ISIS in Afghanistan
August 26, 2021 11:16 PM   Subscribe

"At least 80 [85, ed.] people have been declared dead at the Emergency Hospital. 10 people were dead on arrival, a source from the hospital tells." @ShereenaQazi

ISIS claimsresponsibility. The Talibans, already fighting ISIS with the support of US, condemned the act. “As soon as the airport situation is figured out and the foreign forces leave, we will not have such attacks anymore. It is because of the presence of foreign forces that such attacks take place,” said Abdul Qahar Balkhi, a member of the Taliban’s cultural commission.

At the airport, U.S. officials in Kabul gave the Taliban a list of names [sic!] of American citizens, green card holders and Afghan allies to grant entry into the militant-controlled outer perimeter of the city’s airport, a choice that's prompted outrage behind the scenes from lawmakers and military officials. (Politico).

Biden pledges retaliation for ISIS attack that killed US troops.
posted by - (85 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: Poster's Request -- goodnewsfortheinsane



 
"Biden pledges retaliation" The US will never ever learn. Get out, stay out, and don't fucking go in in the first place. There's no such thing as a military solution.

The poor people of Afghanistan. While the us president blasphemes over the Bible.
posted by unearthed at 1:30 AM on August 27, 2021 [16 favorites]


i think the taliban are going to find out that they can't control afghanistan either and the terrorists they can't get rid of are going to target china and russia next

biden has really screwed this up - we need to just get everyone out and stay out
posted by pyramid termite at 2:30 AM on August 27, 2021 [2 favorites]


Biden is maybe putting the icing on the crew-up cake, but the cake of shitty intentions, graft and corruption has been baking for the last twenty years.

The only chance he had (and an impossible one at that) was to turn that fiasco into a genuine, 'Marshall Plan' style rebuilding effort. One that actually did the work necessary to build a country from a loose agglomeration of regions.

It's a fucking tragedy, the whole thing. ("Never get involved in a land war in Asia" has rarely seemed so wise.)
posted by From Bklyn at 3:48 AM on August 27, 2021 [17 favorites]


Why is there a “[sic]” after list of names”? The sentence is spelled accurately and is grammatically correct.
posted by eviemath at 3:49 AM on August 27, 2021 [6 favorites]


biden has really screwed this up - we need to just get everyone out and stay out
But, Biden hasn't screwed up. He is getting us out. There was never not going to be consequences for our leaving. Biden just gutted up.
posted by Bee'sWing at 4:25 AM on August 27, 2021 [61 favorites]


I'm not sure rebuilding Afghanistan is a thing. The Marshall Plan directed aid to nations with functioning governments. It didn't create those governments.

Other than reluctance to surrender the globe we grew up with as children, is there a reason that particular shape in space should be one nation-state and not multiple?
posted by The Monster at the End of this Thread at 4:33 AM on August 27, 2021


Biden hasn't screwed up. He is getting us out.

He's getting the US out, and leaving so many behind to die in his haste. When this entire mess is America's fault, the least they could do is extract every Afghan who wants to leave the crater of a state the US is leaving behind.
posted by dazed_one at 4:36 AM on August 27, 2021 [5 favorites]


Why is there a “[sic]” after list of names”?

Look up the definition of sic.
posted by Pararrayos at 4:37 AM on August 27, 2021 [1 favorite]


Why is there a “[sic]” after list of names”?

I also don't get this. If it was a "joke" about this actually being true, then it probably should have gone after "allies." (Not to say that they weren't allies, but that the whole first phrase is somewhat unbelievable. Also, not a good joke in the first place.)

This is awful, and I think things should have been done better somehow. But I also feel like at some point something like this was inevitable. Wouldn't there always be people desperate to get out during the final days? If we were taking out everyone who wanted to go for many months, wouldn't that cause problems with the Taliban and the Afghan government? It is not obvious to me that there were alternatives that wouldn't lead to some variation of this or other huge problems or both.
posted by snofoam at 4:55 AM on August 27, 2021 [5 favorites]


I’m pretty sure Biden wasn’t the one who negotiated an exit with the Taliban without even bothering to include the nominal government of Afghanistan. Nor did Biden spend 20 years training a military that was unwilling and/or unable to fight the Taliban when the time came.
posted by TedW at 4:55 AM on August 27, 2021 [26 favorites]


He's getting the US out, and leaving so many behind to die in his haste. When this entire mess is America's fault, the least they could do is extract every Afghan who wants to leave the crater of a state the US is leaving behind.

Well (1) we haven’t left yet and are still extracting thousands despite the attack, and (2) “every Afghan who wants to leave” is probably half the country, so you might want to have a more realistic goal in mind.
posted by schoolgirl report at 5:01 AM on August 27, 2021 [7 favorites]


"(2) “every Afghan who wants to leave” is probably half the country, so you might want to have a more realistic goal in mind."

