Quotes of the Day:
“It is not to political leaders our people must look, but to themselves. Leaders are but individuals, and individuals are imperfect, liable to error and weakness. The strength of the nation will be the strength of the spirit of the whole people.”
- Michael Collins
"Insanity in individual is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule"
-Nietzsche
"True political warfare, as understood and practiced by our enemy, is not mere rivalry or competition... Political warfare is a form of war. It is strategic in nature. Its objective...is to impose one's own will... In simplest terms, it aims to conquer the opponent."
- James Burnham, a former Trot who became a cold warrior and wrote “Suicide of the West” in 1964, the quote is from an essay he wrote for Ordinance mag read into the congressional record by Senator Dodd in 1961 in support of the Freedom Academy.
1. Afghanistan’s collapse leaves allies questioning U.S. resolve on other fronts
2. Afghan security forces’ wholesale collapse was years in the making
3. Don’t Fail America’s Allies
4. America’s Withdrawal of Choice | by Richard Haass
5. Afghanistan conflict: As Kabul falls, Biden backlash grows
6. After the fall of Kabul, what’s next for Afghanistan?
7. Japan’s New China Reality
8. Xi’s Dictatorship Threatens the Chinese State
9. Biden’s Afghanistan Surrender
10. Kabul Is Not Quite Saigon, and It Was All Too Easy
11. Responding to China’s Unending Grey-Zone Prodding
12. The GOP quietly removed a webpage hailing Trump's peace deal with the Taliban as the militant group seized power in Afghanistan
13. How America Failed in Afghanistan
14. The Long Game of Partner Warfare: Colombia and Operation Jaque
15. Op-Ed: U.S. foreign policy is 'sanctions happy.' Here's why it doesn't work
16. Chinese state media mocks U.S. over Afghanistan: "More smooth than presidential transition"
17. Afghanistan’s military collapse: Illicit deals and mass desertions
18. A tale of two armies: why Afghan forces proved no match for the Taliban
19. Column: The Lessons for Asia as Biden Deserts Afghanistan
20. 4 soldiers hurt, 3 Reds' guns seized in Isabela clash
1. Afghanistan’s collapse leaves allies questioning U.S. resolve on other fronts
How do we provide strategic reassurance and demonstrate strategic resolve no? The foundation of our foreign policy and national security rests on our alliance system.
Afghanistan’s collapse leaves allies questioning U.S. resolve on other fronts
LONDON — The Taliban's stunningly swift advances across Afghanistan have sparked global alarm, reviving doubts about the credibility of U.S. foreign policy promises and drawing harsh criticisms even from some of the United States' closest allies.
As Taliban fighters entered Kabul and the United States scrambled to evacuate its citizens, concerns grew that the unfolding chaos could create a haven for terrorists, unleash a major humanitarian disaster and trigger a new refugee exodus.
U.S. allies complain that they were not fully consulted on a policy decision that potentially puts their own national security interests at risk — in contravention of President Biden's promises to recommit to global engagement.
And many around the world are wondering whether they could rely on the United States to fulfill long-standing security commitments stretching from Europe to East Asia.
"Whatever happened to 'America is back'?" said Tobias Ellwood, who chairs the Defense Committee in the British Parliament, citing Biden's foreign policy promise to rebuild alliances and restore U.S. prestige damaged during the Trump administration.
"People are bewildered that after two decades of this big, high-tech power intervening, they are withdrawing and effectively handing the country back to the people we went in to defeat," Ellwood said. "This is the irony. How can you say America is back when we're being defeated by an insurgency armed with no more than [rocket-propelled grenades], land mines and AK-47s?"
As much as its military capabilities, the United States' decades-old role as a defender of democracies and freedoms is again in jeopardy, said Rory Stewart, who was Britain's minister for international development in the Conservative government of Theresa May. "The Western democracy that seemed to be the inspiration for the world, the beacon for the world, is turning its back," Stewart said.
