US strikes deal w/ Taliban to remove troops from Afghanistan (1 Viewer)

[Heathen]

Surprised I didn't see it posted anywhere. And to preface -- I know there are too many contextual complexities to name regarding this.

Props to this administration for pushing to get this done. Endless war shouldn't be what American citizens view as 'normal'.

This would be a huge win for Americans and Afghanis if this works out as planned:

Afghan conflict: US and Taliban sign deal to end 18-year war

President Trump says it is "time after all these years to bring our people back home".

www.bbc.com

The US and Nato allies have agreed to withdraw all troops within 14 months if the militants uphold the deal.

President Trump said it had been a "long and hard journey" in Afghanistan. "It's time after all these years to bring our people back home," he said.

Talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban are due to follow.

Under the agreement, the militants also agreed not to allow al-Qaeda or any other extremist group to operate in the areas they control.

 

[Lapaz]

I can appreciate the decision to withdraw. I did when Trump said it, I still do under Biden.

But neither had a good exit plan. It was sloppy then, and it’s sloppy now.

But but - I don’t know a better way to have done it aside from an actual assault on the Taliban before leaving. There was no way they weren’t going to press on once US forces withdrew.

Now we’re seeing just how…bad…Afghan forces really are, despite us being there for so long training and equipping them. If we have to go back in, it’s going to cost lives to get those cities back. The situation sucks on the whole.

If we stop the withdrawal now, it will be much less costly in the future, because the Taliban will know they can't progress any further without negotiating. We had to go back into Iraq when Isis took over and started committing atrocities. We could let that happen and turn a blind eye if we knew that those terrorists wouldn't also start plotting to attack the West, but history shows they probably will. Also, I think it will take a continuous long term presence without a timeline to establish a stable government that can deter terrorists.

Lastly, most of the current soldiers didn't grow up in a society with a stable and non-corrupt government. It takes generations of stability. We can either stay at little cost, or leave, and pay for it later.

 

[samiam5211]

We would need a semi-permanent occupation of Afghanistan for it to end with anything but the Taliban returning to power.

Maybe if 3 generations were able to grow up with things like education for girls, the Taliban would fade away, but 20 years isn’t long enough.

This was never going to not end in disaster.

 

[Devildog]

We would need a semi-permanent occupation of Afghanistan for it to end with anything but the Taliban returning to power.

Maybe if 3 generations were able to grow up with things life education for girls, the Taliban would fade away, but 20 years isn’t long enough.

This was never going to not end in disaster.

Yep. I mean, how long is enough? 10, 20, 30, 40 years? No. We'd have to be there for the better part of a century and that's forking dumb.

 

[GrandAdmiral]

Looks like Kabul is about to fall...

Afghanistan's president flees the country as Taliban moves to take Kabul

Civilians fearing that the Taliban could reimpose the kind of brutal rule that all but eliminated women's rights rushed to leave the country.

www.cbsnews.com

 

[bdb13]

I agree with the general idea that it wouldn't really matter if it had been another five or 10 years.. this was the way it was going to go down.

But Biden's going to take a hit to some varying degree on this regardless as the optics and reality of the situation there now are obviously rather poor. I thought that this probably was 'inevitable' but the swiftness of it has been crazy.

 

[CoolBrees]

When you don’t include the sitting government in a territorial summit they are immediately illegitimate to the Taliban.

you have sent the message that the government’s opinion is not necessary or wanted.

to the Taliban it was a silent coup, and for the sitting government it was a global embarrassment. No wonder their army never stood up. They were demoralized and knew they were going to be left to twist I. The wind before the Taliban even began their advancement.

Leaving now is the only option other than continued occupation. Which is untenable. So leaving and helping refugees is the only option we are left with.

just a horrible end to a terrible chapter in American history. Hopefully we won’t whitewash this and wonder why they hate us in 20 years (like Iran)

 

[bdb13]

The rapid fall of Afghanistan's national forces and government has come as a shock to Biden and senior members of his administration, who only last month believed it could take months before the civilian government in Kabul fell -- allowing a period of time after American troops left before the full consequences of the withdrawal were laid bare.

Now, officials are frankly admitting they miscalculated.

The fact of the matter is we've seen that that force has been unable to defend the country," Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CNN's Jake Tapper on "State of the Union," referring to Afghanistan's national security forces. "And that has happened more quickly than we anticipated."
...
The notion the civilian government led by President Ashraf Ghani would be unable to withstand the Taliban's advances is not a surprise. Intelligence assessments over the past year have offered differing timetables for what was viewed by many national security officials as an inevitability.

Biden himself has said repeatedly over the last months, including when Ghani visited him in the Oval Office this summer, that Afghanistan's leaders would need to reconcile their differences if they had any hope of maintaining power.