Maybe we should have thought of this before and during the 20 fucking years we were using the country to enrich defense contractors.
posted by dazed_one at 5:04 AM on August 27, 2021 [19 favorites]


we need to just get everyone out and stay out

Make them come to us, huh?
posted by Phanx at 5:05 AM on August 27, 2021


Do we even know the demographics of the Taliban and the people that will modernize if allowed? If there was a vote would most people elect a non-extreme government? As much as it seems there was no attempt to fight (except in the north, successfully so far) is the Taliban a small group or essentially the majority?
posted by sammyo at 5:06 AM on August 27, 2021


We have the bizarre situation of people calling for more yet military involvement because a US military intervention created blowback terrorist organization (ISIS-k) has attacked another US military intervention created blowback terrorist supporting organization (Taliban which supported Al-Qaeda).

Here we are and some people are still looking at infinite recursive enemy creation and forever war in the name of supposedly helping people.
posted by srboisvert at 5:15 AM on August 27, 2021 [13 favorites]


leaving so many behind to die in his haste

How long is long enough to not be haste? 20 years isn't enough?

Something like this was always going to happen as soon as it became clear the US really was going to leave, and leave the Afghan government such as it is to its own fate.

If you don't want the US to leave, what's you preference? Just keep flying around bombing weddings forever? Straight-up colonize the place and put it under direct rule?

When this entire mess is America's fault

The leaders of different ethnic groups in Afghanistan have had real agency in what happens in that land for a long while now.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 5:18 AM on August 27, 2021 [14 favorites]


The leaders of different ethnic groups in Afghanistan have had real agency in what happens in that land for a long while now.

The US went into Afghanistan with no exit strategy. During those two decades, the US held the purse strings, in effect choosing the Afghan leadership. The only way the US is not centrally involved in every layer of this shit sandwich is if they hadn't invaded Afghanistan in the first place. Exiting the country was inevitable - the US lost it's stupid war - but the exit could have been significantly better run than the chaos going on right now.

So yeah, this mess is America's fault and you have to ask, who profited from it?

Now, I'm not naive. I know the racist state of America isn't going to open its doors to the Afghan refugees it created, but more Americans need to be asking the question "are we the baddies?".
posted by dazed_one at 5:28 AM on August 27, 2021 [8 favorites]


Surprisingly enough, I asked because I know the definition of sic and it was not a usage that aligns well with it. For reference, however:

sic
adverb

: intentionally so written —used after a printed word or passage to indicate that it is intended exactly as printed or to indicate that it exactly reproduces an original
said he seed [sic] it all


Using [sic] Properly
Sic is a Latin term meaning “thus.” It is used to indicate that something incorrectly written is intentionally being left as it was in the original. Sic is usually italicized and always surrounded by brackets to indicate that it was not part of the original. Place [sic] right after the error.

Example: She wrote, “They made there [sic] beds.”

Note: The correct sentence should have been, “They made their beds.”

Why use [sic] at all? Why not just make the correction? If you are quoting material, it is generally expected that you will transcribe it exactly as it appeared in the original.


Sic in square brackets is an editing term used with quotations or excerpts. It means “that’s really how it appears in the original.”

It is used to point out a grammatical error, misspelling, misstatement of fact, or, as above, the unconventional spelling of a name.

For example, you might want to quote the printed introduction to a college catalog:

Maple Leaf College is well-known for it’s [sic] high academic standards.

Should You Use [sic] in Your Piece of Writing?

Alternatives to Using [sic]

posted by eviemath at 5:33 AM on August 27, 2021 [19 favorites]


The fall of an American empire: Afghanistan's collapse exposes the political decay in the heart of the West.

Michael Moore: For the past 12 days, President Biden has saved the lives of over 100,000 Americans and Afghans after the Taliban won the war and Kabul fell. Yet, he has been pilloried by pundits and armchair generals, and his approval rating has fallen. On this day of chaos, misery and suicide bombings, I want you to hear why President Biden has made a bold, courageous and smart move and why he deserves our thanks.
posted by No Robots at 6:13 AM on August 27, 2021 [6 favorites]


pyramid termite: “biden has really screwed this up”
No. The people who screwed this up all work in The Pentagon and have stars on their uniforms. There should have been plans within plans within plans for this withdrawal and what they did was leave one MEU as a rear guard? Seems to me the General Staff in this country is absolutely rotten and I think it's 30 years of war profiteering that's done it.
posted by ob1quixote at 6:19 AM on August 27, 2021 [38 favorites]


Gotta at least lay the precedent, strained as it may be, for the next war!

There’s yacht payments that gotta get made.
posted by spitbull at 7:02 AM on August 27, 2021 [1 favorite]


I was driving when the news played the clip of Biden pledging vengeance.

If ever we needed more proof to look past individuals and parties to see that systems prevail and we are all implicated in those systems, now is that time. I get it, many frequent posters are aware etc. But for all that, these systems persist and produce the misery we are seeing (most of us, rather comfortably from afar). The old quote about failing to stand up against the Nazis until it was too late has older roots, I'm sure. At some point some of our forebears developed the ability to recognize that when misery and misfortune visits neighbours, it is only a matter of time before misery and misfortune visits you.. that one brutal raiding party would inevitably invite a responding assault. The hope that our social histories produce more empathic, less murderous communities and better ways to solve tensions remains a hope, that's something I guess.
posted by elkevelvet at 7:39 AM on August 27, 2021


The reported death toll has doubled again.
posted by St. Oops at 7:51 AM on August 27, 2021


And apparently all the result of one bomber, not two as originally reported.
posted by schoolgirl report at 8:09 AM on August 27, 2021


it's war and war is applied chaos. what were expecting?
posted by philip-random at 8:22 AM on August 27, 2021 [1 favorite]


Re: Vengeance, this is one situation in which the US, the Taliban, Pakistan, and everyone else in the region including even Russia and China all share a common interest. Pretty much everyone would like to see ISIS offshoots ground into dust.