Britain has voiced some of the bluntest criticisms of the pullout, which is unusual for a country that regards itself as the United States' closest ally. Britain made the biggest contribution to the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan and suffered the highest number of casualties after the United States.
In comments Friday, British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace predicted civil war and the return of al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization whose attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, prompted the U.S.-led intervention in Afghanistan.
"I feel this was not the right time or decision to make," he told Sky News. "Of course al-Qaeda will probably come back, and certainly it would like that kind of breeding ground."
"Strategically, it causes a lot of problems, and as an international community, it's very difficult . . . what we're seeing today," he added.
Rivals of the United States also have expressed dismay. Among them is China, which fears that the ascent of an extremist Islamist government on its western border will foster unrest in the adjoining province of Xinjiang, where Beijing has waged sweeping crackdowns on the Uyghur population that have been denounced by the West.
Washington "bears an unavoidable responsibility for the current situation in Afghanistan," Col. Wu Qian, a spokesman for China's Ministry of National Defense, said earlier this month. "It cannot leave and shed the burden on regional countries."
Secretary of State Antony Blinken rejected criticisms that the withdrawal damages U.S. credibility. He said staying mired in a conflict that is not in the "national interest" would do far more damage.
"Most of our strategic competitors around the world would like nothing better than for us to remain in Afghanistan for another year, five years, 10 years, and have those resources dedicated to being in the midst of a civil war," Blinken told CNN. "It's simply not in our interest."
But the manner and implementation of the withdrawal has left allies feeling betrayed, said Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook, director of the German Council on Foreign Relations. Germany’s government, which withdrew its troops in June and is evacuating its embassy, has refrained from overt criticism of the U.S. withdrawal.
Nonetheless, some German officials and lawmakers are seething at Washington's failure to consult coalition partners such as Berlin, Clüver Ashbrook said. Germany is particularly concerned about the potential for an exodus of Afghan refugees similar to the influx of 2015, when more than 1 million migrants, spurred largely by the war in Syria, surged into Europe, with many headed for Germany.
"The Biden administration came to office promising an open exchange, a transparent exchange with its allies. They said the transatlantic relationship would be pivotal," she said. "As it is, they're playing lip service to the transatlantic relationship and still believe European allies should fall into line with U.S. priorities."
"We're back to the transatlantic relationship of old, where the Americans dictate everything. . . . 'Yes we want to partner with you, but in reality, we want to be able to tell you what to do and when,' " she added.
The United States' Arab allies, which have long counted on the U.S. military to come to their aid in the event of an attack by Iran, also have faced questions over whether they will be able to rely on the United States.
"What's happening in Afghanistan is raising alarm bells everywhere," said Riad Kahwaji, who heads the Inegma security consultancy in the United Arab Emirates, which hosts one of the biggest American military contingents in the Middle East.
"The U.S.'s credibility as an ally has been in question for a while," he said. "We see Russia fighting all the way to protect the Assad regime [in Syria], and now the Americans are pulling out and leaving a big chaos in Afghanistan."
Clüver Ashbrook said Biden's plan to build an alliance of democracies to counter the influence of China and Russia is also in doubt, now that the West will no longer maintain a significant presence in Central Asia.
For China and Russia, there is opportunity as well as concern in the departure of U.S. troops. Both Moscow and Beijing have hosted Taliban delegations in recent weeks in an attempt to pave the way for a post-American future in the region.
The humiliating conclusion of the two-decade U.S. venture into Afghanistan will aid their efforts to persuade many governments to seek out relationships elsewhere, analysts say.
In a commentary directed at Hong Kong, China's state-run Global Times cited Afghanistan in a signal to democracy activists not to heed repeated American promises to "stand by" Hong Kong.
"It has been proven repeatedly that whomever U.S. politicians claim to stand with will face bad luck, plunge into social unrest and suffer severe consequences," the commentary said.
