moldyoldy

The images coming out of Afghanistan have been disturbing. But let's be clear: The Trump Administration led us straight into this mess. And President Biden is doing everything he can to get us out of it.

In Afghanistan, President Biden got dealt yet another losing hand from the Trump Administration. Their Doha Agreement with the Taliban violated the most basic principles of self-government for the Afghan people. There was no way to enforce it or make sure the Taliban kept its word. There was no denunciation of al-Qaeda terrorists. Worst of all, the deal didn't mandate the Taliban stop attacks against Afghan security forces.

All of this set the stage for the chaotic scenes we're seeing on TV today.

Trump's deal with the Taliban was flawed from the start, which is why Trump's own officials are now scrambling to distance themselves from it. "To have our Generals say that they are depending on diplomacy with the Taliban is an unbelievable scenario. Negotiating with the Taliban is like dealing with the devil," tweeted Trump's ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, who certainly voiced no such objections while working for Trump. She was not alone. "Our secretary of state signed a surrender agreement with the Taliban," Trump's former national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, told journalist Bari Weiss. "This collapse goes back to the capitulation agreement of 2020. The Taliban didn't defeat us. We defeated ourselves."

To have our Generals say that they are depending on diplomacy with the Taliban is an unbelievable scenario. Negotiating with the Taliban is like dealing with the devil.

Even Mike Pompeo, Trump's Secretary of State and the man who negotiated the deal with the Taliban in the first place, is now denouncing it. He had the audacity to tell Fox News that the "debacle" in Afghanistan "will certainly harm America's credibility with its friends and allies." He certainly didn't seem to think so while he was laying the groundwork for the debacle in the first place.

"We're letting the Taliban run free and wild all around Afghanistan," complained Pompeo, the man who cut the deal to release the Taliban's leader from prison in the first place. Trump ordered the release of 5,000 of the top captured Taliban fighters last year—a decision his own designated "peace envoy" Zalmay Khaliizad said publicly had disturbed him. Those same fighters are now threatening the streets of Kabul.

Republican outrage was also completely absent in the first 45 days of Donald Trump's agreement, when there were over 4,500 Taliban attacks resulting in over 900 Afghan casualties. Where was the Republican outrage about the Afghan army then, when their President handed over Afghanistan to the Taliban? Nonexistent.

They saved their denunciations for Biden's efforts to clean up Trump's mess—efforts which have as yet cost many fewer lives.

But this hypocrisy is not limited to former Trump officials. Take House Republican firebrand Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), for example, who only tweeted once in 2014 about losing an American general in combat in Afghanistan, until discovering it as a partisan issue this summer. Now that he can blame Biden for Trump's mess, he hasn't stopped tweeting about it.

Jordan is one of many Republicans hypocritically denouncing a Biden withdrawal that they championed under Trump. The Republican Party used to brag about Trump's "historic" peace deal in Afghanistan. Now, they went so far as to delete that press release to pave the way for a new, partisan attack on President Biden over the end results of that very agreement.

We shouldn’t be surprised about Joe Biden’s Afghanistan failures.

Have you seen the southern border?

— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) August 17, 2021
Twitter is awash in angry Republicans outraged about our allies in Afghanistan who we should have evacuated before we left. And yet, it is Trump—and his advisor Stephen Miller—who are the reason so many Afghan interpreters are stuck in Afghanistan due to stalled special immigrant visa application infrastructure. Former Vice President Mike Pence advisor Olivia Troye wrote on Twitter that folks like Trump and Miller made it "even more challenging" to get allies out, overriding the concerns of others in the administration. "There were cabinet mtgs about this during the Trump Admin where Stephen Miller would peddle his r****t hysteria about Iraq & Afghanistan," Troye wrote. "He & his enablers across gov't would undermine anyone who worked on solving the SIV issue by devastating the system at DHS & State."

