Aug 18, 2021 - Failure In Afghanistan, Over 40 Years in the Making

By William Hartung, defense analyst covering the economics of Pentagon spending.

The wrenching scenes at the Kabul airport and the justified fears of what will happen to Afghans under a new round of Taliban rule have formed the backdrop of a heated national conversation about what the United States should or should not have done in Afghanistan. Much of the criticism has landed at the doorstep of the Biden administration for a poorly planned withdrawal that has left U.S. citizens and Afghan allies at risk. Some aspects of the immediate crisis might have been averted if evacuations of U.S. personnel and Afghans who worked with the U.S. had started sooner. And the administration clearly underestimated the speed at which the Afghan security forces would collapse in the face of the recent Taliban offensive. But even if the U.S. exit had been better planned, the Taliban takeover would have occurred sooner or later, with harsh consequences for the people of Afghanistan. The short-term priority must be to evacuate U.S. personnel as quickly as possible, and to provide safe havens – including visas and financial support – for Afghans fleeing the Taliban.

But as for the question of what should have been done differently, keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan indefinitely was not a viable answer, as President Biden noted in his speech earlier this week:

“After 20 years — a trillion dollars spent training and equipping hundreds of thousands of Afghan National Security and Defense Forces, 2,448 Americans k**led, 20,722 more wounded, and untold thousands coming home with unseen trauma to their mental health — I will not send another generation of Americans to war in Afghanistan with no reasonable expectation of achieving a different outcome.”

Given this reality, we should resist the arguments of those who have long advocated for our failed military mission in Afghanistan that if only we had “stayed the course” militarily things could have turned out dramatically differently. As the Washington Post made abundantly clear with the release of the “Afghanistan Papers” – which are elaborated upon in a new book by Post reporter Craig Whitlock – U.S. officials have long known that U.S.-backed military and police personnel in Afghanistan were not a viable fighting force, crippled by corruption and lack of basic support from the top levels of the Afghan government. Even as the final Taliban offensive moved forward, there were Afghan troops forced to leave their posts due to lack of basic items like food and ammunition. The will to support a corrupt government in Kabul of questionable legitimacy just was not there. The repeated public claims by U.S. military and civilian leaders that the Afghan forces were improving and were combat capable belied their private pessimism – in short, they were lies designed to sustain U.S. public support for the war.

As the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approaches, it’s long past time for a radical reassessment of America’s overly militarized, relentlessly interventionist foreign policy. According to the Costs of War Project at Brown University, America’s post-9/11 wars have incurred obligations of over $6.4 trillion; costs hundreds of thousands of lives on all sides; and left hundreds of thousands of U.S. military personnel dead, or with severe physical wounds, or with traumatic brain injuries or post-traumatic stress disorder. In Iraq, the result was a corrupt, repressive, sectarian regime that opened the door to the conquest of large parts of the country by ISIS, as Iraqi troops evaporated in the face of their 2014 onslaught – for many of the same reasons involving corruption, lack of supplies, and plummeting morale that characterized Afghan troops in the face of the Taliban’s final offensive. In Afghanistan, the result was 20 years of devastating conflict followed by the rise to power of the Taliban. Both cases should be object lessons in the limits – and dangerous consequences – of relying on military force as the primary tool of U.S. global engagement.

Any reasonable assessment of U.S. military efforts of the past two decades and beyond must also grapple with the fact that U.S. interventions often make matters worse by paving the way for the development of new, more determined, and more deadly adversaries. This was the case in the Carter and Reagan administration’s decisions to arm and train anti-Soviet mujahadeen to fight back against Moscow’s occupation of Afghanistan. A significant portion of the fighters trained and armed by the U.S. – including foreign fighters like Osama Bin-Laden – went on to form the core of Al Qaeda, which was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. In Iraq and Syria, ISIS grew up out of the extremist Iraqi opposition to U.S. intervention there, and its leaders plotted the creation of their new organization in U.S.-run Iraqi prisons. This phenomenon has been referred to as “the boomerang effect” – arms sales, training, and military intervention coming back to haunt (and lead to attacks on) the nation engaging in them.

