Hindsight being 20/20, do you think the situation in Afghanistan should have been done differently?

Gosh. I do not know. I can’t think of how we we.could have done it differently.

I wish they had negotiated a longer evacuation plan and a better one but I don’t want to play Monday afternoon quarterback. I just feel we owe the Afghans who want to leave a lot of help.

Yes. Obama should have done this a decade ago. The outcome would have been nearly identical as would waiting another week, month, 10, 20, 30+ years.

Well, it seems that Biden and everyone in the government thought the Taliban would take several months to retake the country instead of a few days. If we had had better intel about how quickly their return would be, we probably could’ve handled the evacuations a little better. A lot of people are talking about the weapons left behind, but I’m not sure that disarming the Afghan military before a Taliban takeover would’ve been a good idea, but then, the Afghan military folded quickly even with American arms, so maybe we should’ve just gone for it.

Either way, the media and the “establishment” are pretty pissed about this withdrawal and are priming the public to turn against it. I think they’re just upset that wars like these are less popular than ever before. Any time I see the far right and the mainstream “liberal” media agreeing on something I get suspicious. Lol

@Demosthenes: “Either way, the media and the “establishment” are pretty pissed about this withdrawal and are priming the public to turn against it. I think they’re just upset that wars like these are less popular than ever before.”

This. Very much this.

I’m no fan of Biden, but he has really surprised me. He did the right thing – in the only possible way.

As for what we could have done differently? Not invaded Afghanistan.

If they did it a year ago the results would have been the same but Trump would have taken the blame.

Given what the Bush administration set up for the military, and what I know (which was both more than what’s in the news, and more recently, less, as I haven’t been studying in great detail) I think the military mostly did the jobs it was given well. The actual jobs to be done and all the various levels of complexity it entailed, including understanding the many factions involved and so on, are hundreds or thousands of times more complex than any news show or pundit discusses them, and they’re also more subtle.

The Trump “administration” set the withdrawal in motion and it was mostly complete before he took over. Biden chose not to reverse it, and the military seems to have done a competent job, and so far it seems to have gone about as well as anyone could have predicted. I don’t think I know enough to have a truly informed opinion to second-guess what was done with the withdrawal.

The criticism just seems like political ridiculousness to me, driven (as Demosthenes and product wrote) by people who profit from US military (and mercenary/contractor) deployment to the Middle East, and of course by the idiot alt-Right that now meaninglessly label anything that’s not them as commie leftist radical etc etc.

The biggest mistake was in signing a deal with the Taliban last year. The reason we went in to Afghanistan was to remove the Taliban and the reason we stayed was to support the government that replaced it. In 2020 we changed our mind and abandoned the Afghan government and the Afghan people to the Taliban wolves.

Just like Vietnam.

There was a plan. It was executed in the best way possible.
Very few things go off perfectly all the time. We are also dealing with a mentality that can be guessed or planned for all possible things.
We didn’t do things perfectly on 9/11, Vietnam, Korea, etc. History shows that you just can’t be fool-proof.
That said, it is a very sad state of affairs with leaving the Afghan people to take this on after we walked in and gave them hope.

There never should have been boots on the ground. Any attacks against the enemy should have been solely done from the air.
We went in to kill Al Queda and anyone who supported/housed/sheltered Al Queda.
COVID – 19 will do what we couldn’t.

For one, I think the US government shouldn’t have let average Americans and US residents fly to Afghanistan for pleasure in the last 3 months, or should have required all people there for pleasure to be out of the country by July 30. From what I understand there were people visiting family! That’s crazy during a time when getting thousands of people out of the country will be difficult. I saw some report about students being over there and I just cannot understand it.

No matter what getting people out of Afghanistan was going to be messy and dangerous. Probably communication could have been better, reassuring people that multiple planes for weeks would be taking people out of the country. Although, people tend to panic anyway and want to be on the first flight.

Maybe we should never have been there. Maybe we should have stayed there.

Never should have been there to begin with. The Taliban and Al Queda could have been delt with as needed, by Special Ops Teams, working in tandem with Brit Special Services. Same way Seal Team Six took out Ben Laden. In and out.

The taliban are terrorists. Whoever thought you can “negotiate” with a terrorist wasn’t thinking. That’s putting it politely.

@snowberry War IS terror. You don’t make peace with your allies.

The Taliban were able to take control of Afghanistan so quickly, because the Afghan military just rolled over, and gave up without a fight.
Why did they do that?
From what I have read, it is because there is no Afghanistan. There is only a collection of competing tribes. Meaning that the people, and by extension, the military do and did not believe in “the cause”. Why defend and risk your lives for something you do not care about or believe in?

To solve that problem, you would have to instill in the population a pervasive sense of national identity, a belief in democratic values, and a standard of living that they want to keep.
Which means massive investments in education, infrastructure, and industry.
It also means a multi-generational programme of western democratic indoctrination, starting in Kindergarten.
That would have taken at least a century.

And naturally, that was completely out of the question.

It simply was not enough to just pump money, equipment and training into a military that did not care.

@ragingloli That is the analysis we are consoling ourselves with. But I read an article by an Afghan general who was leading a campaign to protect a city. He said they were fighting hard but did not have any air support from the US Airforce who had been told to stand down.

As with many tragedies, I think there are multiple ways to spin it and I’m not sure anyone can parse it clearly.

Although it did occur to me this morning that if there was a lesson to be learned from our own history, it’s that a ragtag band of revolutionaries can prevail against the largest army in the world when they are resolute.

Perhaps nation-building and being the cops of the world should be thrown on the pyre although I don’t know what should be done in cases of intranational genocide.

The older I get, the less I want to deal in absolutes.

@ragingloli I just went to a lecture given by a former West Point Professor and he spent a lot of time previous to that in the Middle East, and he basically said what you wrote, that a national identity is what is needed. Ironic that we have been so disgusted that the Republicans were touting Nationalism in the US. It’s a careful balance. National identity but no fanaticism.