Russia has been struck by the speed of the unraveling of the U.S.-installed government in Kabul, said Fyodor Lukyanov, the chairman of Russia's Council on Foreign and Defense Policy and editor in chief of the magazine Russia in Global Affairs.
The decade-long Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, which ended in 1989, is widely remembered as a failure, one that leaves Russia in no mood to reengage too closely with Afghanistan, he said.
But at least, Lukyanov noted, the government left behind by the Soviets survived for three years after the withdrawal of Red Army forces.
"We believe our failure was big, but it seems the Americans achieved an even bigger failure," he said.
John Hudson in Washington contributed to this report.
2. Afghan security forces’ wholesale collapse was years in the making
Here is what I wonder about. While we are sincerely negotiating with the Taliban over the past couple of years what kind of deals have the Taliban been working behind the scenes with Afghan political and military leaders? While we watched the graphics of color red engulfing and bleeding all over the Afghan map as the Taliban rapidly advanced, it is unlikely that that was solely due to military operations. What political preparation was taking place behind the senses as the negotiations took place in Doha? What kind of individual deals were brokered between the Taliban and the military and political leaders? I am sure there was a combination of co-option and coercion (e.g., night letters threatening them and their families). And a most interesting question, why did we not know about such deals? Or worse, what if we did and ignored them?
The Afghan political and military leaders surely saw the writing on the wall after the previous administration agreed to the withdrawal date of 1 May. When Biden pushed it into September and given their understanding of his decisive nature (some call stubbornness) they surely assessed that we were leaving and there was no turning back. The past few months provided the opportunity for the Taliban to prepare the political environment for the rapid advance. It is not that the Afghan Army dissolved for lack of training and ability to fight. They had to transition to the personal survival mode. And most importantly as one Taliban supposedly said to a US interlocutor -the Afghan Army fights for money and the Taliban fight for their convictions. With that understanding it is no wonder some Afghan military and political leaders would cut deals to try to ensure their own survival.
Afghan security forces’ wholesale collapse was years in the making
In the summer of 2011, Army Lt. Gen. William Caldwell IV made a round of public appearances to boast that he had finally solved a problem that had kept U.S. troops bogged down in Afghanistan for a decade. Under his watch, he asserted, U.S. military advisers and trainers had transformed the ragtag Afghan army and police into a professional fighting force that could defend the country and keep the Taliban at bay.
“We’ve made tremendous strides, incredible progress,” Caldwell, the head of the U.S. and NATO’s training command in Afghanistan, told the Council on Foreign Relations in June 2011. “They’re probably the best trained, the best equipped and the best led of any forces we’ve developed yet inside of Afghanistan. They only continue to get better with time.”
Three months later, in a news briefing at the Pentagon, Caldwell said the Afghan soldiers and police previously had been in terrible shape: poorly led, uninspired and more than 90 percent of them illiterate. But he said the Obama administration’s decision to spend $6 billion a year to train and equip the Afghan security forces had produced a remarkable turnaround. He predicted that the Taliban-led insurgency would subside and that the Afghans would take over responsibility for securing their country by the end of 2014, enabling U.S. combat troops to leave.
“It really does give you a lot of hope for the future of what this country may have ahead of itself,” he said.
In fact, according to documents obtained for the forthcoming Washington Post book “The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War,” U.S. military officials privately harbored fundamental doubts for the duration of the war that the Afghan security forces could ever become competent or shed their dependency on U.S. money and firepower. “Thinking we could build the military that fast and that well was insane,” an unnamed former U.S. official told government interviewers in 2016.
Those fears, rarely expressed in public, were ultimately borne out by the sudden collapse this month of the Afghan security forces, whose wholesale and unconditional surrender to the Taliban will go down as perhaps the worst debacle in the history of proxy warfare.