🧵There were cabinet mtgs about this during the Trump Admin where Stephen Miller would peddle his r****t hysteria about Iraq & Afghanistan. He & his enablers across gov’t would undermine anyone who worked on solving the SIV issue by devastating the system at DHS & State.(1/7) pic.twitter.com/vtNWaasCK7

— Olivia of Troye (@OliviaTroye) August 20, 2021
In fact, at the end of last year, the Trump administration had nearly 11,000 visas authorized for Afghans who helped America during the last 20 years—but only gave out 1,300 while most of the withdrawal took place.

So whose fault is it that so many of those who helped us are stuck in Afghanistan? The burden of that responsibility falls squarely on Trump's shoulders. And it is Biden who is working diligently to get them out.

And it was Trump who bragged just this April that the process of moving the U.S. military out of Afghanistan had progressed to a point that even if President Biden wanted to, he "couldn't stop the process." Trump was right: There was nothing Biden could do to stop what was coming in Afghanistan short of another massive U.S. military deployment. According to the text of the February 29, 2020 agreement Trump signed with the Taliban, within 135 days, America would withdraw from five major bases and agreed to complete the rest of its major withdrawals within nine months. In other words, the Army agreed to pull out of Afghanistan long before Biden's inauguration, which it mostly accomplished.

So to those blaming President Biden for how the Afghanistan war is ending, let's be real: Trump led us into this mess. And he could not get us out of it.

Joe Biden is doing something Trump and two other presidents over two decades never could or would do: President Biden is ending the war in Afghanistan.

For that, he deserves our respect.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/stop-blaming-biden-for-afghanistan-he-s-cleaning-up-trump-s-mess-opinion/ar-AANDxv2?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531

Liberty Tree

You are a delusion cult member. The American people and the nations of the world know this us all on Biden. Consult something besides ELWNJ sites.

Carol Kelly

Are you mentally ill?

Wolf counselor Loc: Heart of Texas

moldyoldy

Why didn’t trump allow the Afghans to be part of the negotiations? He sold them out when he demanded the release of 5000 terrorists.

Michael Rich Loc: Lapine Oregon

It's no mystery as to why 💩Bama so accurately stated..."never underestimate Joe's ability to F things up"

You can't honestly blame Trump for Afghanistan or the bungled mess on our southern border.

moldyoldy

The United States never understood Afghanistan. American planners thought they knew what the country needed, which was not quite the same as what its people wanted. American policy was guided by fantasies; chief among them was the idea that the Taliban could be eliminated and that an entire culture could be t***sformed in the process.


In an ideal world, the Taliban wouldn’t exist. But it does exist, and it will exist. Western observers always struggle to understand how groups as ruthless as the Taliban gain legitimacy and popular support. Surely Afghans remember the terror of Taliban rule in the 1990s, when women were whipped if they ventured outside without a burka and adulterers were stoned to death in soccer stadiums. How could those dark days be forgotten?

America saw the Taliban as plainly evil. To deem a group evil is to cast it outside of time and history. But this is a privileged view. Living in a democracy with basic security allows citizens to set their sights higher. They will be disappointed with even a relatively good government precisely because they expect more from it. In failed states and in the midst of civil war, however, the fundamental questions are ones of order and disorder, and how to have more of the former and less of the latter.

The Taliban knew this. After its fall from power in 2001, the group was weak, reeling from devastating air strikes targeting its leaders. But in recent years, it has been gaining ground and establishing deeper roots in local communities. The Taliban was brutal. At the same time, it often provided better governance than the distant and corrupt Afghan central government. Doing a little went a long way.

Afghanistan’s U.S.-backed government didn’t fail just because of the Taliban. It was hobbled from the start by America’s blind spots and biases. The United States saw a strong, centralized authority as the answer to Afghanistan’s problems and backed a constitution that invested the president with sweeping powers. That, along with a quirky and confusing e*******l system, undermined the development of political parties and the Parliament. A strong state required formal legal institutions—and the United States dutifully supported courts, judges, and other such trappings. Meanwhile, it invited resentment by pushing programs that were meant to reengineer Afghan culture and g****r norms.