And Blinken said Sunday that "we've known all along, we've said all along including the President, that the Taliban was at its greatest position of strength at any time since 2001 when it was last in charge of the country. That is the Taliban that we inherited. And so we saw they were very much capable of going on the offensive and beginning to take back the country."

Yet the downfall and collapse of the Afghan military has happened far quicker than Biden or his team expected.

Ghani left the country on Sunday for Tajikistan, two sources told CNN. Afghan Chairman of the High Council for National Reconciliation Abdullah Abdullah referred to him in a video statement as "former President."

American officials have expressed dismay at Ghani's inability to protect key cities and regions from the Taliban, despite laying out a strategy for doing so during his communications with Biden and other senior US leaders.
...
Last week, the President told reporters there was still a possibility the government could hold up, saying a newly installed military commander was a "serious fighter." And as recently as Friday, the administration said the Afghan capital of Kabul was not in an "imminent threat environment."

https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/15/politics/biden-administration-taliban-kabul-afghanistan/index.html

I think it's fair to say the Biden admin has.. been caught flat flooded/off guard and wasn't prepared for it to go to complete hell so quickly. Looks rather incompetent to say Kabul is not in imminent danger when it then basically falls two days later.

 

[GrandAdmiral]

I truly hope this teaches nations of the West (again) that you can't nation-build countries that don't want it. We should've learned from the utter failure the Brits went through. But no... Iraq, Afghanistan... both failures.

Unfortunately, I can see history repeating itself again.

 

[zztop]

So from skimming some articles, a lot of the military didn't have things like food, ammunition and weren't getting paid. The government was corrupt and commanding officers were telling their troops to surrender. Sounds like a perfect storm.

The Afghan Military Was Built Over 20 Years. How Did It Collapse So Quickly? (Published 2021)

The Taliban’s rapid advance has made clear that U.S. efforts to turn Afghanistan’s military into a robust, independent fighting force have failed, with its soldiers feeling abandoned by inept leaders.

www.nytimes.com

It began with individual outposts in rural areas where starving and ammunition-depleted soldiers and police units were surrounded by Taliban fighters and promised safe passage if they surrendered and left behind their equipment, slowly giving the insurgents more and more control of roads, then entire districts. As positions collapsed, the complaint was almost always the same: There was no air support or they had run out of supplies and food.

...
Soldiers and policemen have expressed ever-deeper resentment of the Afghan leadership. Officials often turned a blind eye to what was happening, knowing full well that the Afghan forces’ real manpower count was far lower than what was on the books, skewed by corruption and secrecy that they quietly accepted.

And when the Taliban started building momentum after the United States’ announcement of withdrawal, it only increased the belief that fighting in the security forces — fighting for President Ashraf Ghani’s government — wasn’t worth dying for. In interview after interview, soldiers and police officers described moments of despair and feelings of abandonment.

...
On one frontline in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar last week, the Afghan security forces’ seeming inability to fend off the Taliban’s devastating offensive came down to potatoes.

After weeks of fighting, one cardboard box full of slimy potatoes was supposed to pass as a police unit’s daily rations. They hadn’t received anything other than spuds in various forms in several days, and their hunger and fatigue were wearing them down.

“These French fries are not going to hold these front lines!” a police officer yelled, disgusted by the lack of support they were receiving in the country’s second-largest city.

By Thursday, this front line collapsed, and Kandahar was in Taliban control by Friday morning.

 

[Taurus]

Just a breathtaking failure of intel.

 

[Lapaz]

Keeping less than 3000 soldiers there to support is not occupation of the country. The terrorists will establish themselves and it will have a negative impact on our security. This was an unforced error. It took more than 20 years to establish democracy in Korea. I would’ve given it another 20 years, since it was costing us very little. It will cost us more to try to deal with the terrorists in Pakistan without a base in Afghanistan.

 

[bdb13]

The US has flown approximately 500 staff members from the US embassy in Kabul out of Afghanistan today, a defense official told CNN.

Approximately 4,000 US embassy staff members are still to fly out of the country, including US citizens and Afghan nationals who work for the embassy, two defense officials said.

That number does not include family members of the Afghan staffers. The US plan for those family members remains unclear at this time.

The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Afghanistan latest news as Taliban edges closer to taking control: Live updates

The Taliban have taken control of the presidential palace in Kabul after the country's president Ashraf Ghani fled the country. Follow here for the latest news.

amp.cnn.com

I'm hoping there's not a problem there..

 

[GrandAdmiral]

Keeping less than 3000 soldiers there to support is not occupation of the country. The terrorists will establish themselves and it will have a negative impact on our security. This was an unforced error. It took more than 20 years to establish democracy in Korea. I would’ve given it another 20 years, since it was costing us very little. It will cost us more to try to deal with the terrorists in Pakistan without a base in Afghanistan.