Also, what else can he really say? No US President would publicly throw up their hands and say "welp, nothing we can do ¯\_(ツ)_/¯" after a group of international terrorists kills US servicemembers. What matters isn't what he says, but what he does. Tracking the fuckers down as part of a multilateral operation would be quite fine by me. We've got some real nice surveillance drones that could help in that effort. Using it as an excuse to continue the forever war, not so much.
posted by wierdo at 9:07 AM on August 27, 2021 [7 favorites]


Maybe the inevitable loss due to the chaos of war
Maybe not


Perhaps by design, perhaps by incompetence, perhaps out of sheer spite or arrogance, Trump has created the circumstances for another Bay of Pigs, Black Hawk Down, or Benghazi," James Golby, who served as a special advisor to Vice President Mike Pence, wrote in a November article for The Atlantic.
posted by armoir from antproof case at 9:23 AM on August 27, 2021


Re: Vengeance, this is one situation in which the US, the Taliban, Pakistan, and everyone else in the region including even Russia and China all share a common interest. Pretty much everyone would like to see ISIS offshoots ground into dust.

Except for the Turks who would make a deal with Satan himself if it meant they got to fuck the Kurds in any way, shape or form.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 9:28 AM on August 27, 2021 [2 favorites]




People have been expecting some sort of horrific scenario when the crusaders withdrew for almost twenty years. This is just the version that happened. Afghanistan is when America gave America its own Vietnam. How many Marines died when Saigon fell?

Proclaiming vengeance? Oh fuck that noise. Previous US logic (enemy of enemy=friend), historically not great in the region, rather falls down when you've been beaten by the Taliban, and then the Taliban cop a blow from Takfiris while you're running away.

In terms of suppressing ISIS, at least the US has supplied the Taliban with an air-force, and loads of vehicles, night-vision etc for its new elite "Victory Force".
posted by pompomtom at 9:35 AM on August 27, 2021


In terms of refugees though: I think about 10% of Afghans are Hazara, and unless Iran can step up, they're all fucked - ISIS or Taliban or USA or whatever.
posted by pompomtom at 9:36 AM on August 27, 2021


Military Contractor CACI Says Afghanistan Withdrawal Is Hurting Its Profits. It's Funding a Pro-War Think Tank,” Sarah Lazare, In These Times, 25 August 2021

They want a war? We could head to their headquarters and place it under siege. Stop all the water, power, and sewer services to the building. Surround it with fortifications. Staff the fort with gun nuts of fortune with weapons trained at every point of ingress and egress.

Solves two birds with one stone. Gives all those gun nuts with weapons who want to cosplay army people something to do and CACI get their war.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 9:37 AM on August 27, 2021 [4 favorites]


No US President would publicly throw up their hands and say "welp, nothing we can do ¯\_(ツ)_/¯" after a group of international terrorists kills US servicemembers. What matters isn't what he says, but what he does.

I think that's part of the problem, that there's such well-understood limits that make it easy to get back on the incline towards forever war and difficult to de-escalate.
posted by CrystalDave at 9:48 AM on August 27, 2021


lol i am not watching an entire Gleen Greenwald video
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 9:57 AM on August 27, 2021 [23 favorites]


I can't really keep up but AFAIK the US funded and supplied (or funds and supplies) Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (AKA Al-Nusra Front, AKA Al Qaeda) to fight ISIS (classic), and also to fight the Syrian government because Iran. It seems like the Taliban should maybe be the next US ally, if anything of anything ever made any sense ever.

They're Sunni. They don't like Iran. They win wars. What's not to like?
posted by pompomtom at 10:01 AM on August 27, 2021 [1 favorite]


we need to just get everyone out and stay out

Make them come to us, huh?
posted by Phanx


I'm probably misreading your post, but did you just use the fight them over there, so we don't have to fight them here argument?
posted by Beholder at 10:03 AM on August 27, 2021


a military that was unwilling and/or unable to fight the Taliban when the time came.

Around 65,000 Afghan security forces have been killed since 2002. The large majority of those deaths were in the last 6 years. It’s not like ‘the time came’ a few weeks ago, Afghans have been fighting the Taliban and dying (in far greater numbers than American soldiers and contractors) for years.
posted by soy bean at 10:09 AM on August 27, 2021 [12 favorites]


No US President would publicly throw up their hands and say "welp, nothing we can do ¯\_(ツ)_/¯" after a group of international terrorists kills US servicemembers.

