Biden is taking pounding on Afghanistan, and as Commander In Chief the buck does stop at his desk.

Yeah, I figured as much. That's why I've been avoiding American news outlets for the most part and following Al Jazeera and RT and China Global and relying on a favourite American political analyst to keep me up to speed.

Though, some of the criticism of Biden is certainly deserved.

I have to admit, I haven't been following the media/pundit/analyst, save for one critique of Biden but the ones who I have seen and who are highly critical are the ones who think the US should still be in Afghanistan, forever.

I also have to admit that I don't understand why the US under the Biden administration was so woefully unprepared to secure the exit from the country. I expected so much more ...

So, I ask how many of his rather opportunistic critics (on both sides the aisle*)actively tried to extricate the USA from Afghanistan. Not a whole lot.. Are we supposed to stay longer…is that going the bring back the dead, make the wounded whole again, or retrieve the fortune spent on the war? It hurts to lose…but Afghanistan has a habit of humbling great powers…among them, Great Britain…Russia…and now the USA. I don’t expect it, but the politicians and US citizens should accept the mistake and not repeat it.

* “Failure is always an orphan”

Idiot.

I believe that, but your opinion doesn't count for much in Afghanistan, where Sharia law reigns, right?

The Afghan officials that we wanted to run the country proved to be extremely corrupt — which, again, should not surprise anyone since they were simply modeling themselves after our own country’s GOP!

And are we the only country that goes to war for reasons other than to expand our empire? Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan… we shed a lot of blood for what, exactly? While the stockholders of Haliburton might say Iraq and Afghanistan seemed to go perfectly to them; we gained nothing as a nation! Give your soldiers something tangible for them to fight for and they will fight much harder! What good is taking a hill or a city if you are just gonna give it back to those you defeated later on? Was it really “war” or were we just overly armed hall monitors for these countries?

9] CRS

Well said and spot on!

https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2021/08/afghanistan-veterans-struggling-news-taliban-takeover/184590/

If there was a "C.R. Stucki Comments Hall of Fame" this comment would be in it.

Mezzo [11]

There are no "women and girls" under Sharia law. In places like Afghanistan, what they have is more accurately designated as female chattels.

Stig [20]

Like I told Kick once when she had that same "problem" - Better have somebody feel your forehead, you may be delirious with fever.

Biden says that fighting terrorist the old way by military occupation and nation-building doesn't work. He must now lay out a plan that does work!

Once in a great while I find myself in complete agreement with what you post. This is one of those times.

We need new writers, this reality is becoming unplausable.

"And, going forward, where does Pakistan fit into all of this?"

Same place it always was. Another regional neighbor fighting for influence and providing a safe cross border haven. We were never going to "WIN" the war in Afghanistan unless we invaded, occupied, and overthrew the Pakistan government as well.

"Two, regarding the 'intelligence failure' about the implosion of the anti-Taliban Afghan state."

Once the Trump administration cut a separate deal with the Taliban back at Doha, leaving out our Afghan allies completely, it was all but over for the Afghan government. The Taliban just negotiated take over deals with local leaders of towns and cities one by one. There was never ANY fighting. The Taliban just walked in and the local police and military melted away.

"Well, the way I look at it, the US accomplished the most important mission, and relatively early in the campaign. Namely that Osama bin Laden et al. are no longer in Afghanistan. That's when the US should have left, damn the consequences for America's Afghan government and national army."

Yep, the Taliban first surrendered back in 2001. The anti-terrorism part of the mission was actually over close to 18 years ago. Remember, Bin Laden was actually found and captured in Pakistan, not Afghanistan.

The chances of a 'good' or 'well-managed' withdrawal were vanishingly small, but still it's a mess.

Back in my days teaching English to speakers of other languages, I taught many Afghan refugees, first from the initial Taliban takeover (When asked why he hadn't stayed to fight, a professional man explained to the other students 'I have a wife and daughters and I could no longer keep them safe;' another man brought an old unexploded Russian grenade home for lack of any other protection until they could get out) and then later waves of refugees, many of them the kind of people needed for actual rebuilding, generally very realistic about the internal barriers to a sound government.

I fear most for the women and girls.

Couldn't agree more!

Except that I think the US and allies were right to go there but they should have meant it as a strictly counter-terrorism mission and got the hell out of there when that mission was accomplished.

Do you think appropriate lessons have been learned?

I keep hearing they were "functioning as a terrorist training ground". I say BULLSHIT. Bin Laden ran a damn near one-man operation, and he could have planned it just as well living virtually anywhere. You've gotta remember, most of the WTC operation happened RIGHT GAWDAM HERE in the U.S.A., NOT in Afghanistan. The hijackers learned to 'guide' (not 'fly', not 'pilot') jetliners at U.S. schools/training centers, NOT in Afghanistan.

And for that same reason, I ain't buying into the idea that the instant we leave, it will "revert" to being a terrorist training ground. It never was, and anyway we can monitor the place and wipe out any "terrorist training centers" by means of drone attacks, without settin a single foot over there.

We were stupid to ever go there, and we paid dearly for our stupidity. The question now is, did we LEARN ANYTHING from our mistake? I ain't betting on it.

But the War itself is hardly over, and one would hope the president would remind us of that, and acknowledge it himself.

Biden has acknowledged this and even did do in his address today, no?

Call me a cockeyed optimist but, I think there may be some shred of hope for Afghanistan in terms of it not becoming a terrorist state again. That may be the best outcome. And, who knows, the Taliban may learn lessons a whole lot better than American political and military leaders.

If America plays its cards right, keeping a close eye on China and Russia in Afghanistan, and if American diplomacy is not dead, then better things could happen there, in time. Speaking of which, as far as I know, the Russians haven't closed their embassy in Kabul. And the game goes on and on ...

One, depending on how we define the "War on Terror", that is the true Forever War, with Afghanistan being just one front on an amorphous and eternal world war with dozens of fronts on every continent. There have been rumors that the Taliban bought into Trump's deal: we let you have Afghanistan and its people, and you promise not to house any more global terrorist training camps and bases. The corollary to the deal is, presumably, this: you break the deal and we'll be back to take you down again, even if only for a while. In other words, the Taliban is on the other side in the War on Terror, or it always has been up to now. If it goes neutral, in order to solidify the Islamic state in its homeland, the War on Terror has one less player on the terror side. But the War itself is hardly over, and one would hope the president would remind us of that, and acknowledge it himself.

Two, regarding the 'intelligence failure' about the implosion of the anti-Taliban Afghan state. On public radio this morning they had several guests from the intelligence community, so-called (mostly ex-CIA, I think), protesting that NO, they've been telling the US powers-that-be for many years now that the Pentagon has its head up its a** and has severely underestimated the Taliban's strengths. YES, we warned anyone who would listen that, if and when we leave, the entire house of cards will collapse in much less time than your self-serving experts in the Defense and State Department are telling you. Clearly this will be the subject of many debates in the national security cocktail circuit and Congressional hearing rooms for months if not years to come. Was there an intelligence failure? Or was there a listening-to- intelligence failure?

As much as I used to think that nation-building was the way to go in Iraq, where it could have worked or in Afghanistan, where it would never have worked in a million years, the US sucks at nation-building.