Someone begins to regret the "evil" Trump???

[morim]

Does anybody start to think that the almighty Biden is not so almighty (exspecially in foreign matter)?
I do not know why but I have an idea that taliban raise to power in middle east would not have taken place with mr Trump.

[Laphroaig]

Except the withdrawal was agreed by the Trump administration in February 2020 and originally scheduled for May 2021. Whether Biden was actually bound by that agreement appears to be in dispute though.

https://www.axios.com/trump-taliban-agreement-doha-biden-8dabe136-6dce-4e43-9289-98551bd47ed6.html

https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-middle-east-taliban-doha-e6f48507848aef2ee849154604aa11be

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/19/us/politics/trump-biden-afghan-taliban.html

[rodinuk]

Afghanistan is not in the Middle East

[filghy2]

Except the withdrawal was agreed by the Trump administration in February 2020 and originally scheduled for May 2021. Whether Biden was actually bound by that agreement appears to be in dispute though.

Another great deal by the master dealmaker, following his equally useless deal with North Korea.

No doubt the withdrawal process could have been better handled, but the only real alternative to honouring the agreement would have been to stay in Afghanistan indefinitely. Given how quickly the Afghan army folded, does anyone seriously believe that staying for a few more months or even years would have made much difference?

[Stavros]

Why was Forever-in-Debt Trump negotiating with the Taliban? Blair is right to argue major gains have been made in civil society since 2001, but ignored the fact that the US and its allies lost interest in Afghanistan after the USSR's withdrawal, leaving a space filled by the Taliban, other than the areas dominated by the 'Afghan Napoleon' -Ahmed Shah Massoud (see link below)- and again, after routing the Taliban in 2002, Blair and Bush all but abandoned Afghanistan to hammer Iraq. The one thing they failed to do was nurture a functioning State and security apparatus.

The irony, as Vanda Felbab-Brown argued this lunchtime on BBC Radio 4's The World this Weekend (see link) is that the Taliban are effective at running a State -they can collect taxes, impose law and order, albeit of their own kind- while the Afghan State was hopelessly corrupt and incapable of gaining compliance among citizens in terms of tax collecting, law and order. But the Taliban doesn't have the expertise to maintain water and energy supplies, it has retarded views on employment and education, and they have to learn how to handle such details if they are to survive, and the 'West' is to eventually recognize them as the legiimate government.

Radio4 The World this Weekend (requires log in, and may not be available outside UK)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000yyv2

Forthcoming in September-
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Afghan-Napoleon-Life-Ahmad-Massoud/dp/191336822X

Vanda Felbab-Brown
https://www.brookings.edu/experts/vanda-felbab-brown/

[broncofan]

This will be a bit vague for the time being but there are at least a few things I've been unhappy with Biden about. You have to understand though that Trump did not respect this country's laws, wouldn't let the Department of Justice operate free from political influence, and said things that at times seemed designed to cause unrest and violence.

Low bar but I don't think Biden has caused that kind of threat to American democracy or our branches of government. That doesn't mean Biden isn't in for a lot of criticism. I'd be eager to hear it because since Trump has been out of office I've had the luxury of not following politics as much.

[filghy2]

Biden seems to have been getting a lot of criticism on this issue from people who are normally supportive. That points to the essential difference between the two sides. One is a normal political party that views it's leader as a fallible human being for whom their support is conditional. The other has turned into a personal cult that is increasingly divorced from any idea of objective reality.

[broncofan]

Biden seems to have been getting a lot of criticism on this issue from people who are normally supportive. That points to the essential difference between the two sides. One is a normal political party that views it's leader as a fallible human being for whom their support is conditional. The other has turned into a personal cult that is increasingly divorced from any idea of objective reality.
Twitter is kind of interesting because although it's not a full spectrum of people who vote you get a real time sense for who is open to criticism and who is unwilling to accept it.

I agree that this separates the two sides but it might be something like 25% of Democrats won't accept criticism of Biden whereas it's at least a 75/25 split in the opposite direction for Trump supporters.

