means more bleeding before the inevitable messy exit.

How many more lives and how much more money are we supposed to spend in search of something that we haven't found after 20 years on the ground?

[PeterRS]

55 minutes ago, caeron said:

I think it is wishful thinking to imagine the exit could have gone better.

Now that is a position I cannot agree with at all. Biden knew perfectly well he was going to withdraw all troops. It was a campaign promise. He knew of the deal Trump had made even though its detail was is some senses ridiculous! The Taliban really agreed to the CIA operating in parts of a Taliban controlled Afghanistan? Oh, please!

So Biden is elected in early November. There was a ton of time between then and the withdrawal date he announced in April for all his various government departments and the CIA to work out and hand him a host of all the possibie outcomes and to start working on them. We know the CIA experts (experts?) told him the Taliban would be in a position to take over in between 6 and 12 months after the US exit. Others told him they would be in Kabul much more quickly.

Whatever, it is the duty of all administrations to plan for all eventualities. Several very senior US military figures have in recent days roundly attacked Biden's lack of planning and the utter disaster of the last few days in Kabul. Why was there no scenario for a total collapse of the Afghan army? Was it because the USA had spent years and billions of taxpayers $$ building it up? Could it not admit to itself that it might just collapse with its personnel just giving up and returning to their home provinces? After all, what loyalty did that army have? To a President who was elected by less than 2% of the population? When that election itself was first delayed by five months and then as a result of feudal factional in-fighting a further delay of another five and a half months before being ratified? After the disasters in Vietnam and in Iraq, did the USA seriously believe that democracy can be introduced into a country based on a feudal system where loyalty is to tribe and clan rather than to a bloated, corrupt national government, something which has rarely worked before? What were the military fighting for?  A US-backed President who fled the moment things began to look really bad?

All that could and should have bewn put into at least one scenario presented to Biden. As should all the paperwork and agreements regarding the quick exit of all the Afghan helpers another families before the USA troops left. But none of that was done. It is a total disaster.

[caeron]

 

"A US-backed President who fled the moment things began to look really bad?"

If you think 20 years of failure of the Neocon plan is "fled the moment things began to look really bad", I am not sure there is a basis for discussion. This reads more like somebody with an axe to grind against Biden.

[JKane]

That was probably referring to the Afghan president, was just thinking I hadn't heard anything about or from him in forever, but whenever I did he was a disappointment.  I assume he was the compromise candidate, was anybody thrilled with him?  

[caeron]

1 hour ago, JKane said:

That was probably referring to the Afghan president, was just thinking I hadn't heard anything about or from him in forever, but whenever I did he was a disappointment.  I assume he was the compromise candidate, was anybody thrilled with him?  

If so, I'm not sure of the point, because if the guy on the ground who supposedly is in charge abandons his job, that rather says the situation is not tenable, and was only barely so by the continuous presence of western troops.

[PeterRS]

9 hours ago, caeron said:

If so, I'm not sure of the point, because if the guy on the ground who supposedly is in charge abandons his job, that rather says the situation is not tenable, and was only barely so by the continuous presence of western troops.

Yes @JKane was correct. I was referring to the Afghan President. I am all for Joe Biden as President even though I think he and his administration have made a disastrous mistake in the way the withdrawal from Afghanistan has been handled.

And yes, the Afghan President did flee. But who put him there? Who attempted to introduce western style democracy into a country which has rarely ever been democratic throughout its history and whose loyalties are far more localised and not to a central government? And yes again, without the presence of western troops, there would have been no democracy, functioning or otherwise. So what did anyone expect to happen when those western troops announced months in advance that they would leave? Chaos and a return the status quo before they arrived.

[JKane]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[JKane]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[PeterRS]

There is a very perceptive article in Friday's edition of the UK's Guardian newspaper. Written by Simon Jenkins it delivers a blistering attack on British and American lawmakers. The article was written before Tony Blair, the British Prime Minster who had given his Ambassador to Washington in 2001 instructions to "Crawl up Bush's ass and stay there!", published a 2,700 word article on his website in which he claims "The abandonment of Afghanistan and its people is tragic, dangerous, unnecessary, not in their interests and not in ours,” This from a discredited Prime Minister who went in front of the nation in 2016 to apologise for his errors in taking part in the invasion of Iraq! "I express more sorrow, regret and apology than you can ever know or believe."

