"Over our country’s 20 years at war in Afghanistan, America has sent its finest young men and women, invested nearly $1 trillion dollars, trained over 300,000 Afghan soldiers and police, equipped them with state-of-the-art military equipment, and maintained their air force as part of the longest war in U.S. history. One more year, or five more years, of U.S. military presence would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country. And an endless American presence in the middle of another country’s civil conflict was not acceptable to me." -- part of President Biden's statement on Afghanistan yesterday. You can read the full text here.
As we noted yesterday, our obligation remains to "secure the immediate evacuation of those Afghans who served us as translators, clerks, embassy staff and more." The "stab in the back" chorus that's featured every night on the national news and in other media should direct its fire to the corrupt government and inept military and security forces who, on paper, far outnumber and outgun the Taliban, but who are unwilling or unable to protect themselves or their wives, daughters and sisters. That's the harsh truth.
2 comments:
our obligation remains to "secure the immediate evacuation of those Afghans who served us as translators, clerks, embassy staff and more."
At the rate the Taliban are overrunning the country, at this point it's clearly too late for that. The evacuation should have been completed before the troop withdrawal began. This is going to go down as a shameful day for American foreign policy. There's no way around that.
It is curious that the Afghan forces have been so ineffective. The Kurds in Syria and Iraq, with far less help from the West, fought tenaciously for years against Dâ'ish (ISIL) and played the largest role in defeating it. I suspect the US foolishly tried to build a "national" Afghan military rather than ethnic militias like the Kurdish militias in Syria and Iraq. The Kurds were fighting for their own ethnic territory, not for the Syrian or Iraqi states, which meant nothing to them. I doubt that the Turkmens, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Hazaras, etc making up the "Afghan" population care about Afghanistan as a state either. If they had been organized into local fighting forces each defending its own ethnic group, they might have been more motivated.
Infidel -- clearly, the administration was caught completely off guard by the collapse of the Afghan forces (I think you're right about the way the military was constructed leading to its demise). Perhaps the best way to have said it was "secure the immediate evacuation of as many Afghans as possible who served..." because we already know many have already fallen victim to the Taliban and perhaps the majority of others will, too, unless they rely on other means to escape the country. But, absolutely no doubt the evacuation and the intelligence preceding it have been bungled.
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