Trump did not publicly say anything after troops were killed by ISIS in Niger other than "Not my fault".
posted by srboisvert at 10:13 AM on August 27, 2021 [9 favorites]


Something that I think deserves more attention, and that I only really see in non-US press, is that this is not a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. While it is partly that, near as I can tell the withdrawal this is is of "Resolute Support Mission" -- a NATO operation that involved 36 countries and that formally ended last month. Certainly there's a story about the U.S.'s outsized role in NATO, and what our country has done there specifically, but there are other stories too. Anybody talking about Germany pulling their 1300 troops out at the end of June? Was that better, a good plan that avoided the deaths from extending a quagmire slightly further, or did they just successfully toss the hot potato off to other countries and got out while the getting was good?

I wasn't surprised to see the U.K. was number two in the number of soldiers being withdrawn in this final retreat, but was more surprised to see Turkey at number 3. I for one wouldn't enjoy a debate on whether Erdoğan himself was personally doing this too soon, too late, and/or in the wrong way but boy could people talk about that!

The point being, there absolutely is a U.S.-in-Afghanistan story here but it's not the only story and it's not the complete story. There are other sides, other voices, and other factors involved that need to be part of a full understanding.
posted by traveler_ at 10:20 AM on August 27, 2021 [18 favorites]


Before Kabul fell, but after it became obvious that the ANA wasn't offering anything like the level of resistance that had been forecast, there was a series of comments and interviews with former military and intelligence leaders basically saying, we got everything wrong in Afghanistan and we thought we trained an army capable of self defense but we didn't. This is of a kind but far worse than the fake WMDs in Iraq, in my opinion. There is plenty of evidence that people in the military/intelligence complex knew the truth but it just never bubbled up. Biden's mistake, such as it is, was taking their advice at face value. If the ANA still held Kabul as forecast, this would've almost been a non-issue. Clearly, military leaders saw this coming earlier in the year in enough time to begin to soft pedal the narrative. We then arrive, once again, at a fundamental question: what the fuck are the military and intelligence communities actually doing? This could've ended in Tora Bora.
posted by feloniousmonk at 10:41 AM on August 27, 2021 [11 favorites]


Biden is doing the best he can, with the terrible set of cards Trump laid out for him. That's not to let him off the hook for all of what has happened, and how, but all Biden can do is direct the military to follow out the terms of the peace agreement, at this point.

The human cost is very high, but maybe one positive to come out of Biden's approach might be to lend support to set up another nuclear deal with Iran, by showing that Trump's form of "do what feels good" diplomacy was an aberration and that the US can still stick to agreements. One fewer country with nuclear weapons would be a good thing, in the long run.

Whatever else, if the Taliban is back to its old ways, giving aid and comfort to terrorist groups (and it seems they are), containment is probably going to be the longer concern.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:07 AM on August 27, 2021 [3 favorites]


We should have fewer allied Afghans to pull out of Afghanistan because we should've been bringing them to the US for 20 years already. I can't be any angrier at Biden than I have been at the last three guys. This has been an unforgivable issue for decades.

Also worth noting for the issue of American citizens: the State Dept. has issued urgent warnings to Americans to get out since April, to the point of offering to cover the costs of flights in some cases. I'm not saying that to victim-blame, because I imagine a lot of those Americans had their own difficulties and reasons for staying, but the idea that the administration did nothing in the last few months just isn't true.

The problem with running a draw-down, evacuation, retreat, call it what you will, is that your force shrinks as time passes, making those that remain more vulnerable. This was always going to be an ugly mess. soy bean also makes a really good point about how much the Afghan army did fight in recent months & years and how many of them have died. They didn't just throw up their hands the first day the shooting started.

I can accept and agree with some criticism of Biden's handling of all this. It's also worth remembering that a great deal of that criticism is a lot of vague "This could be handled better" from people with no clear idea of what a realistic "better" looks like. And even more of it comes from people who would've supported Trump 100% when he inevitably abandoned literally every Afghan ally and refugee from the start.
posted by scaryblackdeath at 11:22 AM on August 27, 2021 [14 favorites]


Biden is doing the best he can, with the terrible set of cards Trump laid out for him. That's not to let him off the hook for all of what has happened, and how, but all Biden can do is direct the military to follow out the terms of the peace agreement, at this point.
A large fraction of critics have bent over backwards to avoid acknowledging this: the situation was arguably lost after 2003 or so (i.e. any discussion of blame should be focused on Bush), but it was certain before Biden took office. Trump had the Afghan government release thousands of prisoners, including some people who are now leaders, and removed most of the U.S. troops. The direct impact of that is overshadowed by the message that sent to everyone in the Afghan government: the Americans are leaving and you’d better make a deal now with the people who aren’t. Once someone makes an agreement with the other side, they’re not going to back out easily – just imagine the personal risk – and nothing Biden could was likely to change that. He could have reversed the troop drawdown but that wouldn’t have shifted loyalties on its own and it’s not clear that anything else done in this decade would, either.
posted by adamsc at 11:31 AM on August 27, 2021 [8 favorites]


Isn't ISIS-k kind of fighting against the current Taliban? I think it's jumping a bit to suggest that they are giving aid and comfort to ISIS-k.
posted by Windopaene at 11:34 AM on August 27, 2021 [1 favorite]


being experienced in such things, i think the u.s. ought to just pony up the membership fee and try to become contributing members of the community.
posted by 20 year lurk at 11:47 AM on August 27, 2021