The critiques of how the Biden administration handled the withdrawal from Afghanistan shouldn’t be allowed to obscure the fact that getting out was the right thing to do. The failure of our multi-trillion-dollar military misadventure in Afghanistan should prompt a thorough rethinking and revision of a foreign policy that has for far too long prioritized arms and military dominance over diplomacy and global cooperation.

Your quote: Liberals are the ones who don't know the cost of things. Just bill it to the tax payers, print a few $ Trillion more.

I responded to that, try an keep up. I can select and choose what I respond to, if you'd like me to address one thing in particular, let me know. You and I had been addressing the economics end of it, not the right and wrong of it, or the get in or get out of it, maybe you're confused on who you're responding to.


Your quote: "if the Taliban allow Terrorists to attack America, we have no way to know about it or stop it."...
as far as that goes, we have the same ways as before, with our intel, but we'd be saving lives, our own.

Aug 18, 2021 - Failure In Afghanistan, Over 40 Years in the Making

By William Hartung, defense analyst covering the economics of Pentagon spending.

The wrenching scenes at the Kabul airport and the justified fears of what will happen to Afghans under a new round of Taliban rule have formed the backdrop of a heated national conversation about what the United States should or should not have done in Afghanistan. Much of the criticism has landed at the doorstep of the Biden administration for a poorly planned withdrawal that has left U.S. citizens and Afghan allies at risk. Some aspects of the immediate crisis might have been averted if evacuations of U.S. personnel and Afghans who worked with the U.S. had started sooner. And the administration clearly underestimated the speed at which the Afghan security forces would collapse in the face of the recent Taliban offensive. But even if the U.S. exit had been better planned, the Taliban takeover would have occurred sooner or later, with harsh consequences for the people of Afghanistan. The short-term priority must be to evacuate U.S. personnel as quickly as possible, and to provide safe havens – including visas and financial support – for Afghans fleeing the Taliban.

But as for the question of what should have been done differently, keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan indefinitely was not a viable answer, as President Biden noted in his speech earlier this week:

“After 20 years — a trillion dollars spent training and equipping hundreds of thousands of Afghan National Security and Defense Forces, 2,448 Americans k**led, 20,722 more wounded, and untold thousands coming home with unseen trauma to their mental health — I will not send another generation of Americans to war in Afghanistan with no reasonable expectation of achieving a different outcome.”

Given this reality, we should resist the arguments of those who have long advocated for our failed military mission in Afghanistan that if only we had “stayed the course” militarily things could have turned out dramatically differently. As the Washington Post made abundantly clear with the release of the “Afghanistan Papers” – which are elaborated upon in a new book by Post reporter Craig Whitlock – U.S. officials have long known that U.S.-backed military and police personnel in Afghanistan were not a viable fighting force, crippled by corruption and lack of basic support from the top levels of the Afghan government. Even as the final Taliban offensive moved forward, there were Afghan troops forced to leave their posts due to lack of basic items like food and ammunition. The will to support a corrupt government in Kabul of questionable legitimacy just was not there. The repeated public claims by U.S. military and civilian leaders that the Afghan forces were improving and were combat capable belied their private pessimism – in short, they were lies designed to sustain U.S. public support for the war.