From The Guardian Friday 20 August 2021 (the use of bold face is mine - it is not in the original article).

Britain’s MPs this week uttered one long howl of anguish over Afghanistan. Their immediate targets were Joe Biden and Boris Johnson, politicians who just happened to be on the watch when Kabul’s pack of cards collapsed. But their real concern was that a collective 20-year experiment in “exporting western values” to Afghanistan had fallen into chaos. MPs wanted someone other than themselves to blame. A politician is never so angry as when proved wrong.

Like their fellow representatives in Congress, MPs somehow hoped the end would be nice and tidy, with speeches and flags, much like Britain’s exit from Hong Kong. Instead, tens of thousands of Afghans who had lived in an effective colony under years of Nato occupation had come to believe the west would either never leave or somehow protect them from Taliban retribution. They were swiftly disabused.

In 2006 I stood at dusk on a castle wall overlooking Kabul with a young UN official. He had just heard the Kandahar road was no longer safe. “Why,” he sighed, “can’t Afghanistan be more like Sweden?” I tried to see if he was smiling, but he was grimacing. For another 15 years, armies of western soldiers and civilians hurled stupefying amounts of money at the country. They created a wildly corrupt western dependency, where some 50,000 Afghans have links with the west that are now lethal. As for the “western-trained” army, one of its trainers told me it was mostly for show. An occupying power could not possibly motivate local youths to kill their fellow countrymen who might soon be ruling them. He rightly predicted: “They will just walk home.”

It is now 22 years since Tony Blair gave a speech in Chicago lecturing the US on his doctrine of international intervention. He wanted the west to invade countries across the world not in self-defence, but to save people everywhere from oppression. It was a reformulation of Alfred Milner’s Victorian concept of moral imperialism. British politicians on both the left and the right have long been uncomfortable about the abandonment of Milnerism as the acceptable face of empire. Global policing is somehow embedded in Britain’s political DNA. All Blair’s wars of aggression were cheered on in the House of Commons.

Many people have spoken this week of the “decline of the west”, lamenting the collapse of US moral authority. Yet these theories are beside the point. The belief that our moral values are somehow meaningless unless they are enforced upon those who do not share them is imperialist bigotry. It also leads to absurd biases. Iraq is now thought of as “bad interventionism”, as opposed to Afghanistan’s “good” version. The virtue of the latter invasion led President Obama in 2009 to bless the war in Afghanistan with a “surge” of soldiers, taking the US total to 110,000, mere target practice for the Taliban.

American gunboat diplomacy, initially supposed to salve the wounds of 9/11 in 2001, opened the door to fake morality and a trillion-dollar nation-building fantasy. The catastrophic return of Taliban autonomy became its inevitable conclusion. The US – with Britain as its lackey – committed liberal interventionism’s cardinal sin: half-heartedness. The craving to intervene is always followed by a craving to withdraw. Traditional empires at least pretended they would never leave. As it was, Afghanistan replicated departures from India, South Africa, Hong Kong and Iraq. If you invade and conquer an alien state, you own it, but must then disown it. Western rule has killed an estimated 240,000 in Afghanistan since 2001, more than the Taliban ever did. It has not left morality, just a mess. 

We must assume strategists in Washington and London are now planning interventions in Taiwan and Ukraine against possible Chinese and Russian expansion. If you ask taxpayers to spend billions on defence, you need something to show for it. So you pretend, as Johnson did in his bizarre conversation with Biden this week, that “gains” were made in Afghanistan. You accuse non-interventionists, as did the former Tory leader William Hague, of demonstrating “the enfeeblement of the western mind”. In a recent column, Hague called on Britain to continue invading foreign countries when “our common humanity demands it”. In doing so, he sounded like Pope Urban summoning the First Crusade.

more at

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/20/west-nation-building-fantasy-afghanistan-boris-johnson

[reader]

[PeterRS]

Tony Blair has gone much further in his denunciation of the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Speaking to broadcasters, he claimed the decision to withdraw was made 

". . . in obedience to an imbecilic political slogan about ending 'the forever wars'".

"In terms of what was imbecilic, frankly it was the strategy that was followed for 20 years, which was to try to build a highly centralised state in a country that was as diverse - geographically and ethnically - as Afghanistan, and to engage in a counterinsurgency strategy without a local partner and the local partner was corrupt, ineffective, illegitimate," he said. 