Should I, after tea and cakes and ISIS,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
posted by kirkaracha at 11:48 AM on August 27, 2021 [3 favorites]


“Long, Invisible, and Highly Profitable,” Suzanne Schneider, n+1, 27 August 2021
posted by ob1quixote at 11:51 AM on August 27, 2021 [1 favorite]


Biden was VP for 8 years. I would expect him to know how efficient the Afgan forces are and how true public statements on that are as well. I think a big part of the withdrawal mismanagement can be laid at his feet.
posted by asra at 11:54 AM on August 27, 2021 [1 favorite]


The west has to ask itself: if IS is the enemy, does that make the Taliban our friends?
posted by adamvasco at 12:02 PM on August 27, 2021


I tried to say something about this article, but it is honestly just too maddening.

"Then-Vice President Joe Biden was right when he urged then-President Barack Obama to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen said Sunday, adding that the US could have left Afghanistan earlier."
posted by feloniousmonk at 12:09 PM on August 27, 2021 [3 favorites]


Bee'sWing There was never not going to be consequences for our leaving.

Unfortunately the whirlwind is not being reaped by the sower. For this to have had a chance of success it would have been a 75 year project, a real civilisation may have a chance - China may go next.

The Monster at the End of this Thread Other than reluctance to surrender the globe we grew up with as children, is there a reason that particular shape in space should be one nation-state and not multiple?

Divide and rule is traditional, but the people (all people*) should be left in peace.

* including the people of the "eighty-five countries" where the "US conducted counterterrorism operations" in the last couple of years - from ob1quixote's link above. I'm highly skeptical of anything the US does in the way of CT and that includes the other eyes in the pact.
posted by unearthed at 12:14 PM on August 27, 2021 [2 favorites]


What this thread and especially the [sic] after "Taliban" because it's actually multiple groups - "talibans" - is making me realize is that after 20 years I still know very little about Afghanistan. I don't think I have anything like the knowledge to judge whether this is being flubbed, handled the best it could be given the circumstances, or something in between. And I don't think most commentators know enough to judge either. The only thing I do believe is that it was a mistake to go into Afghanistan, that the occupation was horribly mismanaged from the beginning, and that getting out is the correct choice. Also that the refugees shouldn't have to go to Mexico bc some of the American public are too racist to resettle them here.
posted by subdee at 12:29 PM on August 27, 2021 [7 favorites]


if IS is the enemy, does that make the Taliban our friends?

I thought we made that decision in Feb 2020 -- when Pompeo signed the deal with the Taliban (PDF available on state.gov) to remove our forces in exchange for them vaguely promising to fight enemies of the U.S, and the POTUS at the time said that it was "time for someone else to do that work and it will be the Taliban"
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 12:31 PM on August 27, 2021 [4 favorites]


We should have fewer allied Afghans to pull out of Afghanistan because we should've been bringing them to the US for 20 years already. I can't be any angrier at Biden than I have been at the last three guys.

Stephen Miller basically shut down the visa program for Afghans. Biden's people restarted it earlier this year, but had a backlog of something like 17,500 applicants that they had to work through. Given that the vetting process is probably non-trivial, I don't think it's reasonable to expect they could have just cleared that all up in a few months.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 2:22 PM on August 27, 2021 [6 favorites]


Here are some things to keep in mind when considering all the criticisms of Biden over the Afghanistan situation.

In almost every case, when you really look what's being explicitly or implicitly proposed by the people saying "He should have done it differently!", it boils down to some version of:

(1) Sending more U.S. troops in Afghanistan,
(2) For a longer, if not indefinite, period of time.

You cannot increase and extend our troop presence while simultaneously drawing it down and ending it.

You cannot exercise total and perfect control while simultaneously giving up control.

We all have to deal with our internalized imperialistic assumptions. It is not the job, or the obligation, of the U.S. president, or the U.S. government generally, to be an omniscient, omnipotent world policeman.

We have to accept that some things are simply not under our control.

War is chaos, and suffering, and death. Afghanistan has been at war, and in chaos, to some degree or another for decades. Over the last 20 years, some of that chaos was caused by our presence. What is happening this week is not as exceptional as it may appear -- it's just that most of the chaos and suffering and death happened out of the range of our TV cameras, or was carefully edited for our consumption in a way that supported official government narratives.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 2:34 PM on August 27, 2021 [16 favorites]


No. The people who screwed this up all work in The Pentagon and have stars on their uniforms.

the president is the commander in chief - he is ultimately responsible

---

In almost every case, when you really look what's being explicitly or implicitly proposed by the people saying "He should have done it differently!", it boils down to some version of:

(1) Sending more U.S. troops in Afghanistan,
(2) For a longer, if not indefinite, period of time.


no

1) get the civilians out before the military goes
2) don't leave a shitload of hardware for anyone to use

it's not the concept of getting out i have the problem with - the execution was a clusterfuck, one that could well lose democrats the next couple of elections

especially if they continue to made bad excuses for bad leadership
posted by pyramid termite at 3:06 PM on August 27, 2021 [5 favorites]


Well, if the US had started evacuating civilians who wanted to leave before US troops began leaving, the US would have to accept hundreds of thousands of refugees created by this war of theirs and that sounds an awful lot like consequences and they sure can't face those.