As the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approaches, it’s long past time for a radical reassessment of America’s overly militarized, relentlessly interventionist foreign policy. According to the Costs of War Project at Brown University, America’s post-9/11 wars have incurred obligations of over $6.4 trillion; costs hundreds of thousands of lives on all sides; and left hundreds of thousands of U.S. military personnel dead, or with severe physical wounds, or with traumatic brain injuries or post-traumatic stress disorder. In Iraq, the result was a corrupt, repressive, sectarian regime that opened the door to the conquest of large parts of the country by ISIS, as Iraqi troops evaporated in the face of their 2014 onslaught – for many of the same reasons involving corruption, lack of supplies, and plummeting morale that characterized Afghan troops in the face of the Taliban’s final offensive. In Afghanistan, the result was 20 years of devastating conflict followed by the rise to power of the Taliban. Both cases should be object lessons in the limits – and dangerous consequences – of relying on military force as the primary tool of U.S. global engagement.

Any reasonable assessment of U.S. military efforts of the past two decades and beyond must also grapple with the fact that U.S. interventions often make matters worse by paving the way for the development of new, more determined, and more deadly adversaries. This was the case in the Carter and Reagan administration’s decisions to arm and train anti-Soviet mujahadeen to fight back against Moscow’s occupation of Afghanistan. A significant portion of the fighters trained and armed by the U.S. – including foreign fighters like Osama Bin-Laden – went on to form the core of Al Qaeda, which was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. In Iraq and Syria, ISIS grew up out of the extremist Iraqi opposition to U.S. intervention there, and its leaders plotted the creation of their new organization in U.S.-run Iraqi prisons. This phenomenon has been referred to as “the boomerang effect” – arms sales, training, and military intervention coming back to haunt (and lead to attacks on) the nation engaging in them.

The critiques of how the Biden administration handled the withdrawal from Afghanistan shouldn’t be allowed to obscure the fact that getting out was the right thing to do. The failure of our multi-trillion-dollar military misadventure in Afghanistan should prompt a thorough rethinking and revision of a foreign policy that has for far too long prioritized arms and military dominance over diplomacy and global cooperation.

Aug 18, 2021 - Failure In Afghanistan, Over 40 Years in the Making

By William Hartung, defense analyst covering the economics of Pentagon spending.

The wrenching scenes at the Kabul airport and the justified fears of what will happen to Afghans under a new round of Taliban rule have formed the backdrop of a heated national conversation about what the United States should or should not have done in Afghanistan. Much of the criticism has landed at the doorstep of the Biden administration for a poorly planned withdrawal that has left U.S. citizens and Afghan allies at risk. Some aspects of the immediate crisis might have been averted if evacuations of U.S. personnel and Afghans who worked with the U.S. had started sooner. And the administration clearly underestimated the speed at which the Afghan security forces would collapse in the face of the recent Taliban offensive. But even if the U.S. exit had been better planned, the Taliban takeover would have occurred sooner or later, with harsh consequences for the people of Afghanistan. The short-term priority must be to evacuate U.S. personnel as quickly as possible, and to provide safe havens – including visas and financial support – for Afghans fleeing the Taliban.

But as for the question of what should have been done differently, keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan indefinitely was not a viable answer, as President Biden noted in his speech earlier this week:

“After 20 years — a trillion dollars spent training and equipping hundreds of thousands of Afghan National Security and Defense Forces, 2,448 Americans k**led, 20,722 more wounded, and untold thousands coming home with unseen trauma to their mental health — I will not send another generation of Americans to war in Afghanistan with no reasonable expectation of achieving a different outcome.”

Given this reality, we should resist the arguments of those who have long advocated for our failed military mission in Afghanistan that if only we had “stayed the course” militarily things could have turned out dramatically differently. As the Washington Post made abundantly clear with the release of the “Afghanistan Papers” – which are elaborated upon in a new book by Post reporter Craig Whitlock – U.S. officials have long known that U.S.-backed military and police personnel in Afghanistan were not a viable fighting force, crippled by corruption and lack of basic support from the top levels of the Afghan government. Even as the final Taliban offensive moved forward, there were Afghan troops forced to leave their posts due to lack of basic items like food and ammunition. The will to support a corrupt government in Kabul of questionable legitimacy just was not there. The repeated public claims by U.S. military and civilian leaders that the Afghan forces were improving and were combat capable belied their private pessimism – in short, they were lies designed to sustain U.S. public support for the war.

