That’s fairly self-evident to anyone really paying attention at the time.
If you haven’t run across it, The Spaces in Between was a good read and illuminating. Author was a Brit who served there during the first few years of the occupation, diplomatic or Intel I believe, not a “shooter”.
Indeed
This is a great topic for the Hive.
I’ve enjoyed Josh’s recent editor’s blog on the overall subject.
On the issue of why no one in the intel community predicted this rapid of a fall is a fascinating one because somebody in the intel community surely could see that. I am currently trending toward the idea that a forever war keeps certain people making money, lots of money, in lots of different ways. Taxpayers funding the whole thing is a big fat pot of continual flow of cash that can go on as long as…well…as long as it will before someone pulls the plug.
Caught a show on Genghis Kahn the other day and it really struck me (as a complete military laymen) how similar the Taliban’s tactics seem to be. I don’t care what one’s militarily technical prowess is, that shit is hard to beat.
I’m certain that I’m completely wrong about this, but… if I were a bad ass leader in this situation, I would do the “Appear Weak When You Are Strong” playbook and draw the Taliban in, concentrating them and then kick their ever loving asses. Thoughts like these are why I am not in the military…
Whatever you do, don’t think of Iraq. I mean, an elephant.
Disappointing that she’s elided that, but not surprising.
Oh, people definitely did. There are folks whose whole job is to be Debbie Downers on any given assessment, to make sure that more rosy analysis is actually sound.
Question here is why those weren’t given more prominence, whether some groupthink or hubris or whatever prevented them from moving along to more and higher visibility
So, since there have to be two sides to everything, one side in this wants to prevent further spread of the virus and the other is, what, taking the side of the virus?
We lost 3,000 American lives on 9/11 and Republicans wanted to fight Al Qaeda for two decades. We lost 600,000 because of COVID and Republicans won't even support masks or vaccinations.
— Rex Zane (@rexzane1) August 15, 2021
Afghanistan is not everywhere.
The South and Central American drug cartels and gangs are viciously sociopathic violent criminals and serial human right violators.
And they would not willingly tangle with the Taliban.
Afghanistan is a total failure from us. But it’s a total failure that occurred in 2003, not in 2021. Our failure in Afghanistan was the diversion of massive amount of manpower and funding from the effort to secure Afghanistan, into the invasion and resulting chaos of Iraq.
Once that happened, there was no way, short of committing to a sizeable presence in Afghanistan for at least 10-20 years beyond our time in Iraq, to build a stable, competent government, supported by a population willing to commit to standing up to the potential for violence that the Taliban represent.
As for the Intelligence Community… honestly, one of the hardest things for the IC to do over the last 40 years has been gauging the amount of partisan bloodletters harboring in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Basically none of the IC’s estimates on their capabilities, going back to the Soviet invasion in 1979, have been on the money.
Add to that the clear message that we sent to the Afghan military by gutting the facilities we left behind, and it’s not surprising that they were immediately demoralized and undermined in their capabilities. They were trained to use tools and facilities that they suddenly didn’t have access to.
That, unfortunately, was a matter of pragmatism: no matter what the IC was saying, it’s obvious the Pentagon and the in-theater commanders had a very different idea of what was likely to happen. There’s no way they were going to leave those facilities intact when they clearly felt the Taliban was likely to take control, regardless.
A few did predict this sort of “fail”. Afghanistan has always been a “fail” even from the time of Alexander the Great. The weak government we propped up was a fail. I think the Taliban will be a fail as well. People won’t put up with brutality forever. And that is what the Taliban are… thugs in the guise of religion. Whoever is the boss may well repeat what Mullah Omar did in 1996 when he was in Kandahar city. He took out a robe that supposedly was worn by Mohammed himself that is a treasured item kept in a Mosque in a special box looked over by one family for generations …and showed the assembled crowd this robe. Omar stood on the roof of that Mosque and displayed the robe and that gave him backing and authority to be the “Emir” of Afghanistan. Folks in Afghanistan ascribe magical powers to that robe.
It’s my opinion, having been to Afghanistan as a much younger man, that we should have left that country after the Taliban had been thrown out after 9/11
edit
Apparently we knew where bin Laden was in 2005. We had images of his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. We knew it was just up the road from the premier military acadamy in Pakistan. The Pakistanis knew he was there as well.
The world is a very very messy place.
Only in the editor’s blog, where nobody can comment on it.
Peer pressure for one and money for another. Either, “you’re going to pay a price for obstructing the gravy train” or “here, you can have some of the gravy train”. So, you either leave or chose a way to stay. Just spit balling here…
Pakistan and Iran only have a few troublesome tribal areas but you’re right about Iraq (thanks Winston) and especially Afghanistan. Even though Afghanistan was once a monarchy it has devolved into a patchwork of ethnic warlords. The “known unknown” now is whether the Taliban leadership can hold on to this coalition in the face of the glaring “known known” that the country is heavily armed with experienced militias.
“In retrospect, the United States and its allies got it really wrong from the very beginning. The bar was set based on our democratic ideals, not on what was sustainable or workable in an Afghan context.”
~~Michele Flournoy
That 30% are probably DeSatan’s base of RWNJs so maybe they’ll exterminate themselves and we can get back to normal.
Let’s see.
You got your Dan Coates, and a Richard Grenell, and your Dan Ratcliffe …
That’s right in line with my general suspicion, that middle management killed it because they wanted to curry favor with senior leadership and deliver what they thought would be best received, even though senior leadership prefers not to be blindsided by bad news and would rather hear it upfront.
Under the principle of ‘you break it, you bought it’. Once we invaded the country and took operational control, yeah, we had a reasonable obligation to leave behind at least as functional a nation as we found. But the Haliburton administration wanted Iraqi oil instead.
I think it for damn sure can be laid at the feet of the generals. Everything that’s happening now to make the exit so chaotic is a result of the cultural misunderstandings and blind optimism of the generals. Read this if you haven’t already, by a retired colonel who served there. He’s pinning it directly on the US military, and I think he’s right.
Nor would the Taliban tangle with them. Do you comprehend?