Did anyone seriously think that the US 20-year adventure in Afghanistan was going to end in any other way?

I was just starting to ask a similar question. I am conflicted. I think we should never have gone in there and we definitely shouldn’t have stayed 20 years. We seem to have accomplished nothing. On the other hand, the Afghans, rightly so, feel betrayed and abandoned by our abrupt departure. I kind of feel that if they couldn’t build a force strong enough to beat back the Taliban in 20 years of support, what more could we do but I am really upset by the chaos the people are experiencing.

And I don’t see a need to put this on either the Democrats or the Republicans, they were all complicit in the prosecution of this war.

Just for your information; it was a coalition that went in.

No, I’m not surprised.
The Taliban just had to sit and wait (they didn’t actually just sit, they planned and executed attacks throughout the twenty years), and do some ‘negotiating’ every once in a while.
They have such radical views that it was never going to be expected that they would pour water into their whine.
Now the coalition is gone, and few weeks later they have half the provinces under control.

This was the umpteenth time Afghanistan was the stage of bloodshed and fights over power, so far all attempts failed.

Completely predictable.
Just as predictable as the Orangutan now blustering that the withdrawal would have run better if he was still president

Bitch, you are the one that decided the withdrawal, and you are the one who made a “deal” with the Taliban, that everyone and their decrepit grandmother knew they would never uphold. What a bloviating fucking idiot.
Biden just continued what you set in motion.

It’s called “The Graveyard of Empires” for a reason…

I don’t see how anyone could’ve thought otherwise.

If there’s one nation where “nation building” would be doomed to fail, it would be Afghanistan, a region that has never been a cohesive state, but always a collection of disparate tribes. I do think there was justification for going into Afghanistan after 9/11 to root out Al-Qaeda forces using the nation as their base of operations, but I also think the “nation building” project was a fool’s errand. If an army that was built up by the U.S. over 20 years crumples within a few days, it’s proof of how futile all this was. We could’ve stayed there another 20 years and the same thing would’ve happened upon our withdrawal. We can’t stay there forever. It’s unfortunate what is happening, but I think withdrawing is the right option.

Don’t forget that it was not only the US who sent their troops into Afghanistan, 456 of them were British.

It is extremely annoying after the billions of dollars and pounds which have been spent helping the Afghans out and helping them to recruit their Army. But even more importantly countless lives that have been lost by the countries trying to help them.

I get the impression that the ‘Army’ Afghanistan have are either totally useless or are they afraid of the Taliban and allowing them to run rough shod on the country.

I can envisage foreign countries like the US and GB being sent back there but if they are WHY?

We have tried to help them at enormous cost in lives and money and the Government of Afghanistan either does not appear able or even want to protect their country and their people.

Enough is enough so the country MUST learn to protect themselves.

The fear is that the more land the Taliban take the bigger the likelihood and threat of terrorism rearing its head again bif time.

20 years ago I made no predictions. Maybe some new weaponry would have allowed us to succeed. What is irksome is that nobody is willing to admit that we lost. That the Taliban is headquartered in Pakistan makes it particularly difficult to go after them. We can blame our loss on Pakistan.

We’ve made a number of mistakes with Afghanistan and some have been habitual. We had an opportunity to stabilize the country way back in the beginning of this war. Ahmad Shah Massoud was the leader of the Northern Alliance and the main player in the defeat of Russia there. He also had the backing of the majority of the Afghan people. Bin Laden assassinated Massoud on Sept 9, 2001 primarily because he couldn’t get the support from the USA. I blame Bush for that one. Massoud would have been a formidable leader that hated both the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Had we supported Massoud the whole war may have been avoided. Of course that is hindsight but still a major blunder.

The next big mistake was in trying to fight, yet another, limited war where the goal was not to win but rather to contain the enemy. The same strategy we used in all operations since Korea. The Taliban has been operating out of Pakistan for 20 years. if we’re not willing to go after them where they are then get out. It doesn’t take 20 years to figure that out. A lesson we should have learned from Vietnam (hell we should have learned that from Korea). Given the strategy, the result was inevitable. If we had changed the strategy we may not have suffered the same result. The Taliban has been lying in the weeds waiting and planning for this withdrawal. The speed with which they’ve retaken the country is surprising but given the time they’ve had to plan it we should have been able to see it coming.

