Seth Frantzman: How the US disaster in giving Afghanistan to the Taliban happened
What’s worse is that the US had already pulled contractors and air support and other key factors that had helped prop up the paper-thin Afghan army. It turned out that despite the trillion dollars spent since 2001 in Afghanistan, almost no infrastructure had been built. The Afghan Air Force was a few propeller planes and helicopters, not a real air force. The US had kept the Afghan army underarmed precisely because of the sense that this way it would be dependent, and if the US left, then US fighter jets would not end up in the hands of US adversaries. Almost nothing was left to show for 20 years of the US role when it was all over.Biden's catastrophe
AMERICA SENT in troops to secure part of the airport to get Americans and Westerners out. It wasn’t exactly apartheid at the airport in the final hours on August 16, but Afghans were left stranded, and mostly white Westerners got on the planes. Where once the US had helped Kosovars and helped Kurds, in 2021 the days of Americans helping were done.
While some compare the US leaving Kabul to the US leaving Saigon, in 1975 the US ambassador in Saigon, Graham Martin, went to the front to see the debacle himself and struggled to stay to the end to help get Vietnamese out.
He and his wife personally helped get Vietnamese out, and he urged the navy to help Vietnamese who were fleeing.
That was a time when American officials cared about locals. This time the US chargé d’affaires didn’t sit around to wait; he was gone when the chaos unfolded at the airport.
No one will take responsibility. Afghan leaders had all left their people behind, off to comfortable villas in Central Asia, Europe or the Gulf. US troops were left at the airport to fire gunshots in the air as the poor people begged for flights.
Unlike Vietnam, there would be no Americans offshore helping the refugees, no American Afghan version of the Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act. This century would have no Americans like ambassador Graham Martin, whose steadfastness helped 140,000 Vietnamese flee.•
This “ending endless wars” narrative , long espoused by too many politicians of both parties, ignores the prudent admonition of former Defense Secretary and CIA Director Leon Panetta. We should absolutely scrutinize military interventions and how those interventions are conducted, but “we must also apply the same scrutiny to withdrawals,” Panetta wrote in December. “In doing so, Americans will find that some withdrawals can be equally deleterious to our national security, especially when the withdrawals are conducted precipitously and without clear preconditions.”
One simply needs to look to the 2011 Obama administration withdrawal from Iraq for an example. President Barack Obama, motivated in part by the sincere and misinformed advocacy of then-Vice President Joe Biden, pursued withdrawal based on a timeline and not conditions in the country — against the advice of his military commanders.
Sound familiar?
And what was the result of that 2011 withdrawal from Iraq? That decision catalyzed the rise of the Islamic State and culminated in a costly U.S. military return in 2014.
A decade after the 2011 withdrawal from Iraq, Biden drew from the same playbook, and we are all witnessing the horrible results. In a bizarre twist of logic, Biden is arguing that the catastrophe his policy catalyzed in Afghanistan is evidence of the wisdom of that policy. The idea is that chaos was inevitable and that inevitability argued against keeping troops there.
This is absurd. When I taught at West Point, I might have flunked a cadet if he or she had attempted that logical maneuver in a term paper. The Afghan security forces, despite their many shortcomings, fought hard for nearly 20 years, with an estimated 66,000 paying the ultimate price to defend their country and fight our common enemy.
Some trend lines were troubling, but the rapid unraveling came after Biden’s April 14 announcement of the impending withdrawal. The psychological impact on Afghan security forces of the American abandonment (which started under Trump) and the denial of air support (by Biden) cannot be overestimated.
US general tells British special forces: Stop rescuing people in Kabul, you're making us look bad
I understand that the commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division has told the commander of the British special forces at the Kabul airport to cease operations beyond the airport perimeter.Ricochet Podcast: Scary and Confusing
Maj. Gen. Christopher Donahue has told his British Army counterpart, a high-ranking field-grade officer of the British army's 22nd Special Air Service Regiment, that British operations were embarrassing the United States military in the absence of similar U.S. military operations, according to multiple military sources. I understand that the British officer firmly rejected the request.
Col. Joe Buccino, a spokesman for the XVIII Airborne Corps, denied that Donahue made such a request.
“The XVIII Airborne Corps denies the central thrust of this story," the spokesman said. "Specifically, Gen. Chris Donahue, whose sole focus is security at HKIA, never made such a request to any British Army officials and would have no motive for doing so.”
This show of rare tension between the U.S. and British command groups in Kabul reflects three factors.
First, it shows the obvious stress of attempting to extricate thousands of personnel under a situation of increasing terrorist threat. Elements of the Haqqani network, the Islamic State in Afghanistan, and possibly al Qaeda are now operating in proximity to Kabul airport with some degree of command separation from the Taliban.
Hosted by James Lileks, Peter Robinson & Rob Long
With guests Eli Lake & Victor Davis Hanson
What can we say? Frustration has a way of concentrating the mind, and this week we’ve got one word: Afghanistan. Victor Davis Hanson joins us to talk about our absurd administration and its pathetic priorities. Then national security correspondent Eli Lake joins us to speak on the Taliban, Biden’s “return to normal” on the world stage and his moral illiteracy. The fellas also have a chance to muse on the tug-of-war of nation-building versus our security interests, along with the question of what America’s choice will be regarding its role as the leader of the free world. We’d be interested in what Ricochet members think. Let us know in the comments!