As an example, Julia Ioffe who writes for the Atlantic has been unusually critical of Biden over the Afghanistan pullout, and since I haven't studied the issue she might be right I don't know. But she had some newcomer lefty with 50,000 followers tell her to "go back to Russia if she doesn't like it here". Ioffe was born in Russia and moved to the US as a kid. The reaction to that dumb comeback was a bit mixed, but plenty of people who vehemently disagreed with Ioffe agreed that it's not an acceptable response. Of the people who thought it was fair game I think you have some evidence of tribalism because they could disagree with Ioffe and not think saying "go back to where you came from" is a liberal response.

We know that Trump critics on the right were overwhelmed with abuse and threats and the contentious positions they took were not about something as complex as foreign policy but in defense of the proven reality that Trump did not lose because of election fraud.

Point of interest: Did you guys see or hear about the Trump rally in Alabama? I thought it showed something interesting about demagoguery that I hadn't really thought much about or considered. Trump encouraged a crowd of his most loyal supporters to get vaccinated and was loudly boo'd. So yes, it's a cult of Trumpism in that any ignorant position he leads with will be followed. But he's unable to ring the bell once he takes his supporters too far down one path.

[Stavros]

Twitter is kind of interesting because although it's not a full spectrum of people who vote you get a real time sense for who is open to criticism and who is unwilling to accept it.

I agree that this separates the two sides but it might be something like 25% of Democrats won't accept criticism of Biden whereas it's at least a 75/25 split in the opposite direction for Trump supporters.

As an example, Julia Ioffe who writes for the Atlantic has been unusually critical of Biden over the Afghanistan pullout, and since I haven't studied the issue she might be right I don't know. But she had some newcomer lefty with 50,000 followers tell her to "go back to Russia if she doesn't like it here". Ioffe was born in Russia and moved to the US as a kid. The reaction to that dumb comeback was a bit mixed, but plenty of people who vehemently disagreed with Ioffe agreed that it's not an acceptable response. Of the people who thought it was fair game I think you have some evidence of tribalism because they could disagree with Ioffe and not think saying "go back to where you came from" is a liberal response.

We know that Trump critics on the right were overwhelmed with abuse and threats and the contentious positions they took were not about something as complex as foreign policy but in defense of the proven reality that Trump did not lose because of election fraud.

Point of interest: Did you guys see or hear about the Trump rally in Alabama? I thought it showed something interesting about demagoguery that I hadn't really thought much about or considered. Trump encouraged a crowd of his most loyal supporters to get vaccinated and was loudly boo'd. So yes, it's a cult of Trumpism in that any ignorant position he leads with will be followed. But he's unable to ring the bell once he takes his supporters too far down one path.

Why did nobody in a position of authorty in Alabama do something to stop this Covid Infection Rally from taking place when there is a crisis of service provision in the State? Wherever this man goes, his rallies, fund-raisers or whatever you call them, have resulted in people getting sick and in need of treatment. You start on the premise that vaccinations 'don't work', expand that into outrage that anyone mandate the wearing of masks in shops, malls, theatres and restaurants -and end up with a health care crisis. And even when you join the dots for the militants, they just don't care or accept the facts. No concept of civic duty, just rank selfishness that is eroding the bonds that once held the country together, just as Brexit is destroying the UK and anti-vaxxers here determined to kick us into the ditch, for some illusion of freedom

[blackchubby38]

I posted this in the Night of the Generals thread a week ago:

"I knew the United States couldn't stay in Afghanistan forever. So when it was announced that the United States was leaving, the one thing I hoped that didn't happen was a fall of Saigon moment. We are getting pretty close to that happening.

But you know what, I can't really put the blame on the United States and/or NATO. The Taliban just wants that country more than the Afghanistan army does. "


Well the Fall of Saigon moment happened and then some. What made this worse was watching it unfold in real time.

I have also come to have some empathy for the Afghan army. I think I would find it hard to fight too if I wasn't get paid or the Taliban was threatening to torture, rape, and kill my family.

I still believe it was the right decision to leave Afghanistan. But did it really need to happen this year. Trump withdrew the United States from the Iran Nuclear deal and the Paris Climate Accords. Was anybody really going to give Biden shit if he decided to withdraw from a deal with the Taliban and start over from scratch.

My biggest issue with Biden is that he seems to be disconnected from reality with everything that is going on with Afghanistan. He has given two Presidential addresses, an interview, and one short press conference and he seems like someone who just doesn't give a shit. As long he is proven right in the end.