Much easier to just bug out and say fuck it. Maybe wring your hands a little bit afterwards for the cameras.
posted by dazed_one at 5:28 PM on August 27, 2021 [2 favorites]


And Trump laughs in Mar-A-Lago
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 6:23 PM on August 27, 2021


I said:

In almost every case, when you really look what's being explicitly or implicitly proposed by the people saying "He should have done it differently!", it boils down to some version of:

(1) Sending more U.S. troops in Afghanistan,
(2) For a longer, if not indefinite, period of time.

pyramid termite said:

no

1) get the civilians out before the military goes
2) don't leave a shitload of hardware for anyone to use

Your point (1) looks to me like basically a restatement of what I said above: You think we should leave troops in AFG longer.

As for point (2): We took home our own essential hardware. The stuff the Taliban captured, as I understand it, is stuff we gave to the Afghan army.

But if we *hadn't* given so much equipment to the Afghan army, I'm sure the critics would be slamming Biden for that instead.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 6:34 PM on August 27, 2021 [3 favorites]


Well, if the US had started evacuating civilians who wanted to leave before US troops began leaving, the US would have to accept hundreds of thousands of refugees created by this war of theirs and that sounds an awful lot like consequences and they sure can't face those.

The (late) Afghan government demanded that we *not* conduct mass evacuations starting months ago, because they thought it would lead to panic.

But if we had done so anyway, and the army and government collapsed on the same timetable as they ended up doing, I'm 1000% confident that the armchair quarterbacks would be saying, "Biden shouldn't have started evacuating people so early! The Afghan government warned him it would create panic!"
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 6:36 PM on August 27, 2021 [6 favorites]


1) get the civilians out before the military goes
2) don't leave a shitload of hardware for anyone to use
How does this work? As soon as you announce #1, that seems like we’d see basically the same collapse with people changing sides since it’s telling everyone in the region that you’re leaving and the balance of power will be shifting — and there’s no way to do it secretly on that scale. #2 is similar: most of the equipment they got was owned by the Afghan government — destroying it is declaring war on your ostensible ally who was in theory going to use it to fight the Taliban (and with something like 65k casualties definitely had the need).

The main thing which would have helped would have been clearing the backlog of visas but that runs into domestic politicians blocking it. Maybe having pre-arranged bases with refugee camps, but again when news goes out that’s putting up a giant billboard saying “we’re gone, make new arrangements” to a lot of people who control local conditions.
posted by adamsc at 6:39 PM on August 27, 2021 [5 favorites]


How does this work?

It don't really and Biden knows it. Operation Eagle Push should have taught him. Though Operation Eagle Pull is considered a "success" but ask the Cambodian people that. Truces can turn FUBAR quick. For example, the Christmas bombing halt in '67..."During the bombing halt, a representative of the North Vietnamese Politburo addressed PAVN/VC leadership in Thua Thien Province near Huế about the go-ahead for what would become known as the Tet Offensive" and on "30 December...North Vietnam's Foreign Minister, Nguyen Duy Trinh, stated that his nation would open peace discussions as soon as the United States halted bombing. President Thieu stated that he “saw no real change” in the North Vietnamese Foreign Minister's formulation for peace, while U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk questioned the sincerity of the Hanoi regime, in light of the fact that the North Vietnamese had ordered an offensive for the winter season and had already violated the holiday truces. Former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower later warned President Johnson that "we must not put ourselves in the position of depending upon belief in what a Communist says."
Johnson's fuck up cost lives in a war we should have never got involved.
posted by clavdivs at 7:12 PM on August 27, 2021


Our presence in Afganistan is ending. The last president said by September. Biden threw it into gear and Afghanistan crumbled under the Taliban offensive. Once we said we were out, Afghanistan became Afghanistan. Maybe enough Afghanis have fought with and against women to learn their strength. Maybe they will ultimately all work together to save themselves from fanaticism in their ranks. We are leaving period. Get off our leadership. Afghanistan lost more than ten times the number than the US did, in the attack. It is easy enough to say, for ISIS to say, they set up the suicide bombing. But no one really knows who did that. How much is it worth to discredit this administration, in this time when we are ending our involvement overseas? People make a lot of money off of war. They hate giving it up. Collateral damage, airplane rides for sale, offers to handle the war privately, this smells of, reeks of politics. The rapid undeployment is a nightmare, and whipping at the people handling the situation is irresponsible, and with so many lives hanging, it is not supportive of the efforts being made, everywhere. Right now, the Taliban are faced with the chaos they made by usurpation. They are bound to see, their people deserve more of a voice and some safety. We are lucky, lucky, lucky, to live in a secular society. I wish the Afghanis well in their newly evolving nation. It might grow peacefully if we, and everyone else can get out. War and profiteering from war is some people's only job. God help anyone who gets in the way of it.
posted by Oyéah at 8:22 PM on August 27, 2021 [4 favorites]


The way we reward the ones who get us into war and punish the ones who get us out of it says everything. War is holy and sacred to the United States in its own way.
posted by ichomp at 8:42 PM on August 27, 2021 [7 favorites]


That country is isolated, phone lines, cable, modernization is kept out. Technology will seep in. Several generations from now locals with quality knowledge will bubble up. But it will be organic or the locals will not be able to deal.

