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What Will We Call This Debacle?
I know almost nothing about fighting a war. In earlier times, it seems that wars usually had two sides; both sides knew that the other was the enemy. Both sides knew what they were fighting for. Both sides knew there was a plan to go in, to fight, to win, to leave. But who is the enemy in Afghanistan? The Taliban? al Qaeda? Our leaders?
What is this “thing” in Afghanistan? Does anyone remember the original plan for going in? Who decided we should stay once al Qaeda was “defeated?” There are some who say we didn’t want to nation-build; others say that nation-building is the only way we would have stayed. These were an illiterate people who couldn’t read an instruction manual or a newspaper headline, but they were desperate to rid themselves of the Taliban. We wanted them to be free of these barbarians, too. Was that our purpose—to free the Afghans of these monsters, who could hide for months or years until their opportunity to raid and savage the country re-appeared? And what about the women and girls who have had a taste of freedom? Will they now be tortured and killed because they now understand what it means to live free? Must those memories be destroyed?
What do we now call this debacle in Afghanistan? Was it a foolish dream to believe we could leave quickly? How many people are at risk? How many people will die? How many soldiers are wondering what in the world they are doing as their leaders flail about, hoping a miracle will appear?
What is this “thing”? What do we call it? We are running out of words: debacle, nightmare, destruction, chaos, desperation, insanity—is there one word that will suffice? Or are there not enough words to express this “thing” that we are watching unfold in real-time? What will we call this “thing” years from now?
Our illustrious leaders are saying that we will not leave until we free each and every American (and maybe our Afghan allies?) from the country. They tell us that the Taliban will not stop us, but everyone except our leaders knows that hope is a delusion. They say that commercial airlines are stepping up to remove people, but how will these people get to the airport? Where is the strategy? Where is the will?
Where is the truth?
God help us and the Afghan people.
Published in Military
There is a leaked CIA memo (from 2010) with PR strategies for NATO countries to sell continued involvement.
We continue to discover (and it’s the same lesson every time) that not everyone cherishes the governance that we believe in. We assume that we and our way of life is superior in every way. Certainly there is much to appreciate and be proud of. But we can’t keep making the mistake where we assume that we know what is best for every other country.
A thoughtful comment, @daventers. Perhaps that is an obligation of a superpower, but we must, WE MUST clarify and define our role–why we are entering, what we plan to accomplish and when it’s time to leave. We won’t be able to define precisely those times when we are willing to go in, but we must have some criteria or it will cost us dearly. I put your last comment in bold, because we may be so far lost that we have already severely threatened our claim to be the good guys.
Maybe we’ll call it much ado about nothing.
I’m inclined to agree with the first half of Ekosj’s comment #26, about Afghan tribalism, and about our so-called “allies” being a collection of other tribes and warlords settling scores with the Taliban.
I don’t think that there’s anything of practical value in Afghanistan. It looks like their GDP is around $22-23 billion/year, about $500/person. The figure that I’ve heard (from Dan Crenshaw and Ben Shapiro) is that we were spending about $45 billion/year in Afghanistan. Twice as much as their entire economy.
I’m not worried about the Chinese moving in. They’d be fools to do so. Why would they want to embrace a tar-baby that gave such grief to the British, then the Soviets, and then us?
Unlike Vietnam, there’s no dangerous global movement behind the Taliban. In Vietnam, we were trying to stop the spread of international communism, which was quite powerful at the time. There is Islam, but the Jihadis are both woefully disunited and weak.
What international trouble can the Taliban cause? Are they going to invade a neighbor? Who? The Iranians are much more powerful than the Afghans, and I wouldn’t exactly shed tears to see them fighting each other. The Pakistanis are much more powerful than the Afghans. Are we worried about the Turkmens or the Uzbeks? Like Afghanistan, these countries have nothing of value to us.
It’s sad for the people of Afghanistan, but I think that they, themselves, are to blame. The problem is their culture and their religion, and I see no evidence that they want to change. This is unfortunate, but not our problem.
About the Americans left behind: they’ve been warned by our government, for years, not to go there. They were told not to go, and they were told to get out. I’m going to do a separate post on this, because I think that the facts are important.
I do hope that Americans who were foolish or stubborn enough not to heed these years of warnings will nevertheless manage to get out of Afghanistan safely. But they were either so ignorant of danger as to deserve a new level of Darwin award, or they decided to take their chances. They are free people, and can take foolish risks if they wish.
The NY Post had that the other day as a headline.
Afghanistan will be will be remembered as another Vietnam, that is, a defeat within the overall context of a greater victory. We lost in Vietnam as one element of the greater victory of the Cold War. Afghanistan will be a defeat in the greater victory over Islamism. They will not win the over arching war.
But we have to still understand we are in a war with Islamism. Many seem to have forgotten.
It’s called Islamism.
No, it’s called Islam.
But it’s weak. It doesn’t present anything like the danger of the former Soviet Union. Muslim countries don’t seem to be able to even maintain a tank, helicopter, or jet, much less build them by the thousands.
This. There is no “Afghan People”, just a collection of ethnic tribes. We thought we were helping them, but they didn’t think so. If they had, the members of their “army” would not have robbed us blind, then deserted into their mountain fastnesses. And the members of their “army” would not have blown each other to smithereens regularly either.
Whether Islamic nations on their own can be determined to be dangerous, I haven’t a clue.
But the assault on Western values by having massive numbers of Muslims immigrate to Western nations is an assault fully backed by the Chinese Commie-led UN, whose commission on immigration openly details the absolute need to insert 350 million economic, religious, and Climate Change refugees into every society in the West.
That is a whole lot of people. Meanwhile our societies are being educated to embrace the diversity of other religions and social attitudes, and at the same time, relinquish any outward involvement that promotes Western traditional values.