Then there is everyone under Biden who also bears responsibility for this mess.

http://www.yahoo.com/news/miscue-miscue-u-exit-plan-151402423.html

[Stavros]

My biggest issue with Biden is that he seems to be disconnected from reality with everything that is going on with Afghanistan. He has given two Presidential addresses, an interview, and one short press conference and he seems like someone who just doesn't give a shit. As long he is proven right in the end.

Then there is everyone under Biden who also bears responsibility for this mess.


Do you think, as a one-term President, and I think Biden knows this, that his priority is domestic rather than foreign policy, and that his mission is to restore credibility to US Government, to at least try and re-build some form of the bi-partisan consensus politics that he once was part of in the US Senate, but that he has not got the best people to help him, while Trump's party of Sedition, Sleaze and Lies is dedicated to rejecting everything Biden proposes?

Does it mean the Biden Presidency will go down as being weak on foreign policy, and a failure at domestic political renewal?

What will the mid-term elections reveal about the direction the US is heading?

[filghy2]

I still believe it was the right decision to leave Afghanistan. But did it really need to happen this year. Trump withdrew the United States from the Iran Nuclear deal and the Paris Climate Accords. Was anybody really going to give Biden shit if he decided to withdraw from a deal with the Taliban and start over from scratch.

I'm curious to know why you think that waiting another year or so would have made a fundamental difference. What could have been achieved in that time that was not able to be achieved in the previous 20 years? It's hard to see how the factors that caused the Afghan army to collapse would have changed. The only way to avoid a Taliban takeover would be to stay there forever.

The real problem was the inaccurate assessment of how long the Afghan army could hold on, which led to complacency about evacuating people. That seems to be independent of the actual timing of withdrawal. If they'd renegotiated the agreement to impose more conditions they would have faced the same problem at the end, and the same problem of enforcing adherence.

The reality, as in Vietnam, is that when the other side knows you want leave you are in a weak bargaining position. They know they can just wait you out and that you will you have limited ability to enforce the terms once you've left.

It's also pretty disingenuous for the Trump administration to say they would have imposed stronger conditions when they didn't do so when they had the opportunity. The responsibility needs to be shared among all four administrations over 20 years. They all engaged in wishful thinking and none of them had a realistic plan for what could be achieved and how it would end.

[blackchubby38]

I'm curious to know why you think that waiting another year or so would have made a fundamental difference. What could have been achieved in that time that was not able to be achieved in the previous 20 years? It's hard to see how the factors that caused the Afghan army to collapse would have changed. The only way to avoid a Taliban takeover would be to stay there forever.

The real problem was the inaccurate assessment of how long the Afghan army could hold on, which led to complacency about evacuating people. That seems to be independent of the actual timing of withdrawal. If they'd renegotiated the agreement to impose more conditions they would have faced the same problem at the end, and the same problem of enforcing adherence.

The reality, as in Vietnam, is that when the other side knows you want leave you are in a weak bargaining position. They know they can just wait you out and that you will you have limited ability to enforce the terms once you've left.

It's also pretty disingenuous for the Trump administration to say they would have imposed stronger conditions when they didn't do so when they had the opportunity. The responsibility needs to be shared among all four administrations over 20 years. They all engaged in wishful thinking and none of them had a realistic plan for what could be achieved and how it would end.

My concern wasn't with the Taliban taking over or nation building. My concern was with a smoother exit and preventing some of the things we have been seen happening over the past two weeks.

Maybe another year wouldn't have been necessary. But extending the deadline until the end of this one would have bought the United States more time to make sure they got this thing right.

[filghy2]

Maybe another year wouldn't have been necessary. But extending the deadline until the end of this one would have bought the United States more time to make sure they got this thing right.

I'm not convinced the problem was lack of time rather than poor decision-making. Anyhow, its now turned into a political disaster with the US troops being killed. The idea that voters would forget about this by election time depended on avoiding US casualties. This is going to be as bad as Jimmy Carter's Iran embassy hostage crisis.

[Stavros]

I'm not convinced the problem was lack of time rather than poor decision-making. Anyhow, its now turned into a political disaster with the US troops being killed. The idea that voters would forget about this by election time depended on avoiding US casualties. This is going to be as bad as Jimmy Carter's Iran embassy hostage crisis.