No, it was not inevitable. Technology is on the verge of refining robotics to the point of perfecting robotic soldiers, and we could have continued to fight the war far into the future as it should have occurred. Or for as long as it would take for us to really win it.

Now it’s China’s turn!

(Keep in mind that the fighting in the middle east has been going on for 1300 years, and we should have been ready for that reality in Afghanistan.)

If Al Queda comes back and strikes us again, all of our fighting and casualties suffered in Afghanistan will be for nothing, and that is what I fear, and what makes my blood boil!

It is the young people in the cities that I feel most sorry for, especially the women. They were encouraged to fight for human rights, to attend university and to take up professional jobs and many of them did in the belief the west would support them. Now they feel abandoned by the democratic world and are terrified of what the Taliban may do to them. They are in a horrible situation.

@Jaxk It also didn’t help that shortly after the War in Afghanistan began, we diverted much of our resources, power, and attention to yet another blunder in Iraq. Afghanistan seemed to be an afterthought at that point, with no clearly-defined objective there other than to keep the Taliban at an insurgency level (which was of course untenable).

Afghanistan would be a tropical democratic paradise by now if America had only invaded the Taliban, and left Iraq alone.
But we had to go to Iraq because Neoconservatives wanted regime change there all along, as detailed in the the Project for a New American Century’s agenda. .
We should have spent all those resources in Afghanistan and just let Saddam Hussein’s government remain.

I have wanted to airlift all the women out of Afghanistan for 20 years. Makes me sick to my stomach.

Where the hell are the other Arab countries to keep the Taliban out? They don’t give a damn.

No, I’m not surprised. I was in favor of America going to Afghanistan and never understood why we went to Iraq. If we were going to use a lot of our military power in any country Afghanistan made more sense to me, but we obviously did not do enough, we probably shouldn’t have bothered at all.

We regard our kind as the most intelligent of all species, capable of complex learning. Yet, we seem unable to learn from centuries of experiences with warfare. Rabble-rouser’s rejection of the authority of their rulers has time and time again successfully rebelled against them despite the superior military power that attempted to put the rebellion down. Our nation is an example. We defeated England, the greatest nation in the world. Of course, that could not have happened without the assistance of France.

France, however, did not learn from this. Decades later, they attempted to put down the rebellion by North Vietnamese and lost, not because the North had a more powerful army but because of the passion generated by years of oppression. After France withdrew, America decided we could accomplish what they had failed to do. It should not have been a surprise when we were forced to flee.

When the then USSR invaded Afghanistan, we rightly assisted Afghanistan’s defeat of their invaders by providing the weapons capable of shooting down the helicopters that had brought that country to the verge of defeat. Having beaten our Cold War enemy we, unfortunately, turned our backs and left leaving the now heavily armed rebels to engage in an internal war for control of the country. Of course, we could not let that happen so sent our military. And here we are. Once more, after twenty years of great costs in lives and money, we are left with no option other than to withdraw.

I am old enough to remember a song in the sixties that said it well. “Where have all the flowers gone… When will we ever learn?”

Considering how fast the Taliban regained control of the entire country, it just shows how utterly useless the occupiers were in preparing the country to defend itself.
20 fucking years of military occupation, and the Taliban get back into power in a matter of days.

Thank you George Bush, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and countless others for their roles in this fiasco.

I just see all this repeating in the near future. The reason we went into Afghanistan in the first place was because Taliban-run Afghanistan had become a haven for terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. What makes anyone think that won’t happen again? I’m sure there will be justification for invading and temporarily ousting the Taliban soon enough…

This is a wonderful piece about what happened and why there was no way to win:

https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2021/08/15/fareeds-take-us-afghanistan-withdrawal-gps-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/afghanistan-falls-to-the-taliban/

Or, to put it more succinctly, “never fight a land war in Asia.”