Several years ago, Merkle over in Germany signed on to national legislation that banned the crucifix in German classrooms. Except for some time during the Third Reich, the crucifix was part and parcel of each classroom in that nation. This occurred the same week an inner circle of The Council of Foreign Relations gleefully discussed how white Christians would be a minority by 2025 if not sooner.
When white Christians in the West have stood down and away from their traditions, while the immigrants from Muslim nations hold to Sharia law, just who do you think will come out on top?
We can’t go out of our way to fight Islamism when half the country subscribes to Wokism, which is the moral equivalent of the ‘mostly peaceful’ variants of Islamism…and will become much worse if the military, oligarchs, and intelligence services of the United States are able to cement their positions for too much longer, much like what happened with Islamism in Pakistan (not that it was ever benign, but totalitarian ideologies of that type require enabling conditions for their worst effects to manifest).
If there are Afghan dogs it stands to reason that there are Afghan people. :)
This is very good. We weren’t vicious enough at Tora Bora. That was the first mistake. Then we should’ve just said that if they even twitch we are coming back and it’s going to be worse. Since we didn’t do that, we are better off just staying there forever. The big problem is we don’t have any friends in that neighborhood and it can’t be accessed by the Navy very well.
https://www.gingrich360.com/2021/08/18/newts-world-episode-293-the-crisis-in-afghanistan/
600,000 assault weapons and thousands of Humvees and trucks. Night vision goggles.
They will probably figure out how to leverage helicopters and so forth.
China is nothing but a bunch of mafia that wants to rip off their own people and the whole world. Mafia with an army. Our stupid ruling class really screwed up when we started trading with them. Some people think that the whole Nixon and Mao thing was a screwup too.
Tribal issues are first. The second thing is Islam is inherently political unlike the other religions. The koran says it’s integrated with the government. Then you have geographic problems. Mountainous areas are hard to unify and control from a terrorism standpoint.
A lot. more guys at Gitmo should have been executed, too.
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Nah. Wars have always been like this from time to time. There’s nothing new under the sun.
The US is in the hands of the groups we gave US domestic power to. They’d like things to work better, but who resigned and raised hell as this was going to unfold, any military, civilian civil servants, or foreign service officers.? They think they know what is in their interest and govern their little piece of political power accordingly. They may even cooperate with each other and occasionally coordinate as they did to steal or ignore the theft of the presidency. But the system the founders created that now has 320 million people with the largest military in the history of the world can’t be governed by the top and can’t remain prosperous and free if governed by the collection of interests that has evolved to spend our wealth. Can we do anything about the unfolding disaster? The disaster isn’t Afghanistan, that’s just a very vulnerable piece where the ineptitude showed up first. After the next election is stolen will it be too late to fix it? What role will China play in the unfolding economic disaster.
This part of your comment is especially prescient, @iwalton. Afghanistan has been victimized by years of ineptitude and ignorance.
China will move in to get access to minerals and pipeline. Going green will enrich china.
My Time Is Up.
Guys, I think that you are using the language of the very people that you criticize.
I think that the entire reason for the existence of the strange word “Islamism” is the desire to draw a distinction between the Jihadis, on the one hand, and some other, hypothetical form of Islam which is thought to be benign. Some people think that the problem is “Islamism,” which seems to be defined as some strange perversion of the supposedly wonderful Religion of Peace that is Islam. I understand their point. This could be true of other groups, like a hypothetically tyrannical, bloodthirsty version (or perversion) of Christianity, which has been seen at certain times in the past. With respect to Islam, however, I think that the core of the religion is the problem. There may be many Muslims who want Islam to be a religion of peace, but I don’t think that it can be reformed successfully, given its core doctrines and the nature of its founder.
It’s true that there will probably never be a major reform of Islam. It’s true that it expresses in its teachings violence and superiority to others. There is a large group of people, however, who, in their practice of Islam, practice peacefully. They are willing to abide by the secular laws and just want to live their lives. There are others, however, who believe that violent jihad is acceptable, and approve of violence to conquer other peoples and impose sharia law. They are the ones who are called Islamists or practice Islamism. You can judge them all you like, but it’s simply incorrect to say that every Muslim wants to force Islam on everyone.
Yes, I know we can’t tell which is which on the surface. I’m very concerned with Islamism but slandering all Muslims doesn’t help the situation.
I have found the term “Islamism/Islamist” useful in the past to emphasize the larger political and social force. I like to use Islam/Muslim to mean just the religion.
This is, however, not so useful as it appears — it is very Enlightement, and somewhat Protestant, to draw this line at all.
There is also merit in just calling the whole thing Saracen and being done with it.
I don’t think that I slandered Muslims, but maybe I’m wrong. I think that Islam is a bad thing, so I don’t think that people should adhere to it. I think that you may be correct about many nominal Muslims not taking the religion seriously, though it’s hard to tell, in two ways. You point out one of them.
First, it may be hard to distinguish a real Jihadi-type from a relatively peaceful Muslim. You noted this. Another danger, though, is that the relatively peaceful Muslims may just be laying low, and things might shift once they reach a certain percentage of the population. This might apply not just in a country as a whole, but in particular localities within a country. I think that both Douglas Murray and Ayaan Hirsi Ali have pointed this out in their recent work.
I think that Islam generally requires forcing Islam on everyone, though some nominal Muslims may not take this part seriously. I also think that there is a doctrine in Islam about the “people of the book,” meaning Christians and Jews, who are not forced to convert but are taxed and treated as second-class citizens. This was a practical doctrine that allowed Islamic societies to parasitize Christian lands. This was particularly apparent during the Ottoman rule of the Balkans.
Surrender Gate.