Although U.S. intelligence officials had recently forecast the possible demise of the Afghan government over the next three to six months, the Biden administration was caught unprepared by the velocity of the Taliban takeover. Afghan forces “proved incapable of defending the country. And that did happen more rapidly than we anticipated,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday on the ABC News program “This Week.”
Over two decades, the U.S. government invested more than $85 billion to train and equip the Afghans and pay their salaries. Today, all that is left are arsenals of weapons, ammunition and supplies that have fallen into the hands of the enemy.
Senior U.S. officials said the Pentagon fell victim to the conceit that it could build from scratch an enormous Afghan army and police force with 350,000 personnel that was modeled on the centralized command structures and complex bureaucracy of the Defense Department. Though it was obvious from the beginning that the Afghans were struggling to make the U.S.-designed system work, the Pentagon kept throwing money at the problem and assigning new generals to find a solution.
“We kept changing guys who were in charge of training the Afghan forces, and every time a new guy came in, he changed the way that they were being trained,” Robert Gates, who served as defense secretary during the Bush and Obama administrations, said in an oral-history interview with scholars at the University of Virginia. “The one thing they all had in common was they were all trying to train a Western army instead of figuring out the strengths of the Afghans as a fighting people and then building on that.”
In the interviews, U.S. military trainers who worked directly with recruits said the Afghans suffered from other irreconcilable problems, including a lack of motivation and a corrupt chain of command that preyed upon its own soldiers and police.
Maj. Greg Escobar, a U.S. Army infantry officer, spent 2011 trying to straighten out a dysfunctional Afghan army unit in Paktika province near the border with Pakistan. The first Afghan battalion commander whom Escobar mentored lost his job after he was charged with raping one of his male soldiers. The commander’s replacement, in turn, was killed by his own men.
Escobar said he came to realize that the whole exercise was futile because the U.S. military was pushing too fast and the Afghans were not responding to what was, in the end, a foreign experiment. “Nothing we do is going to help,” he recalled in an Army oral-history interview. “Until the Afghan government can positively affect the people there, we’re wasting our time.”
Other Army officers who trained the Afghans recounted scenes of mayhem that bode poorly for how they would perform on the battlefield. Maj. Mark Glaspell, an Army engineer with the 101st Airborne Division who served as a mentor to Afghan forces from 2010 to 2011, said even simple exercises went haywire.
Glaspell recalled trying to teach an Afghan platoon in the eastern city of Gardez how to exit a CH-47 Chinook, a heavy-lift helicopter used to transport troops and supplies. They lacked an actual Chinook to practice on, so he lined up rows of folding chairs instead and instructed the Afghans how to safely disembark.
“We were working on that and it was going pretty good and all of a sudden this Afghan soldier walks up and he and one of the guys in the class started to get into an argument,” Glaspell said in an Army oral-history interview. A third Afghan soldier then picked up a folding chair and pounded the first guy over the head, he said.
“Well, then it was a brawl; it was on,” Glaspell added. He let the Afghans duke it out until they got tired. “My interpreter actually looked at me, shook his head and said, ‘This is why we’ll never be successful,’ and he walked away.”
Jack Kem, a retired Army officer who served as Gen. Caldwell’s deputy from 2009 to 2011, said the training command struggled to overcome a host of challenges. Recruiting was hard enough, but was compounded by startling rates of desertion and attrition. And trying to maintain an ethnic balance in the force among Afghanistan’s fractious tribes was another “enormous problem,” he said.
But perhaps the biggest hardship was having to teach virtually every recruit how to read. Kem estimated that only 2 to 5 percent of Afghan recruits could read at a third-grade level despite efforts by the United States to enroll millions of Afghan children in school over the previous decade.
“The literacy was just insurmountable,” he said in an Army oral-history interview. Some Afghans also had to learn their colors, or had to be taught how to count. “I mean, you’d ask an Afghan soldier how many brothers and sisters they had and they couldn’t tell you it was four. They could tell you their names, but they couldn’t go ‘one, two, three, four.’ ”
Making everything harder was the Obama administration’s decision to rapidly expand the size of the Afghan security forces from 200,000 soldiers and police to 350,000. With recruits at a premium, Afghans were rushed through boot camp, even if they couldn’t shoot or perform other basic tasks.