Look Bush's missed opportunity was the week after 9/11. The message should have been, stay home and be peaceful, if you come at America you have a couple hours to win (the third plane was a terrorist failure). Bush should've skipped the security theater and ramped up STEM and economic development. And sent vast quantities of books to Iraq and Afghanistan (and their neighbors).

So will the Chinese get jucy mining contracts? Is there really huge natural resources in them 'stan mountains?
posted by sammyo at 8:45 PM on August 27, 2021 [2 favorites]


How does this work?

1. Send enough planes.
2. Worry about the paperwork stateside.

Well, plus: 0. Have processed way more applications regularly over the last 20 years, because this isn’t an entirely new threat to the Afghans who wanted to be evacuated, just more immediately urgent. And: 0.5 Don’t install a barely functional kleptocratic/colonial puppet regime after invading other countries. But unfortunately we can’t change those historic failures from the present day.
posted by eviemath at 8:52 PM on August 27, 2021 [6 favorites]


The (late) Afghan government demanded that we *not* conduct mass evacuations starting months ago

LOL everyone knows the US doesn't give a shit what the Afghan government thought or demanded. Just look at the treaty made with the Taliban. What's the real reason the US didn't start ferrying out the soon-to-be refugees?
posted by dazed_one at 9:42 PM on August 27, 2021 [1 favorite]


I don't know, did you have a conspiracy theory to offer, or just vague, cynical insinuations of one?
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 11:34 PM on August 27, 2021 [3 favorites]


The real issue is that Lithium. None the less the 2016 Warsaw summit garnered like a billion to the government of Afghanistan through 2020. I'm sure the Reptile fund kept the local warlords flush none the less as to withdrawl, see the British twice or the soviets. An issue of importance is that the guise of total US withdrawal will allow China to help Afghanistan with that mining thing. The Taliban just months ago warned other countries, including Pakistan not to allow A US base.

The question is if this goes bad because soon, everyone is going to want that Lithium
posted by clavdivs at 12:54 AM on August 28, 2021 [1 favorite]


"a war begun for no wise purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, brought to a close after suffering and disaster, without much glory attached either to the government which directed, or the great body of troops which waged it. Not one benefit, political or military, was acquired with this war. Our eventual evacuation of the country resembled the retreat of an army defeated”.

-G.R. Gleig, 1843
.


posted by clavdivs at 1:05 AM on August 28, 2021 [3 favorites]


To the person asking how people feel about Germany's withdrawal, it is a huge huge scandal and disaster that is front page news every day. The government had no idea supposedly how fast the Taliban would take over. In the weeks before the fall of Kabul, they were deporting people TO Afghanistan, saying it was totally safe. They have been completely incompetent at helping local allies escape Afghanistan. Red tape combined with no real plan have meant not everyone who helped German forces has been able to be flown out of Afghanistan as promised. The repeated dire warnings of the embassy in Kabul were ignored and ignored until it was basically too late. The people responsible are pointing fingers at each other, saying no one could have known or done anything, look even the Americans didn't know. Which is true, if American intelligence didn't know what chance did anyone else have? But still, the German government definitely dragged its feet and left people behind.
posted by starfishprime at 1:06 AM on August 28, 2021 [3 favorites]


Your point (1) looks to me like basically a restatement of what I said above: You think we should leave troops in AFG longer.

no, i'm saying the planning should have started earlier and the execution should have been much better

but what we have here is people who will defend a democratic president for something they would have condemned a republican president for doing

this is a clusterfuck and nothing you type here changes that simple fact - if you say it couldn't have been done better than this, i don't believe you
posted by pyramid termite at 11:05 AM on August 28, 2021 [4 favorites]




It was always going to be a shitshow, and when you're planning an you know that however well you do your job it's going to be an absolute clusterfuck at best, and you're going to get reamed out from all sides, let's just say there's not a lot of incentive to do your best work. I'm not saying it couldn't have gone better, but I don't see how it could have gone better ENOUGH for anyone to bother trying to do it better.
posted by rikschell at 5:35 PM on August 28, 2021


There is a lot of misinformation being fed to our fighters here, and a lot of spew. I heard about the contents of one letter supposedly from the Taliban to US forces. I think there is a lot of false intel coming out of the quarter that might be making bad plans. I heard twice today about locals not being allowed to discuss the military or what is going on. Since I am in redland here, it makes me nervous, that people like Pompeo, Flynn, and Prince, three of the four horsemen of the poxylips will foment chaos here, and try to replace the government. In the regular news all of these state audits have turned up nothing, but in the whack news, Biden is not the rightful president, which has been proven by these very same audits. I think hall of mirrirs doesn't even cover what is going on in this country, not to mention Afghanistan. We need to support their government, what ever it turns out to be. They have a long painful road to continue to travel, but maybe they have picked up some sound government practices by now. Truth is, it might be that Afghanistan can become a sovereign nation, and sell their goods, and protect their environment, and realize their country is not spoils for conquerors any more, even if they present as brothers. I read in the Times or Wapo, the Taliban wants us to keep our embassy open. I am not a romantic dreamer, but everyone gets a chance to nation build. Lots of money poured in, maybe it did some good on the ground.
posted by Oyéah at 8:21 PM on August 28, 2021 [2 favorites]


