International Events VI: Glorious Anarchy and Chaos!

[DMC]

As much as I hate to admit it, I think we have to concede that the neocons are right about something - the US could sustain the status quo of pre-withdrawal with relative minimal investment in blood and treasure.  It's just the question of what's the point?  People mention Germany and Japan, but this isn't even Korea, where US presence provides for the perpetuation of a flourishing democratic government on one side. 

All we're doing is propping up a profoundly centralized government in a remarkably decentralized country in perpetuity for..what exactly?  The fear the Taliban may allow terrorist elements that want to kill us again?  Well, this is not 2000 nor 2001 and there are already plenty of failed states that provide opportunities for those that want to kill us to flourish.  The humanitarian atrocities should not be ignored, but that's something for the world community to confront together.  It's time to stop paying for the Bush administration's - and the neocons' - original sin of patronizing "nation building."

[Rippounet]

15 minutes ago, DMC said:

All we're doing is propping up a profoundly centralized government in a remarkably decentralized country in perpetuity for..what exactly?  The fear the Taliban may allow terrorist elements that want to kill us again?  Well, this is not 2000 nor 2001 and there are already plenty of failed states that provide opportunities for those that want to kill us to flourish.

I would assume the point was always to limit the number of hostile states, but yes, the cost has proved far too high in this case.
Also, I think there was an old idea (dating back to at least Brzezinski) that Afghanistan was someplace where the US just had to have a military presence, for the resources, but also to gain some measure of influence on the neighbors: surround Iran, calm down Pakistan vs India, deter China from having funny ideas... etc. Though I'm sure Iran, China, and Pakistan (+Russia and India) will reach some kind of balance, at least in the short-term.

[DMC]

19 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

I think there was an old idea (dating back to at least Brzezinski) that Afghanistan was someplace where the US just had to have a military presence

Well, I'm far from Brzezinski's biggest fan, but his interest in goading the Soviets into an intractable conflict with the Mujahideen was decidedly not about the US having a permanent presence in Afghanistan.  That's..part of the problem in a Billy Joel/"we didn't start the fire" sort of way, but I think the clear lesson there geopolitically is if any other adversary wants to try to exert influence - good luck!

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

Human rights, not combating terrorism, is the only reason the US should remain in Afghanistan, but by that standard we would need to occupy so many countries across the world, including our own. It's just feasible. However, the poor planning of the withdrawal is unforgivable.  

[DMC]

8 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

However, the poor planning of the withdrawal is unforgivable. 

There's clear evidence Biden's decision making was rushed, yeah.  But I'm not sure how much it mattered.  Seems pretty apparent at this point Ghani's government was just going to be in denial about the US leaving no matter when it actually happened.  Plus, of course, there was Trump's deal with the Taliban that Biden had to consider.  Even taking the politics out of it, if he delayed further it's hard to see how their reaction would have been any better.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

7 minutes ago, DMC said:

There's clear evidence Biden's decision making was rushed, yeah.  But I'm not sure how much it mattered.  Seems pretty apparent at this point Ghani's government was just going to be in denial about the US leaving no matter when it actually happened.  Plus, of course, there was Trump's deal with the Taliban that Biden had to consider.  Even taking the politics out of it, if he delayed further it's hard to see how their reaction would have been any better.

Playing MMQB, I think they could have delayed the withdrawal until Afghanistan's winter. That way we could have gotten more people out and established a better vetting system for getting Afghans who helped us over the course of the war citizenship, further fortified their military and delayed a good chuck of the Taliban's advances. But what's done is done.

[DMC]

1 minute ago, Tywin et al. said:

That way we could have gotten more people out and established a better vetting system for getting Afghans who helped us over the course of the war citizenship, further fortified their military and delayed a good chuck of the Taliban's advances.

Well, we'll see how it goes frankly.  This seems like nitpicking and semantics.  The troop deployments are clearly meant to deal with the former, and as for fortifying the Afghan military..if they're not "fortified" by now...

[dog-days]

News coming in of a big earthquake in Haiti. It sounds as if its epicentre wasn't near Port au Prince at least...

[Fragile Bird]

7.2 earthquake in Haiti, and heavy rain from a tropical storm on it’s way. Ground liquidation, aftershocks, and possibility of a tsunami in the Caribbean.

Month 20 of 2020. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

24 minutes ago, DMC said:

Well, we'll see how it goes frankly.  This seems like nitpicking and semantics.  The troop deployments are clearly meant to deal with the former, and as for fortifying the Afghan military..if they're not "fortified" by now...

The redeployment is an acknowledgment that they got things wrong, seriously wrong, and with the latter, yeah, it's probably a fruitless endeavor, but buying another six months or so could have had some positive impact. 

[DMC]

Just now, Tywin et al. said:

The redeployment is an acknowledgment that they got things wrong, seriously wrong, and with the latter, yeah, it's probably a fruitless endeavor, but buying another six months or so could have had some positive impact. 