In Washington, some skeptics warned Obama administration officials that they were sacrificing quality for quantity. But leaders at the Pentagon dismissed the concerns and insisted they could have both.
“There was a big debate that said, ‘Either you can have a small Afghan army and police that is trained to a high quality or you can have a lot of them but they won’t meet the quality standards. They’ll just be poorly equipped and poorly trained,’ ” Brig. Gen. John Ferrari, who also served under Caldwell at the training command, said in an Army oral-history interview.
Caldwell, who retired from the Army in 2013, did not respond to a request to comment for this story.
As the years passed, it became apparent that the strategy was failing. Yet U.S. military commanders kept insisting in public that everything was going according to plan.
In November 2012, Marine Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr. Jr. told lawmakers that he had grown “optimistic” about the war because the Afghan army and police had improved so much. “When I look at the Afghan national security forces and where they were in 2008, when I first observed them, and where they are today in 2012, it’s a dramatic improvement.”
In September 2013, Mark A. Milley, then an Army lieutenant general and deputy commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, gave reporters another upbeat assessment. “I am much more optimistic about the outcome here, as long as the Afghan security forces continue to do what they’ve been doing,” he said.
“If they continue to do that next year and the year after and so on, then I think things will turn out okay in Afghanistan,” he added. Today, Milley is chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and serves as the chief military adviser to President Biden.
3. Don’t Fail America’s Allies
It may be too late:
Excerpts;
Biden and his administration can and need to do better. My family and I were rescued from communist forces in 1975 because Ford provided the leadership and resources to overcome the tremendous bureaucratic and logistical hurdles involved in evacuating 130,000 Vietnamese allies within weeks. Biden has failed to do the same in 2021.
What Biden should do is, using existing authorities, immediately designate America’s Afghan allies and their families as parolees. These parolees should then be marshalled at Kabul under the protection of rapidly deployed U.S. forces, before evacuation to a location outside Afghanistan for care and processing. The full and vast capabilities of the U.S. Air Force supplemented by contractor aircraft should be used to complete this urgent airlift. The administration can then determine, in coordination with Congress, which individuals will be resettled in the United States and implement a plan to do so properly. Finally, Biden should immediately and clearly state his public support for this effort and back his words by empowering the secretary of state and secretary of defense to take all actions necessary for the United States to fulfill its moral obligation to its Afghan allies.
There is still time to save Jabar, his family, and the tens of thousands of Afghan allies like them who risked their lives alongside soldiers like myself.
Don’t Fail America’s Allies - War on the Rocks
President Joe Biden failed America’s allies — and my family — in 1975. He should not repeat his mistake in 2021.
My mother was a Vietnamese national who risked her life working for the U.S. naval attaché in Saigon. My father was a South Vietnamese army officer. In April of 1975, as communist forces closed in on Saigon, the fate of my family and tens of thousands of other Vietnamese allies hung in the balance as President Gerald Ford and congressional leaders debated.
Today, America faces a similar challenge as the Taliban control the capital of Afghanistan, the United States evacuates its embassy, and the lives of America’s Afghan allies and their families hang in the balance.
Ford faced marked opposition from key members of Congress, including then-Sen. Joe Biden. On April 23, the same day my family boarded a U.S. Air Force C-141 Starlifter for Guam, Biden took to the Senate floor and stated, “The United States has no obligation to evacuate [one], or 100,001, South Vietnamese.”
Had Biden prevailed in his view that day, I and 130,000 other Vietnamese who had worked hard for the United States — and their families — would have suffered the fate that befell those not rescued: reeducation camps, torture, and death. I would have likely grown up an orphan in communist Vietnam instead of an immigrant in a free America.