The lithium mining angle is a red herring. There is no shortage of lithium ore. Afghanistan isn't even in the top six countries in terms of lithium reserves; both the US and China are higher, and here in the US we basically don't even bother to mine the stuff because it's not cost-effective. (Though everyone's favorite eccentric billionaire wants to start.) Western Australia now supplies around 60% of global supply from only five mines; there are lots of other places it could be mined, but only if prices increase to make it worthwhile to do so.

There is a significant bottleneck in the supply of lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide for batteries, but that's more related to lithium processing, which is done almost exclusively in China regardless of where the ore comes from. That's a very capital-intensive, environmentally-nasty industry, and apparently nobody can or wants to compete with the Chinese right now.

Anyway, derail over, moving on...
but what we have here is people who will defend a democratic president for something they would have condemned a republican president for doing
Yeah. I've seen a lot of this in the last week or so. Political tribalism at its finest. Biden can do no wrong because he's not named Trump, "Trump did worse to the Kurds!" (as though that's an excuse), etc. It's gross, if not exactly unexpected.

While it's always nice to see politicians take an interest in the way soldiers' lives are being expended, it certainly seems like somewhat suspicious timing that there's suddenly so much interest in avoiding casualties, when there hasn't been exactly an overwhelming feeling of concern emanating from Washington over the last two decades, regardless of which party was in power at the time.

To paraphrase a good friend currently working on the evacuation: "We lost 2000-plus people over 20 years on a bullshit war, but the second we get a chance to actually do something worthwhile, suddenly we can't afford to risk anything."

There are many worse goals to which the US military has been put over the last 75 years than rescuing anyone who wanted to get out of Afghanistan before we left it to the Taliban would have been. Even if that had meant additional US casualties, those casualties would have been—and how rarely can one say this—in the service of something good, decent, and honorable. There was an opportunity for the military to do the job it aspires to do, that it trains to do, rather than be purely the pointy end of the imperial stick used to prod uncooperative parts of the world.

It seems somewhat less than flattering that Biden can't see any use or role for the military once the narrow aims of realpolitik have been crossed off as impossibilities. As soon as there's no hope for a US puppet state, it's apparently time to pull chocks.
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:54 PM on August 30, 2021 [4 favorites]


And... it's over.

Per an unnamed source at JSOC: "Last plane went wheels up as of 1530. No US military presence in AFG."
posted by Kadin2048 at 2:45 PM on August 30, 2021 [1 favorite]


As soon as there's no hope for a US puppet state, it's apparently time to pull chocks.

Is this an argument for occupation? I don’t get what else people mean when they say this.
posted by ichomp at 3:53 PM on August 30, 2021


Chocks go around airplane wheels to keep them in place. Pulling the chocks happens just before taking off; i.e. leaving.
posted by achrise at 4:17 PM on August 30, 2021


There is no shortage of lithium ore
Not know as it's everywhere, but soon. Afghanistan has yet to produce a mining industry for all the rare earth material.
The Chinese are already lining up for concessions, it more of an economic factor like why isn't Chile supplying 60%...."But in Chile, scientists are finding that the rapid rate of removal may be disrupting water availability in the surrounding desert"

It about the minerals and opium.
posted by clavdivs at 6:41 PM on August 30, 2021


It about the minerals and opium.

It about the dick-waving.

Taliban can/would/have-previously shut down the opium industry. Synthetic fentanyl will own that market.
New lithium mining there is daft compared to, say, WA, where the govt wants nothing more than more mines.

The point is that now the USA is just a "power" where it was once a "super-power".

Being able to end life on this planet is not special any more. Loads of countries can do it. TBH it's just going to happen anyway, job done.
Being able to control other nations by hard power is no longer solely the domain of the US.
Being able to control other nations by soft power? Hollywood vs Belt-and-Road? I'd bet on the latter.
posted by pompomtom at 9:39 AM on September 3, 2021


This was just posted on Reddit: an 8 minute video shot by a Marine during the evacuation of Kabul. (Youtube link)

Content warning for violence (though relativity mild) and filthy toilets.
posted by riruro at 6:29 AM on September 4, 2021 [1 favorite]


“The Logistics of Evacuating Afghanistan”—Wendover Productions, 08 September 2021
posted by ob1quixote at 4:53 PM on September 8, 2021


I don’t get what else people mean when they say this.

Usually interventions have been designed to help the good guys (or our guys) win. That hasn’t worked well. But is it worth running a policy where the interventions are simply designed to stop the killing and destruction, forcing the locals back to politics/negotiation?
posted by Phanx at 1:37 AM on September 9, 2021




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