I was being too argumentative in the last post because I had a problem with the "unforgivable" language.  The Biden administration deserves legitimate criticism, but I'm preemptively (heh) trying to stave off the absolute horseshit onslaught that's going to come from the right on this.  Practically, I don't think "buying" another six months changes much of anything.  This is what is going to happen whenever we pull out.  It's quite apparent it's happening exactly because we're pulling out.  Politically, Biden is absolutely right to do it ASAP instead of delaying the inevitable.  There's even a compelling argument that if he delayed it would not only embolden the Taliban, but make Ghani's government even more complacent.

[Werthead]

On 8/13/2021 at 3:45 PM, IFR said:

Is there any effective approach to Afghanistan? Decades of occupation did not positively impact that area. Withdrawing is clearly seeing its own consequences. 

There are situations where occupation and an investing in the rebuilding of infrastructure had a revitalizing effect (Japan and Germany, for example). But Afghanistan certainly doesn't seem to fit in that category. Do people propose the US remains there in perpetuity?

No, but the situation required a degree of management to prevent a humanitarian crisis of massive proportions, which will lead to a further migrant crisis in Europe (that's now in train, so great); a semi-genocide on the ground as the Taliban take revenge on absolutely anyone who even looks like they helped the international forces or the successive governments since 2001 (that's already underway, with police, soldiers, teachers, translators and regional administrators being executed or, at best, imprisoned in those districts where they have taken power); and the absolutely colossal propaganda victory this gives the United States' enemies and rivals. If the US isn't willing to take very moderate action to stop a bunch of guys in trucks with no air force and almost no armour, then that's a clear sign to the Chinese that they'll probably be able to waltz into Taiwan and take it on a whim, and to Russia that the US will not help its NATO allies if they decide to go into the Baltic States. I fully expect to see massive edit wars going on in the coming weeks on Wikipedia as people, with a fair degree of argument behind them, switch the War on Terror article to "Outcome: Taliban and Al-Qaeda strategic victory and United States defeat in Afghanistan."

This isn't Vietnam where the United States interfered hugely with the internal processes of a country for absolutely no provocation and was suffering massive, daily military losses on an apocalyptic scale (by US domestic standards) for years on end. The status quo in Afghanistan could have been maintained, possibly indefinitely, for a relatively low price. That doesn't mean we stay there forever, but we work harder to encourage the Afghan institutions to properly take hold. You might say that twenty years should be enough for that and in most countries it would have been, but Afghanistan has been in a state of constant instability and civil war or near-civil war for fifty years or more. It took well over ten years for the nascent Afghan military to go from being totally useless to only moderately incompetent (although Afghan special forces are reportedly much better), and they were still years away from being able to take over the mission permanently. Trump just tried to come up with an easy exit strategy to make himself look good and if it meant tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths, fuck it. I'm extremely surprised Biden just agreed to implement that plan and say screw the consequences.

Quote

Anybody who actually knows history knows that Afghanistan cannot be occupied by anyone who isn't Afghanistan.

This is correct. However, this never really happened in the post-2001 scenario. It was the Northern Alliance that defeated the Taliban in the actual bulk of the ground fighting, with US air strike and special forces support (and the Russians supplying equipment to the Alliance). NATO forces were then deployed in a peacekeeping exercise which was moderately successful, with points earlier in the 2010s (after the Surge) when the number of foreign troops in the country was relatively low, compared to earlier periods, and the Taliban relatively contained. The key to the success, tenuous as it was, was using international forces to bolster native Afghan forces. What that was in balance, it worked. It was pulling out the international forces completely that has led to the current deterioration.

The problem isn't occupying Afghanistan, it's asking whether Afghanistan actually functionally exists or can exist any more, or if it's just an unstable region waiting for the next strongman to rise up and take over, and if it's possible to change that. Successive Kabul governments have not been able to do that, regardless of the West supporting them or not.

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I do wonder why the Afghani military has been so ineffective so far. They still have the numbers, all the tech they got from the West, even an air force.

They might not have the numbers. There have been reports for years of "ghost soldiers," especially out in the provinces, of army generals and local militia commanders claiming (US-funded, mostly) payments for having say 1,000 troops, but they really only had 200. The bulk of the actual army has been in and around Kabul and, to a lesser extent, the other big cities.

Some of the old Northern Alliance commanders woke up to what's going on and started mobilising a few weeks back, but they look like they've been outplayed: the Taliban have focused a lot of their recruiting and infiltration efforts in the north, and that's why the current offensive has taken everyone by surprise, because it was erupting out what was traditionally the anti-Taliban heartland. The attacks up there are being spearheaded by younger, recently-radicalised forces who are moving with a lot more purpose, and it looks like they've been cutting deals with moderate tribal leaders to effectively get them to stand down and not resist in return for retaining some kind of autonomy (the Taliban made similar deals in the 1990s and threw them out the window, which helped sparked the later uprising against their rule even before 9/11, so that might well happen again).

I mean, Christ, Mazar-I-Sharif has just fallen and that city gave the Taliban absolute nightmares in trying to hold it in the 1990s (and it was the first city liberated by the Northern Alliance in 2001), with local warlords kicking the shit out of them for years before they finally took it in 1998 only after playing off two warlords against one another in betrayals and counter-betrayals.