Biden seemed to soften his view because in May 1975, he supported legislation to bring Vietnamese allies to the United States. In 2020, he went as far to express his explicit support for this cause in an op-ed published in a Vietnamese newspaper.
After coming to the United States, we lived with a sponsor family before settling into a home in Tumwater, Washington. Growing up, I learned about my family’s exodus and felt a deep sense of gratitude and obligation to the United States and to the men and women who served in Vietnam. In order to repay that debt, I attended West Point, followed by five years on active duty. I continued my service as a lawyer, eventually working in the White House as an associate counsel to President George W. Bush. When I left the White House, I recommissioned as a U.S. Army captain and served in Afghanistan as part of Operation Enduring Freedom with a U.S. Army special forces company.
In Afghanistan, my fellow soldiers and I placed our lives in the hands of Afghan interpreters, analysts, and other Afghan allies daily. In turn they risked their lives for us. Like the communists in Vietnam, the Taliban in Afghanistan hold a dim view of those Afghans who worked alongside Americans. Several Afghan allies were killed during my time in Afghanistan by Taliban forces. I vividly remember one who told us that helping Americans would cost him his life.
Days later he was found killed, the cell phone he used to communicate with our company shoved in his mouth.
Just weeks ago, I was contacted by one of my Afghan allies, Jabar, who now resides in Kabul with his family. Jabar and thousands of others were startled by Biden’s decision to formally withdraw from Afghanistan no later than Sept. 11 of this year. While the United States has a system in place to process special immigrant visa applicants like Jabar, it is simply broken. Current estimates place the backlog at more than 18,000 applicants along with over 53,000 dependents.
And now, it is too late. With Kabul under Taliban control, America’s Afghan allies are out of time.
I fear every day for the safety of Jabar and his family. I cannot help but see in them my own family’s uncertain fate 46 years ago.
Biden and his administration can and need to do better. My family and I were rescued from communist forces in 1975 because Ford provided the leadership and resources to overcome the tremendous bureaucratic and logistical hurdles involved in evacuating 130,000 Vietnamese allies within weeks. Biden has failed to do the same in 2021.
What Biden should do is, using existing authorities, immediately designate America’s Afghan allies and their families as parolees. These parolees should then be marshalled at Kabul under the protection of rapidly deployed U.S. forces, before evacuation to a location outside Afghanistan for care and processing. The full and vast capabilities of the U.S. Air Force supplemented by contractor aircraft should be used to complete this urgent airlift. The administration can then determine, in coordination with Congress, which individuals will be resettled in the United States and implement a plan to do so properly. Finally, Biden should immediately and clearly state his public support for this effort and back his words by empowering the secretary of state and secretary of defense to take all actions necessary for the United States to fulfill its moral obligation to its Afghan allies.
There is still time to save Jabar, his family, and the tens of thousands of Afghan allies like them who risked their lives alongside soldiers like myself.
But the window to act is almost gone.
France Hoang commissioned twice as a U.S. Army officer, served as an associate White House counsel to President George W. Bush, and is the co-founder and chief strategy officer of boodleAI and a partner at the law firm of FH+H.
4. America’s Withdrawal of Choice | by Richard Haass
The first paragraph sums it up:
Beyond the local consequences – widespread reprisals, harsh repression of women and girls, and massive refugee flows – America’s strategic and moral failure in Afghanistan will reinforce questions about US reliability among friends and foes alike.
America’s Withdrawal of Choice | by Richard Haass - Project Syndicate
The swift fall of Kabul recalls the ignominious fall of Saigon in 1975. Beyond the local consequences – widespread reprisals, harsh repression of women and girls, and massive refugee flows – America’s strategic and moral failure in Afghanistan will reinforce questions about US reliability among friends and foes alike.
