From @emptywheel Twitter feed:
Ryan Struyk
@ryanstruyk
BIDEN: “One more year, or five more years, of US military presence would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country. And an endless American presence in the middle of another country’s civil conflict was not acceptable to me.”
Continuing for (the 21st) year? A (third) decade? Forever? And this is also part of the point Biden needs to reinforce.
Fair enough. Where did that justification change from routing Bin Laden to saving the Afghans from the Afghans? Vietnam was about “preventing the communists from coming ashore in Long Beach” until it was about saving half (or less, it turned out) of Vietnam from the other half (or more).
It is truly stupefying that any person in government (are you listening DeSantis??) would be against protecting people’s health by being against wearing masks. Or getting vaccinated.
That there are truly stupid folk, who are against getting a free vaccine that can save their life, that are loose in America is beyond my understanding.
Sorry but I just don’t understand why folks hate good health.
Frankly, that sounds like questions that House Oversight and Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence should be asking, of the IC, in SCIF.
Biden . . . voice[d] his support for the districts’ move to implement mask mandates, despite statewide bans on the public health measure.
So the party that is constantly accused of advocating for a strong central government sides with local control while the party of local control demands fealty to a central government edict. Which party is in disarray?
Case in point. We abandoned our “continuing presence” in the Confederate States too soon and that can be directly related to Jim Crow and their current Covid-19 Delta outbreak.
In some respects, it’s trading horrible things with a US presence for more and different things in US absence. The potential for more is there, but at the same time a lot of the potential victims have changed political sides.
The blame falls entirely on the US military establishment that believed its own fairy tales, about how great they were doing in training the Afghan army and police. The intel community probably predicted what would happen, but the US military didn’t want to hear it. They have the ear of the President just as much as the intel community.
Biden did screw up one thing, and that’s not starting evacuations from Kabul much earlier and with a stronger force on the ground. It appears he believed the military analysts’ assessment of the situation and it was deeply self-deceptive and wrong.
Great description of him
Post-9/11, we created that whole DNI position specifically to distill intelligence from at least 15 different agencies (presume there’s a few more that we don’t even know the existence of) to prevent precisely this kind of disconnect.
This can’t be laid at the feet of a few generals, however optimistic they may or may not have been.
Something went very, very wrong with the system.
We cannot prevent all of the horrible things in the world. Heck, we don’t even choose to prevent horrible things right here at home.
One can hope there was some recognition that this scenario or one very like it was very possible and made some preparations. I am at a loss for what might make any difference here and now, though. And no longer buy lottery tickets when the jackpot is massive.
The problem China will have is that corruption in Afghanistan isn’t centralized, it’s local. China will be facing checkpoints every 10 miles along its brand new roads to pay protection bribes to the warlord for that area. Then the warlords will fight among themselves for that lucrative territorial control, causing collateral damage to Chinese equipment and workers.
There is a reason the rich natural resources of Afghanistan have never been mined at any scale in modern times. It’s because it’s not a modern country.
“A very broad Intel apparatus”
Yes indeed we give the Israelis huge sums of $$$ mostly to avail ourselves of their excellent Intel operations.
Perhaps some of the “failures” you suggest were simply a matter of their interest not properly aligning with our interests?
I think the only possibility for peace in any of these countries (Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan) would require division into tribal areas either as independent countries or as independent states in a confederation of some sort. I think they’re too unstable to do a confederation, so probably independent countries with a single tribal identity for each. The current boundaries appear to be meaningless.
And, at least to an incredibly vocal minority, does not choose to be one.
Worth the read
Turns out a 3500 troop presence can’t really interrogate an entire country to find out how they feel.
There was. That’s how we’ve got at least 5k troops in country in less than 72 hours from when the flares went off that everything was going in a different direction (and likely at least twice that off the books).
Tense next days, see if the Taliban remains content to have everyone just leave, or some of their people want to play.