As the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approaches, it’s long past time for a radical reassessment of America’s overly militarized, relentlessly interventionist foreign policy. According to the Costs of War Project at Brown University, America’s post-9/11 wars have incurred obligations of over $6.4 trillion; costs hundreds of thousands of lives on all sides; and left hundreds of thousands of U.S. military personnel dead, or with severe physical wounds, or with traumatic brain injuries or post-traumatic stress disorder. In Iraq, the result was a corrupt, repressive, sectarian regime that opened the door to the conquest of large parts of the country by ISIS, as Iraqi troops evaporated in the face of their 2014 onslaught – for many of the same reasons involving corruption, lack of supplies, and plummeting morale that characterized Afghan troops in the face of the Taliban’s final offensive. In Afghanistan, the result was 20 years of devastating conflict followed by the rise to power of the Taliban. Both cases should be object lessons in the limits – and dangerous consequences – of relying on military force as the primary tool of U.S. global engagement.

Any reasonable assessment of U.S. military efforts of the past two decades and beyond must also grapple with the fact that U.S. interventions often make matters worse by paving the way for the development of new, more determined, and more deadly adversaries. This was the case in the Carter and Reagan administration’s decisions to arm and train anti-Soviet mujahadeen to fight back against Moscow’s occupation of Afghanistan. A significant portion of the fighters trained and armed by the U.S. – including foreign fighters like Osama Bin-Laden – went on to form the core of Al Qaeda, which was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. In Iraq and Syria, ISIS grew up out of the extremist Iraqi opposition to U.S. intervention there, and its leaders plotted the creation of their new organization in U.S.-run Iraqi prisons. This phenomenon has been referred to as “the boomerang effect” – arms sales, training, and military intervention coming back to haunt (and lead to attacks on) the nation engaging in them.

The critiques of how the Biden administration handled the withdrawal from Afghanistan shouldn’t be allowed to obscure the fact that getting out was the right thing to do. The failure of our multi-trillion-dollar military misadventure in Afghanistan should prompt a thorough rethinking and revision of a foreign policy that has for far too long prioritized arms and military dominance over diplomacy and global cooperation.

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Free loading LIARS!

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I have to disclose facts. To be honest to know the difference between the right from the wrongs. The only way to improve and to correct the wrongs is to identify them. Then provide solutions.

Look what I have just found. The liar Biden administration reported that there were only 100 to 200 Americans left in Afghanistan. But it turned out that there are 500 or more American left and baited to the Talibans.

Biden administration put priority to t***sporting the Afghans to the US than the American people. Now they'll become hostages of the Taliban and who knows what else could happen.

Before t***sporting the 60,000 to 113,000 Afghans, they must gather all the Americans and t***sport them home.

Congressman: At Least 500 Americans Stranded in Afghanistan, Contradicting White House Estimates
BY JACK PHILLIPS September 6, 2021 Updated: September 6, 2021

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I know that moldy. With 10 days of brief exit there is no way that the process will be successful. That's why smart planning should have been done with enough time to ensure that the exit was done right for the US. Not to appear surrender which Biden did. But a finalization of its mission since UBL was gone.

The whole world watched, and NATO was so upset at Biden. Biden made the US cowards and for the first time in history shamefully surrendered to these tribal people of uncivilized proportion. Since WW I, US never surrendered to anybody. Not until this old demented Marxist Biden s***e the e******n of president Trump. He has advisors dictating to him what to do.

All the Marxists DEMS were united stealing that power. And now this is what we got. America being shamed to the whole world. America became weak and helpless because of Biden. America became dumb because of Biden's surrender to the Taliban. Now Taliban is flexing its muscles parading all the weapons that Biden gifted on them. Biden wanted to have a normal relation with the Taliban. His brain is so much indoctrinated by the likes of Taliban.