All of these choices reflected the hubris of Western powers that saw Afghan traditions as an obstacle to be overcome when, it turns out, they were the lifeblood of the country’s political culture. In the end, few Afghans believed in a government that they never felt was theirs or wished to wade through its bureaucratic red tape. They kept turning to informal and community-driven dispute resolution, and local figures they trusted. And this left the door open for the slow return of the Taliban.

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction oversaw how the U.S. disbursed reconstruction funds and assessed their effectiveness. Over the past year, two depressing SIGAR assessments were made available to the public.

One—grandiosely if obsoletely titled “What We Need to Learn: Lessons From Twenty Years of Afghanistan Reconstruction”—notes that the United States spent about $900 million helping Afghans develop a formal legal system. Unfortunately, Afghans do not seem to have been impressed.

One of the first things militant groups like the Taliban do when they enter new territory is provide “rough and ready” dispute resolution. Often, they outperform the local court system. As Vanda Felbab-Brown, Harold Trinkunas, and I noted in our 2017 book on rebel governance, “Afghans report a great degree of satisfaction with Taliban verdicts, unlike those from the official justice system, where petitioners for justice frequently have to pay considerable bribes.”

This is one major reason why religion—particularly Islam—matters. It provides an organizing framework for rough justice and a justification for its implementation, and is more likely to be perceived as legitimate by local communities. Secular groups and governments simply have a harder time providing this kind of justice. The Afghan government wasn’t necessarily secular, but it had received tens of billions of dollars from governments that certainly were. A Sharia-based, informal dispute system would almost certainly be frowned upon by those Western donors. How likely was it that an Afghan government headed by an Ivy League–educated technocrat could beat the Taliban at its own game?

As the SIGAR report noted archly, “The United States misjudged what would constitute an acceptable justice system from the perspective of many Afghans, which ultimately created an opportunity for the Taliban to exert influence.” Or, as a former USAID official put it, “We dismissed the traditional justice system because we thought it didn’t have any relevance for what we wanted to see in today’s Afghanistan.”

What, then, did the United States want to see in today’s Afghanistan?

When the Bush administration helped shape the post-Taliban Afghan government, it was still claiming that it had little interest in nation building. Pilfering from Afghanistan’s past constitutions was easier than proposing something more appropriate for what had become a very different country. The new constitution created a top-heavy system that gave the president “nearly the same powers that Afghan kings exercised,” as Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, a prominent Afghanistan scholar, has written.

Strong p**********l systems are appealing because they offer the prospect of determined action. But the concentration of power inevitably alienates other stakeholders, particularly on the local and regional levels.

From the beginning, the Afghan Parliament suffered from a legitimacy deficit. Afghanistan used an e*******l system known as single nont***sferable v**e (SNTV), one of the rarest in the world. There are reasons SNTV is sometimes used in local e******ns but almost never nationally: Among other things, it allocates v**es in a way that depresses the development of political parties. If there’s anything Afghanistan needed, it was political parties—and a parliament—that could check the dominance of the president.

The risks of a p**********l system are heightened in divided societies, and Afghanistan is divided along ethnic, religious, tribal, linguistic, and ideological lines—in almost every way possible. This raises the stakes of political competition, because what matters most is who ends up at the very top.

Finally, the system works only if the president is competent. The now-exiled president, Ashraf Ghani, managed to be all-powerful in theory but resolutely feckless in practice. Despite having been the chair of the Institute for State Effectiveness, his ineffectiveness—reflected in his mercurial style and penchant for micromanagement—infected the entire political system, and little could be done to reverse the trend as long as he remained in office.

In addition to fashioning new political institutions, America believed that it could t***sform the culture of a country. Naturally, most American politicians, nongovernmental organizations, and donors thought that the things that worked in advanced democracies would work in fragile would-be democracies. Liberal values were universal. And because they were universal, they would be, if not embraced, at least appreciated.

