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“What Does an American Promise Mean Today?”
LTC Scott Mann’s opening statement about the Afghanistan evacuation fiasco is well worth watching. If you want horrid details of what the pullout was like from a tactical perspective for those involved, read Operation Pineapple Express. I respect this man. I have never served with him, but he’s all in with whatever he does.
I have no illusions that this will result in anything other than the satisfaction of saying it out loud in the House.
Published in Military
I am glad I listened to the whole thing and think we all should.
At 5:00:
What a bunch of emotionalism. It would be nice if adults, especially leaders, took a mature view of difficult situations.
It’s probably very tough to be a veteran who fought in an inadvisable war. Our military personnel make great sacrifices, some suffering injury or death themselves, others suffering through the losses of friends and comrades. When the war was a mistake, or when the mission shifts so that the ongoing occupation becomes a mistake, we need to be able to cut our losses.
This is what happened in Afghanistan. Thank goodness we got out. There was no perfect way to do so.
This is the sort of emotional argument that leaves us stuck in endless wars.
He seems to want eternal commitment to “our allies,” who are often allies of convenience with whom we have little in common. This is the root of Neocon overextension.
I’m particularly annoyed about the narrative about our broken “promises.” Maybe some political and military leaders made promises. This should not bind future leaders, especially in changed circumstances. No one should have the power to commit our country to a certain course, indefinitely. Policy changes. When we make a mistake, like the ongoing Afghan intervention, we need to be able to correct that mistake.
An international promise binding on our country can only be made, under our Constitution, by a treaty entered by the President with the approval of the Senate. Even then, treaties can be broken.
This has to be the case, or we could never correct mistakes, nor could we adapt to changed circumstances.
So, to me, this testimony looks like grandstanding to score cheap political points.
What I still don’t understand is why the Bagram Air Base with its two runways was shut down. Everyone was funneled into an airport with only one runway. One runway and limited access to that airport that meant hundreds upon hundreds of people were crammed into a kill zone for a suicide bomber.
That doesn’t include the fact that our allies in Afghanistan were never informed that Bagram was going to be abandoned.
It would be nice if we had an adult in the White House, instead of an angry senile old man who’s never held a real job and surrounded by immature adults that have never held a real job, much less that they have never served in the armed forces.
Another issue was that US forces were not allowed to leave the airport to help US citizens get to the airport. That didn’t stop the British and the French elite units that did enter Kabul to rescue as many of their own citizens and anyone else they could help get to the airport. Biden’s bug out was a disgrace.
The French sent the GIGN, a special unit of the Gendarmerie to rescue and evacuate their citizens from Kabul. Some media labeled them as French police officers. The following video gives you a good look at the GIGN.
The withdrawal was handled poorly in so many ways. Here is some additional testimony that should make everyone angry . . .
@arizonapatriot – You did not believe we should have been in Afghanistan. I can understand that, not my view, but I can understand it.
Really? Doing the right thing is lack of leadership and considered mature. If abandoning people you had lived, fought, bled, eaten, suffered, cried and laughed with, and made promises to is lack of leadership I want nothing to do with it. They believed worst case we’d get them and their families out of the country because they did exactly what the U.S. asked them to do and in most cases more. We left them and billions of dollars of equipment behind. If this is your idea of leadership – you can have it and I will dump you into the Obama/Biden bin of leaders.
If we were really making a mature decision, we could have considered that there had been no U.S. casualties in the last 12 months and our footprint was 2,500 service members maintaining what freedom we gained for the country. @dougwatt We also had Bagram Air Base that could be used strategically for more pressing international concerns. Notably we are still in Germany, Italy, Korea, and Japan.
I can live with the fact we pulled out, even understand the argument, but the way we did it was unconscionable. I know for a FACT there was a plan that was left on the floor. I could have gotten with a bunch of Ricochetti and assuredly planned and executed a better evacuation. It was done was for purely political reasons and it apparently worked for you.
So yeah it was an emotional response because it is an emotional event. You have ZERO understanding of men and mission of Special Forces, what we do, who we are, are how it’s done. It’s not a sterile environment. We were pissed off going into Afghanistan having just watched people, including mothers, jump to their death rather than burn to death. This largely pointed to having been planned and coordinated from Afghanistan. Between Special Operations Forces and air power we pushed the Talibs back into their mountain hideaways and told the Afghanis their country could be better. And they believed us. These soldiers believed in what America told them and subsequently sold it to the Afghanis. These Afghanis truly believed they could make their country better place and saw it happening before their eyes.
I feel honored to have served with such men as LTC Mann. Men of conviction and loyalty. If being a leader means sterilizing yourself from what is real, earned, and felt I feel sorry for you.
Guy’s totally overreacting. It’s not like anyone died or anything.
We shouldn’t make the perfect the enemy of the abysmal.
He wasn’t arguing for staying, he was arguing that we shouldn’t have metaphorically let the door hit us in the ass on the way out.
Except the door was bullets and the ass was people who took us at our word.
I think the commitment he was talking about was a matter of weeks rather than eternity.
Again, no one but you is talking about indefinitely.
Not sure why, he prefaced his remarks by saying that he’s not talking about Democrats or Republicans and pointed the blame at the military command.
Are you quite sure you clicked on the same video as everyone else?
Our servicemen died, our allies were left behind, $10-15 billion worth of equipment abandoned just so Slow Joe could have a soundbite moment for the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. It was a soundbite he couldn’t deliver though. He would have sounded exceptionally dimwitted – even for him.
Thank you dajoho for bringing this to our attention. Also, Lt. Col. Mann’s book.
If anyone is interested in listening to the entire hearing, here’s all 5+ hours of it, thanks to the invaluable CSPAN. I can’t imagine sitting that long and watching it, but I’ll be cooking and doing housework tomorrow and will probably listen to all or part of it. The clips I’ve already seen are appropriately scathing and emotionally searing.
IIRC, Bill Clinton got the Ukraine to give up its nukes in exchange for protection by us from Russia. If we keep breaking promises, it’ll be any wonder if our allies stop trusting us . . .