I think you are right to draw the parallels with Carter and the hostage crisis, in part because in spite of the evidence that was mounting in Iran when the demonstations against the Shah became more frequent and violent from 1977 onwards, either US analysts failed to appreciate the vulnerability of the Shah, or chose to ignore it and support the regime to its bitter end, as happened in the UK.

That the Islamic Republic 'guided' by the Ayatollah Khomeini then broke all the rules of Diplomacy and International Relations that had prevailed until then was a shock, and indeed, was one of the key drivers that created a more militant position elsewhere in the region, most notably in Saudi Arabia. It thus fed into a new 'Cold War' in which Political Islam, which up until the siege of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979 had been largely reformist, took a violent turn, and in Afghanistan formed a crucial theatre for competing forces which has been claimed broke the back of the USSR, the US at this time supporting the very Mujahideen that would attack it in 2001.

However one interprets that history, it seems to me that NATO intelligence -specifically the British and the Americans- must -as with Iran in the 1970s- either have underestimated the long term strategy of the Taliban, or just hoped that their worst fears would not come to pass. I find it hard to believe that Humint failled so badly when officers on the ground must have known that soldiers in the regular army they helped to create were not getting paid at the end of each month, that they had no kitchens or basic equipment, and that in the regions outside Kabul, Commanders were claiming salaries for soldiers who did not exist. This is too basic a pool of information to be ignored, so what was done with it? Nothing, I suggest.

It is an important point because Tom Tugenhadt -one of a few MPs who served in the military in Afghanistan- in his House of Commons speech condemned Biden's remarks about the Afghan military running away, because so many died fighting the Taliban and terrorists between 2001 and 2014, but he failed to explain Biden's point, which was bitterly true. What happened in Afghanistan was that NGOs helped create the kind of civil society which gave ordinary Afghans the space in which to live more freely and express themselves, while the NATO mission as charged by the UN which sent it to the country in 2006, failed to create an effective and honest State and State Institution capable of preventing precisely the rampant corruption which alienated Afghans from their Government, and the police and security forces that proved to be ineffective when asked to resist the Taliban, an organization which has more support in rural areas than the British and the Americans want to admit.

As a side note, spare a thought for Dr John Reid, Defence Secretary when 3,000 British troops were sent to Helmand province (the Commanding Officer's first response to this was the potent question, 'Where's Helmand?). Reid grew up poor in a grim corner of Scotland, was a member of the Communist Party in his youth, before becoming a member of the Labour Party and acquiring a PhD in Economic History, evidently not in relation to Afghanistan, as he said at the time ""We would be perfectly happy to leave in three years and without firing one shot because our job is to protect the reconstruction."[ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Reid,_Baron_Reid_of_Cardowan#cite_note-52) In the first year about 4 million bullets and 25,000 artillery rounds had been fired by the British armed forces". The word Folly seems apprpriate here, but even at the time some of us were gobsmacked by the man's ignorance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Reid,_Baron_Reid_of_Cardowan#Background

Again and again and again, the British and the Americans enter a country with their own agenda and expect the locals to be obedient, Palestine being one good if dismal example for the British. Or, as with the Americans their 'intelligence' leads them to support the 'least worst option' which is often Dictatorship -Latin America since who knows when, the 1920s?- the Shah in Iran in the 1970s, Saddam Hussein in the 1980s (Shukran, Rumsfeld Effendi), Saudi Arabia since Roosevelt- rather than democracy. And when their 'revolution from above' fails to create a Democracy in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Libya, they suffer casualties as happened in Lebanon or Afghanistan, or for that matter in the US itself in 2001.

The only people who benefited from the New World Order were the men making and selling arms to williing executioners. They are still raking in the dollars, and will do so for some time, be it in the Yemen, or Syria, Afghanistan -and of course, in the USA where the proliferation of weapons of human destruction and the States -like Texas- lifting not imposing restrictons on such weapons are paving the way for a potential civil war if Trump does not win the election in 2024. If he runs.

And who wll defeat Trump (again) and save America from itself, Kamala Harris?

[filghy2]

However one interprets that history, it seems to me that NATO intelligence -specifically the British and the Americans- must -as with Iran in the 1970s- either have underestimated the long term strategy of the Taliban, or just hoped that their worst fears would not come to pass.

I'd say the over-optimistic assessment was influenced by unwillingness to admit just how badly the mission to strengthen the Afghan army had failed. It's a common failing.