Category: Afghanistan Page 2 of 3

As I noted recently, once the US left Afghanistan, the Taliban would rule. This was obvious, and only completely delusional fools thought otherwise. Anyone who thought so should never say anything about military affairs ever again. Yes, the government army was larger and better equipped, but they have zero legitimacy and the Taliban are better fighters.

Not that being better fighters was needed, in most cases there was hardly any fighting and “government” forces just surrendered because of that whole “zero legitimacy” thing. (Also, they’re corrupt from bottom to top. They weren’t in it to fight, they were in it to be on the take.)

There is a lot of hand wringing among the usual liberal suspects about the bad shit that is now going down: collaborators being killed, women being beaten, the end of women’s rights, and so on.

All of this is true, and not irrelevant, but not sufficient to argue the US should have stayed in Afghanistan indefinitely, and let a guerilla war rage on while Americans used drones to kill 90 percent innocents.

It’s hard to say how many Afghans have PTSD and depression, but it’s certainly a large number. In 2002, PTSD was 42 percent (thanks to the war with the USSR, and the period of civil war, and the anarchy afterwards). As the linked article says, it’s hard to imagine that further war and invasion has lessened.

As for deaths, we’ll never know. The US, as in Iraq, deliberately never counted and I haven’t been able to find a good population study. One very careful analysis from 2015, by Physicians for Social responsibility, came up with 1,400 a month, but noted that number was almost certainly an under-count. (It seems low to me. Remember deaths in war/occupation are rarely, to use the modern world’s lovely euphemism, “kinetic.’)

The point here is that what Afghanistan needs is peace.

It will be a bad peace for a lot of people, there is no question. The Taliban are nasty and medieval. But it will be peace and people will mostly be safe. If the US decides to stop shooting stuff up, maybe Afghans can even have safe weddings and funerals.

The US occupation of Afghanistan was not, ever, in any way comparable to the US occupations of Germany, Japan, or Korea because in none of those cases was there any ongoing multi-decade guerilla war.

Instead, the US occupation was the cause of an ongoing war against invaders.

It is true, that as usual, the US has betrayed the collaborators who helped it rule Afghanistan. They should have shipped them out and to the US before leaving.

The vast majority will be fine, mind you: the Taliban knows how to rule and is just telling almost everyone to go back to work (unless they are a woman). But the key collaborators will be killed or otherwise punished.

This is exactly what Americans would have done if the USSR had invaded and conquered America, then left. Translators and Vichy collaborators would not be treated kindly.

But it’s not in the US’s interest. After all, no doubt the US will need collaborators for its next overseas war and occupation, and they will be less willing seeing how Afghan collaborators were treated.

As for Americans, I’m extremely disheartened though entirely unsurprised to see prominent liberals arguing for forever-war. There’s this weird idea in the US that you are somehow, still, in any way, “good” when it comes to invading and destroying other people’s countries, that you have a right to take such actions and that the US doesn’t need its own Nuremberg trials.

Finally, it was never possible to leave “well.” The US military-political complex is incompetent to its core. You can’t do stupid smart, and Afghanistan has been stupid all the way through. (The smart policy would have been to follow the Clinton plan of going in, then leaving.)

Afghanistan’s peace will suck. It’s better than endless war.

For an American Veteran’s perspective I found compelling, see: “Afghanistan Meant Nothing.”

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Sort of self-explanatory. We’ll see if he actually does. Trump had planned to withdraw by May 1st, after all, and spent most of his presidency talking about withdrawing without actually doing so.

But Biden saying there are no conditions for the withdrawal is a promising sign.

This does mean the Taliban will almost certainly wind up ruling the country again; the Kabul government is not going to stand without US and NATO support.

That’s unfortunate, but the Taliban is the natural ruling party of Afghanistan. That’s just how it is. Probably the US shouldn’t have supported Islamic hardliners even before the Russian invasion (under Carter), but that’s a long-ago decision.

Biden’s going to be under immense pressure from the military and much of the media to not withdraw. He needs to hold firm. It would be best to do this as quickly as possible.

And yeah, this means there will be a “fall of Saigon” moment some time after the US leaves.

So be it.

Good on Biden if he sticks to his (non-gun) on this.

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Use the comments to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

I hope you all have a good one. If you don’t, and many won’t, my condolences and best wishes that the next year is a better one for you.

Danny Sjursen makes the case at the American Conservative.

The piece as a whole is worth reading, but the bottom line is that the Afghan government’s own military and police are hopeless: They are losing to the Taliban. The US military, with current force levels, cannot hold most of the country. Unless the US is willing to surge again, it will lose the war.

And even if it surges, that won’t win the war, it will only delay the inevitable.

Before the Afghan war, I remember reading an interview with the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, which I’ve since been unable to find. He said, paraphrased, “You will invade. You will take the cities. We will retreat to the countryside. You will not be able to destroy us. You will eventually leave and we will win.”

It struck me as prophetic at the time, and it has played out exactly as he expected.

The US is incapable of “nation building,” serious insurgency warfare, and is bad at occupation. (This wasn’t always the case, but it is now.)

The strategy, if there was to be a war at all, should always have been to go in, accomplish limited goals, and be out within three months–six at the most.

(This is somewhat true of Iraq, where the US should have knocked over Saddam, had a proscription list, and picked its Colonel to lead the country, leaving within six months. The difference is that a Colonel might have stood a chance in Iraq, no one but the Taliban is going to rule Afghanistan without ongoing foreign support.)

The US was always going “lose” in Afghanistan if it did not limit its goals sharply. The only question is how many people will die before the US gets tired of the ulcer and leaves.

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