In reply to: Afghanistan posted by ACross
As a career military guy on the tactical side of things, the mind-boggling move was staging the evacuation from Kabul Intl rather than Bagram. Bagram is the fortress. Any 10 year-old who has played a strategy game on an iPhone could tell you that.
That said, we abandoned a population we committed to protect. Beyond the civil population there were interpreters and other individuals we had a duty to protect. The generation that would have led Afghanistan to a better future was in their teens when we abandoned them. They were too young, inexperienced, uneducated and weak when we left - but that calculus would have been different given another 10-20 years to grow. It breaks my heart to think of the girls whose education came to a grinding halt because we left with our tail between our legs.
I also believe we left a massive power vacuum in an important strategic area. An American presence at the center of Iran, China and Pakistan was valuable. More than anything, turning our backs on individuals that put their own safety, and that of their families, at risk to assist us is a stain on our moral fabric as a nation.
Um, yeah. No way.
In my opinion we needed out, so I appreciate both Trump's and Biden's efforts to rip off the bandaid.
I certainly appreciate that we fucked up the evac and could have (potentially) exited more gracefully. Like Across, I'm no military expert or planner either. But it would seem odd that it was the White House that decided to stage the evacuation from Kabul rather than Bagram. Wouldn't that be a DoD decision, or am I missing something? Did the White House overrule our military experts?
We've been in Europe longer than that...perspective.
We are not privy to what happened behind closed doors regarding details of our Afghanistan exit. No one in this administration - neither Biden, his cabinet nor the joint chiefs - want to shine a light onto the planning process behind the biggest embarrassment of the administration.
With regard to your last question, civilian leadership is in charge of the military in this country. It's that way by design. POTUS is the commander in chief and can override the military, not the other way around. The chain of command is POTUS, then SECDEF, then the Joint Chiefs and combatant commanders. Make no mistake, the latter might as well be political appointees as well.
That’s the difference, short of an absolute dictatorship (Saudi Arabia) we’ve only stayed around in places that want us.
that would have allowed us to protect or allies and their families.
Looked? It seems that at some level you'd have needed to surge troops into the country to actively fight and likely take casualties at a level we'd last seen under Obama. All to get out a little more slowly? Who was going to cooperate with us if that intervention was only going to be temporary?
to get the Taliban to cut the shit long enough to fulfill what ACross suggested.
Knocking the table over and leaving all of your chips on the ground after you spill them is not how you play poker or negotiate. Teddy KGB wouldn't do that with Grama sitting over his shoulder. An AC130 is a hell of a lot more of a power projection than an out of shape tough.
AC 130 would have made the terrorist suicide bombing look like a walk in the park.
Mr blutarski. 0.0
I’ve had the pleasure of being aboard an AC130 to see it first hand. It’s humbling.
And yeah…a downed AC130 would have been about number 1,897 on the list of things to be concerned about in an Afghanistan withdrawal.
I am just talking about getting interpreters (and other people to whom we owed a duty of loyalty due to their assistance to America) to get the hell out of dodge rather than abandoning them as they clung to landing gear.
Its an understandable criticism. Personally, I'm not sure there was a graceful exit to be made. But we could have certainly made much more of a concerted post-exit effort to get our Afghan allies to safety and situated here in the US. Still legislation pending to make that a reality, as I understand it. Bipartisan efforts in both chambers are underway to get it done. But nothing is getting through Congress these days, unfortunately.
And overestimated the ability of the Afgans to hold out against the Taliban.
If Joe was planning on getting out, expediting people getting out rapidly should have been a priority.
But once the collapse started it seems like it was too late to go back and slow down the collapse.
And keeping Bagram, at minimum, would have been a strategic asset for decades. As I said many times during the affair, we should have kept BAF, Jalalabad, and possibly a post in Herat to keep an eye on the Iranians. And NATO probably should have kept Marmal in Masi.
It doesn't mean we need to meddle in their domestic affairs. But we could continue to help the Afghan Army keep the lights on at fractional costs, keeping the TB out of the cities, so y'know, the girls can go to school. ANSF was fighting and dying for their country for the last several years- not us. When we pulled the rug, they smartly decided it was no longer worth it.
In Bagram, which in nearly the safest and most defensible part of the country, we would have been safe for generations. We could have kept dirtbags in jail, had a site for CT operations, an airbase for logistics, a listening post for China and a hundred other good reasons.
That this wasn't presented as an option by the Biden admin is an admission that they had good reason to avoid presenting it.
This is not to say I agreed with all prior major decisions. We should have transitioned to that posture as soon as it was clear in the early 2010's that our strategy to turn Afghanistan into a GCC was not going to work.