Good morning,
Afghanistan Collapse
I should have written a couple of days ago but I put together a podcast with a former American Commander, and an Afghan woman who runs a charity educating girls in Afghanistan. Sadly she is now in hiding and fearing she may be on a Taliban “end game” list.
The link is below. Please retweet.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1016881/9037220
It didn’t have to be this way, and President Biden who blames President Trump should be ashamed. Trump I expect could care less about the sweat and blood of those who tried to make a democracy and a free Afghanistan. But I know Biden is surrounded by better people, and on Afghanistan they will be haunted by making one of the worst humanitarian disasters and foreign policy blunder ever.
Thousands of Afghans are running for the Kabul airport again today, dodging gunfire by the Taliban, who encircle the complex guarded by U.S. and allied troops inside. Should the U.S. retake streets leading to the airport to open a humanitarian corridor for those trying to flee? It seems impossible to do so now without bloodshed.
Should the U.S. simply pull the last remaining troops on the ground and leave? That also would be unconscionable. Already the pullout is a disaster, and Biden’s attempts to sound stoic and Statesman like on the need to leave, is bluster and false, and everyone knows it.
Trump should never have started negotiating with the Taliban without the Afghan Government at the table. Biden should never have made the pullout timetable based on the anniversary of 9/11, instead of condition based. The conditions had to be an end to the violence and a real peace sharing deal with the Taliban and the other power groups such as the Tajiks and Uzbeks and many others who the Americans forced to abandon their militias and join the Afghan central Government.
The only way to bring about a peace deal was to pressure Pakistan, which has always run the Taliban as a proxy force to deny Afghanistan its independence and keep the region under its control.
Biden’s democracy agenda in the World and his vows that “America is back” are tragically a joke. I am not writing this with a left or right political agenda, because I don’t indulge in that kind of journalism.
But I am writing after covering the Afghan war from the very beginning, within weeks of 9/11 and the start of the U.S. invasion. Americans were celebrated by Afghans who wanted out from under the backward extremist rule of the cruel Taliban who were educated on Sharia law in far away maddrassas in Pakistan where they were taught the West was evil and women had no place in society other than to make babies and serve their male masters.
The U.S. didn’t get the counter insurgency fight right, despite the claims of big Generals like David Petraeus who spun elaborate counter insurgency talk, while the Taliban sought safe haven again and again over the border in Pakistan to regroup and fight another month and another year, and another decade.
But the U.S. did build an Afghanistan that could have survived without Taliban rule, if it had held course and not withdrawn under a timetable that left Afghan army forces feeling abandoned and in panic their own Government wouldn’t see it through.
I think we will hear much more about the final months of how the Afghan Government couldn’t fight the Taliban off, and why the U.S. cut and ran. Even allied forces, and there are many Countries which helped build the Afghan Government, feel the Biden administration was making terrible errors in withdrawing so quickly.
But first the final chapter of these few thousand U.S. troops holding the Kabul airport needs to be written. It won’t be pretty and Biden won’t be able to stand tall as the video’s of Afghans clinging to the under carriage’s of departing U.S. aircraft fell to their deaths.
Biden says U.S. troops weren’t in Afghanistan to nation build. Of course that’s a lie, because the only way after chasing Al Qaeda and the Taliban from rule, to make the Country stand on its own was the build an Afghan democracy and an independent army.
That’s what I reported on in my many trips to Afghanistan with U.S. embeds across the country. We recorded heroic young U.S. soldiers on patrols “softening the ground” for elections and bringing in far flung regions to be free of Taliban rule. Of course corruption and the drug trade plagued the effort, and eventually as U.S. troop numbers wound down from over 100 thousand to just 2500, the Taliban violence surged.
But to go from a herculean 20 year effort, to a disastrously managed departure will weigh heavily on Biden and his team. It will haunt his Presidency and as it should. It wasted the efforts of so many Countries which built Afghanistan. And every Afghan will have to live with their own Governments hasty departure in planes loaded with Mercedes and bags of cash.
Shame.