Somewhere close to $1 billion was spent on promoting g****r e******y. But such a focus was too often tantamount to social and cultural engineering in a conservative country that was still struggling to establish basic security. USAID’s G****r E******y and Female Empowerment Policy stated as one of its rather ambitious goals “working with men and boys, women and girls to bring about changes in attitudes, behaviors, roles and responsibilities.” This is a worthy objective, but the American approach was heavy-handed and at times counterproductive.

As the second SIGAR report, titled “Support for G****r E******y: Lessons From the U.S. Experience in Afghanistan,” concluded, U.S. officials need “a more nuanced understanding of g****r roles and relations in the Afghan cultural context” and of “how to support women and girls without provoking backlash that might endanger them or stall progress.”

These efforts were well-intentioned, but they drew on assumptions about the arc of progress, and the belief that the United States would make progress happen even if Afghans themselves were less sanguine.

If the United States had made other choices, would the outcome have been different? I don’t know. Americans believe in certain things. Suspending those beliefs in the name of understanding another society can easily devolve into moral and cultural relativism that many, if not most Americans, would reject. Would a Republican—or, for that matter, a liberal suspicious of religion’s role in public life—have felt comfortable supporting programs in Afghanistan that involved the implementation of a version of Sharia, even if that version wasn’t the Taliban’s?

But the order and sequence in a t***sition matter. It’s clear now that we got that sequence wrong in Afghanistan, especially considering that women’s rights had long been one of the country’s most d******e issues. As the experts Rina Amiri, Swanee Hunt, and Jennifer Sova warned in 2004, when the Taliban seemed a relic of the past, “While the situation has markedly improved since the Taliban regime, the stage is set for a struggle between traditionalists and modernists; and once again women’s roles and religion are central to the conflict.”

Was it America’s place to change a culture? Did anyone really expect that the U.S. government would be good at it? If there is any change that should come from within, presumably it’s cultural change. But if there’s anything that’s universal—transcending culture and religion—it is the desire to have a say in one’s own government. Instead of telling Afghans how to live, we could have given them the space to make their own decisions about who they wanted to be.

With the Parliament weak, in part because of that bizarre e*******l system, all attention was diverted to p**********l contests, which were invariably acrimonious. The result was a winner-takes-all system in a country where the winners had long subjugated the losers, or worse. It is little surprise, then, that “every Afghan p**********l e******n has been brokered or mediated by U.S. diplomats,” as Jarrett Blanc, one of those diplomats, put it. This was the democracy that America and its allies tried, for years, to build.

Many of the political institutions that America helped create have now been washed away. It is almost as if they never existed. By insisting on the primacy of culture over politics, the United States thought it could improve both. Might Afghanistan have been doomed regardless? Perhaps. Now we will never know.

Sonny Magoo Loc: Where pot pie is boiled in a kettle

BULLSHIZ! How long from Pearl harbor to Doolittle?
How many months to pull off d-day?
Yeah...moldyoldy sure.
Take your blame and put it on Joe Biden.
He has had long enough...and Soooooo much experience..should have been a piece of cake.

Carol Kelly

Not so. And, moreover, you know it.

moldyoldy

Trump has never planned anything, he just tweets and expects others to take care of the details.

Pompeo was too busy collecting valuable souvenirs to take negotiations seriously.

Steven Miller does not want any refugees to come here of any kind.

MajG

OK. Creepy Joe Biden is now my hero. It was Obammy after he let those guys out of GITMO in exchange for the t*****r, I mean hero, Bergdahl. No one ever though they would end up back in The Stan leading Taliban again. DID THEY? Biden destroyed every good policy Trump ever made so this whole disaster is Trumps fault, not the "Foreign Policy Expert" who didn't do dick his whole career except for graft and making bad decisions for Americans.

moldyoldy

The people released by Obama were not allowed to go back to Afghanistan.

nwtk2007 Loc: Texas

Boy oh boy, moldy, you are as bad as Biden! It makes me wonder just how "out of it" you might actually be!!

moldyoldy

One of these days you might get something right, but it will take a miracle to open your eyes.

nwtk2007 Loc: Texas

What ever you say moldy.