He added that coalition partners "never seriously tried to address the corruption that was prevalent from the top", acquiescing in "fraudulent" Afghan elections, and trying to fit facts into a predetermined strategy, "rather than having a strategy that was based on the facts".

Boris Johnson's Defence Secretary has also come out against the way the withdrawal has been planned and executed.    

Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said the West's exit from Afghanistan was "unedifying" and would have "consequences for us all for years to come".

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-58295384

[reader]

"Shooting the old horse will make people forget about all my mistakes"

                                                                                               Tony Blair

[PeterRS]

Another perceptive article in today's Guardian newspaper. It still leads with the chaos and catastrophe of the US and NATO powers departure from Afghanistan prompted by Biden's screwing up by rushing out so disastrously.

But this focuses much more on those warmongers and especially the media which gloried in the invasions of Afghanistan and also of Iraq. Why the media? "Because to acknowledge the mistakes of the men who prosecuted this war would be to expose the media’s role in facilitating it."

Excerpts from an article in The Guardian 26 August - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/25/blame-afghanistan-war-media-intervention

Any fair reckoning of what went wrong in Afghanistan, Iraq and the other nations swept up in the “war on terror” should include the disastrous performance of the media. Cheerleading for the war in Afghanistan was almost universal, and dissent was treated as intolerable. After the Northern Alliance stormed into Kabul, torturing and castrating its prisoners, raping women and children, the Telegraph urged us to “just rejoice, rejoice”, while the Sun ran a two-page editorial entitled “Shame of the traitors: wrong, wrong, wrong … the fools who said Allies faced disaster”. In the Guardian, Christopher Hitchens, a convert to US hegemony and war, marked the solemnity of the occasion with the words: “Well, ha ha ha, and yah, boo. It was … obvious that defeat was impossible. The Taliban will soon be history.”

. . . Everyone I know in the US and the UK who was attacked in the media for opposing the war received death threats. Barbara Lee, the only member of Congress who voted against granting the Bush government an open licence to use military force, needed round-the-clock bodyguards. Amid this McCarthyite fervour, peace campaigners such as Women in Black were listed as “potential terrorists” by the FBI. The then US secretary of state, Colin Powell, sought to persuade the emir of Qatar to censor Al Jazeera, one of the few outlets that consistently challenged the rush to war. After he failed, the US bombed Al Jazeera’s office in Kabul.

The broadcast media were almost exclusively reserved for those who supported the adventure. The same thing happened before and during the invasion of Iraq, when the war’s opponents received only 2% of BBC airtime on the subject. Attempts to challenge the lies that justified the invasion – such as Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction and his supposed refusal to negotiate – were drowned in a surge of patriotic excitement.

So why is so much of the media so bloodthirsty? . . .  An obvious answer is the old adage that “if it bleeds it leads”, so there’s an inbuilt demand for blood . . . 

Another factor in the UK is a continued failure to come to terms with our colonial history. For centuries the interests of the nation have been conflated with the interests of the rich, while the interests of the rich depended to a remarkable degree on colonial loot and the military adventures that supplied it. Supporting overseas wars, however disastrous, became a patriotic duty.

For all the current breastbeating about the catastrophic defeat in Afghanistan, nothing has been learned. The media still regale us with comforting lies about the war and occupation. They airbrush the drone strikes in which civilians were massacred and the corruption permitted and encouraged by the occupying forces. They seek to retrofit justifications to the decision to go to war, chief among them securing the rights of women.

But this issue, crucial as it was and remains, didn’t feature among the original war aims. Nor, for that matter, did overthrowing the Taliban. Bush’s presidency was secured, and his wars promoted, by American ultra-conservative religious fundamentalists who had more in common with the Taliban than with the brave women seeking liberation. In 2001, the newspapers now backcasting themselves as champions of human rights mocked and impeded women at every opportunity . . . 

You can get away with a lot in the media, but not, in most outlets, with opposing a war waged by your own nation – unless your reasons are solely practical. If your motives are humanitarian, you are marked from that point on as a fanatic. Those who make their arguments with bombs and missiles are “moderates” and “centrists”; those who oppose them with words are “extremists”. The inconvenient fact that the “extremists” were right and the “centrists” were wrong is today being strenuously forgotten.