I wouldn't. It's hard to commit American lives to support a nation who won't fight for itself. Nation-building is a two-way street, but the US was the only one doing all of the work.

 

[Kerry Won Ohio]

So from skimming some articles, a lot of the military didn't have things like food, ammunition and weren't getting paid. The government was corrupt and commanding officers were telling their troops to surrender. Sounds like a perfect storm.

The Afghan Military Was Built Over 20 Years. How Did It Collapse So Quickly? (Published 2021)

The Taliban’s rapid advance has made clear that U.S. efforts to turn Afghanistan’s military into a robust, independent fighting force have failed, with its soldiers feeling abandoned by inept leaders.

www.nytimes.com

It began with individual outposts in rural areas where starving and ammunition-depleted soldiers and police units were surrounded by Taliban fighters and promised safe passage if they surrendered and left behind their equipment, slowly giving the insurgents more and more control of roads, then entire districts. As positions collapsed, the complaint was almost always the same: There was no air support or they had run out of supplies and food.

...
Soldiers and policemen have expressed ever-deeper resentment of the Afghan leadership. Officials often turned a blind eye to what was happening, knowing full well that the Afghan forces’ real manpower count was far lower than what was on the books, skewed by corruption and secrecy that they quietly accepted.

And when the Taliban started building momentum after the United States’ announcement of withdrawal, it only increased the belief that fighting in the security forces — fighting for President Ashraf Ghani’s government — wasn’t worth dying for. In interview after interview, soldiers and police officers described moments of despair and feelings of abandonment.

...
On one frontline in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar last week, the Afghan security forces’ seeming inability to fend off the Taliban’s devastating offensive came down to potatoes.

After weeks of fighting, one cardboard box full of slimy potatoes was supposed to pass as a police unit’s daily rations. They hadn’t received anything other than spuds in various forms in several days, and their hunger and fatigue were wearing them down.

“These French fries are not going to hold these front lines!” a police officer yelled, disgusted by the lack of support they were receiving in the country’s second-largest city.

By Thursday, this front line collapsed, and Kandahar was in Taliban control by Friday morning.

I also read a lot about this recently in the Washington Post. A lot of good reporting.

It also needs to be said that our government lied to us about progress in Afghanistan, at least for the past 15 - 16 years. And that includes our military leadership. Military commanders in Afghanistan repeatedly painted a rosy picture of the situation, as did Presidents Bush and Obama.

It was well-known via reports throughout the country that the Afghan government was hopelessly corrupt and that the U.S. presence was doing very little besides propping up this corrupt government.

 

[Kerry Won Ohio]

Keeping less than 3000 soldiers there to support is not occupation of the country. The terrorists will establish themselves and it will have a negative impact on our security. This was an unforced error. It took more than 20 years to establish democracy in Korea. I would’ve given it another 20 years, since it was costing us very little. It will cost us more to try to deal with the terrorists in Pakistan without a base in Afghanistan.

Not a good idea. Those 3,000 American soldiers would be constantly attacked by a much larger Taliban force. The costs outweigh the benefits.

 

[Kerry Won Ohio]

I was thinking about this earlier, because I read the taliban just overran the 2nd largest city in Afghanistan. You saw that with isis too. All those billions in hardware and training the locals... they buckled and ran (left behind the equipment too). Sad for the innocent bystanders living there.

When cops and soldiers are not paid for 8 - 9 months by a corrupt Afghan government, then nobody should be surprised that their morale is in the toilet and they don't want to fight. That's especially true when the Taliban was offering each Afghan soldier $150 to lay down their arms throughout the country.

 

[SaulGoodmanEsq]

Most everyone who was being honest with themselves predicted this twenty years ago before the Bush administration started such an ill-advised approach. To be sure, Biden deserves some blame for bungling the withdrawal and not allowing those who wished to leave the country time to get out. Perhaps they were caught flat-footed by the Afghan government simply surrendering.

What is hilarious is the GOP has already embraced the talking point, removing all references to supporting Trump's withdrawal's platform and laying all of this on Biden's feet. Not really sure how much more he could have done short of prolonging the occupation. The funny thing most of these GOP (and Trump supporters) were the same ones chanting "USA! USA USA!" when we initially started the war and denounced those who opposed it as "not having the stomach for war." That the Afghan government fell in a couple of weeks after two decades and trillions of dollars of U.S. support speaks more to the past administrations.

This is very much the Fall of Saigon 2.0. Hopefully people finally learn the lesson this time.

 

[SaulGoodmanEsq]

I mean... jeez...