The coming weeks and months are going to see a bloodbath that the United States and its allies are going to have to take quite a lot of culpability for, not to mention massive internal criticism and rival states and terror groups feeling emboldened in a way they haven't for decades.

[Werthead]

This is an interesting point. The Taliban negotiating strategy in Doha was based on the idea that the US and international partners would withdraw slowly over time and would return and provide support to the Afghan government, so the Taliban believed that coming to a negotiated peace was the only thing for them to do.

The second they realised that the US was aching to cut and run completely and was not going to stand and fight, that emboldened them to launch an offensive of this magnitude (which, it's worth noting, looks bigger than it is; there's only around 70,000 actual Taliban fighters in the country, plus whatever local militias and forces have swapped sides and basically agreed to act as police and enforcers for them). So yes, there is a belief that had the US and its allies retained a presence in the country, even at a fraction of the Surge levels, and the Taliban continued to believe that the US would respond to any large-scale offensive on their part with overwhelming force on their part, that a settlement with the Taliban in control of certain parts of the country and another government in Kabul, with Afghans at least able to escape the Taliban area (or go there, if they wanted), could have been possible, even if they planned to betray that at a later date.

[DMC]

15 minutes ago, Werthead said:

If the US isn't willing to take very moderate action to stop a bunch of guys in trucks with no air force and almost no armour, then that's a clear sign to the Chinese that they'll probably be able to waltz into Taiwan and take it on a whim, and to Russia that the US will not help its NATO allies if they decide to go into the Baltic States.

This is a comical overreaction.  Even from a realist perspective - which seems to be what you're going for - the US' interests in Afghanistan are entirely orthogonal to defending the status quo in Taiwan or providing support against Russian incursion.  Indeed, withdrawing from the former can only enhance US capacity to respond to the latter.

20 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Trump just tried to come up with an easy exit strategy to make himself look good and if it meant tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths, fuck it. I'm extremely surprised Biden just agreed to implement that plan and say screw the consequences.

Biden has been trying to get out of Afghanistan for literally a decade.  Obviously Trump's deal has an impact on how the Biden administration undertook such an effort, but he wanted to do this when Trump was still a reality TV host and calling into Fox & Friends to ramble about Obama's birth certificate.

26 minutes ago, Werthead said:

The coming weeks and months are going to see a bloodbath that the United States and its allies are going to have to take quite a lot of culpability for, not to mention massive internal criticism and rival states and terror groups feeling emboldened in a way they haven't for decades.

This is fear-mongering on a rather dangerous scale.  The US pulling back over the past decade - with Syria, with Iraq, with the response to the Arab Spring - has not resulted in catastrophic terrorism towards the west.  These are complicated questions where there is no "right" answer, but there's of course just as much potential increased US presence emboldens terrorist elements as decreased presence does.

[Gorn]

46 minutes ago, DMC said:

 The US pulling back over the past decade - with Syria, with Iraq, with the response to the Arab Spring - has not resulted in catastrophic terrorism towards the west. 

Um, yes it has. Nice, Barcelona, Manchester, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, Istanbul airport, Istanbul nightclub, that airplane full of Russian tourists from Egypt, that train in France, London Bridge...

And that's just Europe. 2010s were by far the worst decade in terms of terrorism deaths in history, but most of the attacks happened in Asia and Africa, out of western media spotlights.

[DMC]

3 minutes ago, Gorn said:

2010s were by far the worst decade in terms of terrorism deaths in history, but most of the attacks happened in Asia and Africa, out of western media spotlights.

I intentionally specified the west.

[Zorral]

Partner's been muttering, tearfully, all day: "Earthquake, tropical storm-hurricane barreling at them, covid.  O ya, and Haiti doesn't have a government.  Of any kind."

[Ran]

1 minute ago, DMC said:

I intentionally specified the west.

Indeed. One can cite individual instances in the West, but the truth is that on the whole attacks against western countries are down compared to the previous decade, looking at Our World in Data's stats. 

[DMC]

Just now, Ran said:

looking at Our World in Data's stats. 

Similar minds.  I was just looking at this:

Quote

The map below which shows terrorism as a share of total deaths for each country. In most countries – particularly across Europe, the Americas and Oceania – deaths from terrorism accounted for less than 0.01%. They are rare in most countries of the world today.

This is not true everywhere. In a number of countries across the Middle East and Africa, terrorist deaths reach up to several percent. Iraq was the most affected 4.3% of all deaths were due to terrorism in 2017, followed by Afghanistan, Syria and Somalia which each had over 1%. These are countries where overall conflict – of which terrorist activity is a part – is high. In fact, as we discuss here, the boundary between terrorism, conflict, one-sided violence or civil war is not always clear-cut.

 

[Gorn]

13 minutes ago, Ran said:

Indeed. One can cite individual instances in the West, but the truth is that on the whole attacks against western countries are down compared to the previous decade, looking at Our World in Data's stats. 

Deaths might be down, but only because the previous decade included 9/11, a unique, statistic-distorting event. The number of attacks has risen.