Surprise

 

Ration for five men in Kandahar, 2020, via France24.

watching tom nichols, max boot, jeffrey goldberg and michael o'hanlon analyzing u.s. failures in afghanistan on a splitscreen next to oj performing the ron and nicole autopsies

— man it’s a hot zone, (@Mobute) August 16, 2021

Indeed. Maybe not Goldberg, who came to a point of rationality on Afghanistan as he studied Barack Obama, e.g. in 2015:

I think Obama had the tragic sense, early on, that there was no possibility of nation building in Afghanistan, and so he focused his efforts on decimating al Qaeda.... Afghanistan has confounded outsiders since the 1850s and earlier, and so it is not remarkable that Obama has failed to ameliorate the situation.

But honestly, these other guys, the ones who became NeverTrumpers because they believed Trump was some kind of pacifist and voted for Biden in the hope he'd be a warmonger can just shut up.

Although what really shocks me is the retired pros who seem to have had no idea the nation hadn't been built in Afghanistan, even as they kept begging presidents from Obama till now to keep the troops there, like James Stavridis just on Thursday, I mean four days ago:

ADM. JAMES STAVRIDIS: I am deeply surprised, as follows. We left 300,000, we thought reasonably well-trained, Afghans. We equipped them with everything that they could need, and we continue to provide a great deal of financial, equipment, over the horizon, intelligence support, but what always makes the difference is leadership and will.

And unfortunately, that is not on display at the senior levels of the Afghan government or security forces.

In terms of how concerned am I that Kabul could fall? Very concerned.

I would say at this point, Andrea, it's four in five chance that it would fall in the next 30 to 60 days.

Or Ryan Crocker, who was ambassador in Kabul in 2011-12, on Saturday:

In an interview with The Spokesman-Review on Friday, Crocker said while the pace of the insurgents’ advance has surprised him, the Biden administration should have seen it coming.

“I think the direction was predictable; the trajectory was not,” he said. “What President Biden has done is to embrace the Afghan policy of President Trump, and this is the outcome.”...

By cutting the Afghan government out of the peace talks, while agreeing to terms that included the release of up to 5,000 Taliban prisoners, Crocker said the U.S. government “effectively sided with the Taliban” in the eyes of Afghan forces, who have reportedly deserted in large numbers.

“It is not exactly a climate in which these young troopers can be reasonably expected to hold that line, having been sold out by us,” he said.

In fact the Afghan government was conducting peace talks with the Taliban, in Doha, while the US negotiations with the Taliban were not peace talks—they were about the safety of US troops during the withdrawal. Ghani's administration blew the Doha talks, as they blow everything. They weren't "cut out".

Crocker is aware of the more important problem, which I just got a better sense of this morning, from a radio appearance by Slate's Fred Kaplan, which is that these young troopers don't know how to do anything without US air support; that's what all the wonderful training we keep hearing about was devoted to. ("Afghan security forces largely did what the U.S. government asked of them," Crocker told the Spokesman-Review, "and maintained garrisons throughout the country, but those deployments were only viable with the help of U.S. airstrikes.") 

So there's no need to make it a story of American betrayal, by Trump administration negotiations with the Taliban or Biden continuing them, that made those soldiers disappear. Without the American planes, those deployments couldn't even function as a Forlorn Hope; they were pure cannon fodder.

Also that they've never been adequately fed or clothed, because commanding officers take kickbacks from the contractors who supply food and clothing and turn a blind eye to the cheating on quality and quantity. Officers are also known to pocket the soldiers' pay, or as I've said simply collect it, $200 a month, for "ghost soldiers" who don't exist. All this corruption has been around forever (see the link in the photo caption above), and goes right up to the top; ex-President Ghani's predecessor, Hamid Karzai, wanted to oppose it, Kaplan reports, but, coalition troops or no coalition troops, his government couldn't survive without the backing of the warlords north and west, and they wouldn't do it without the bribes.

The thing that really gets to me is all that "surprise" on the part of the semi-official members of the pundit class. How did they not know? How did Biden not know? Does the 20 years of happy talk continue in their closed meetings, the way it did over Vietnam? The Washington Post's Afghanistan Papers looks an awful lot like Daniel Ellsberg's Pentagon Papers as it is, is it going to look even more that way?

And why (Kaplan wonders) did they shut down giant Bagram Air Base so thoroughly, forcing the inevitable evacuation to take place in the shabby little Kabul Airport instead? This really has been badly done. Can I chalk the whole thing up to the generals and military intelligence mucking it up and trying to hide it from the White House?

I feel certain that these well-educated and endangered women we are (rightly) worried about are only a very small number, fewer than a  couple of thousand in a population of 38 million, and it's better to aim at moving them all out of Kabul (it's not likely they're anywhere else) to the States than to keep this hopeless war going for their sakes (Steve is pointing out that the horror stories about ongoing abuses by the Taliban are starting to look a lot like propaganda, with very little evidence being offered). Outside the urban enclaves, Afghan women are forced to wear the hijab, kept out of school, and married against their will whether the Taliban are in charge or some local thugocracy, it doesn't make a lot of difference. The twenty years' war hasn't helped them at all. And when Islamist fighters bankrolled by the US drove out the Soviets in 1989, emancipated women survived; they will survive again.

Update: Biden's address getting praised by the NPR punditry for its "forcefulness"; they seem to like the absence of apology. He certainly didn't answer any of my questions beyond admitting that the speed of the Taliban advance was a "surprise".  Politically, it may have been a good move.