NEW YORK – Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has fled the country. His government has collapsed as Taliban fighters enter Kabul. Bringing back memories of the ignominious fall of Saigon in 1975, two decades of America’s military presence in Afghanistan has vanished in a matter of weeks. How did it come to this?
There are wars of necessity, including World War II and the 1990-91 Gulf War. These are wars in which military force is employed because it is deemed to be the best and often only way to protect vital national interests. There also are wars of choice, such as the Vietnam and 2003 Iraq wars, in which a country goes to war even though the interests at stake are less than vital and there are nonmilitary tools that can be employed.
Now, it seems, there are also withdrawals of choice, when a government removes troops that it could have left in a theater of operation. It does not withdraw troops because their mission has been accomplished, or their presence has become untenable, or they are no longer welcomed by the host government. None of these conditions applied to the situation the United States found itself in Afghanistan at the start of President Joe Biden’s administration. Withdrawal was a choice, and, as is often true of wars of choice, the results promise to be tragic.
American troops first went to Afghanistan 20 years ago to fight alongside Afghan tribes seeking to oust the Taliban government that harbored al-Qaeda, the terrorist group responsible for the September 11, 2001, attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in the US. The Taliban were soon on the run, although many of its leaders escaped to Pakistan, where over time they reconstituted themselves and resumed the fight against the Afghan government.
Troop numbers increased over the years – at one point during Barack Obama’s presidency to over 110,000 – as US ambitions in Afghanistan expanded. The cost was enormous: an estimated $2 trillion and close to 2,500 American lives, over 1,100 lives of its coalition partners, as well as up to 70,000 Afghan military casualties and nearly 50,000 civilian deaths. The results, however, were modest: while an elected Afghan government (unique in the country’s history) controlled the big cities, its grip on power remained tenuous, and the Taliban regained control over many smaller towns and villages.
The US intervention in Afghanistan was a classic case of overreach, a limited war of necessity initiated in 2001 that morphed over the years into a costly war of choice. But by the time Biden assumed the presidency, overreach was a thing of the past. American troop levels were down to around 3,000; their role was largely limited to training, advising, and supporting the Afghan forces. There had not been an American combat fatality in Afghanistan since February 2020. The modest US presence was both an anchor for some 8,500 troops from allied countries and a military and psychological backstop for the Afghan government.
In the US, Afghanistan had largely faded as an issue. Americans did not vote in the 2020 presidential election with the country in mind and were not marching in the streets protesting US policy there. After 20 years, the US had reached a level of limited involvement commensurate with the stakes. Its presence would not lead to military victory or peace, but it would avert the collapse of a government that, however imperfect, was far preferable to the alternative that is now taking power. Sometimes what matters in foreign policy is not what you can accomplish but what you can avoid. Afghanistan was such a case.
But this was not US policy. Biden was working from a script inherited from the administration of Donald Trump, which in February 2020 signed an accord with the Taliban (cutting out the government of Afghanistan in the process) that set a May 2021 deadline for the withdrawal of US combat troops. The agreement did not oblige the Taliban to disarm or commit to a ceasefire, but only to agree not to host terrorist groups on Afghan territory. It was not a peace agreement but a pact that provided a fig leaf, and a thin one at that, for American withdrawal.
The Biden administration has honored this deeply flawed agreement in every way but one: the deadline for full US military withdrawal was extended by just over three months. Biden rejected any policy that would have tied US troop withdrawal to conditions on the ground or additional Taliban actions. Instead, fearing a scenario in which security conditions deteriorated and created pressure to take the politically unpopular step of redeploying troops, Biden simply removed all US forces.
As was widely predicted, momentum dramatically shifted to the Taliban and away from the dispirited government after the announced (and now actual) US military departure. With the Taliban taking control of all of Afghanistan, widespread reprisals, harsh repression of women and girls, and massive refugee flows are a near certainty. Preventing terrorist groups from returning to the country will prove far more difficult without an in-country presence.
Over time, there is the added danger that the Taliban will seek to extend their writ to much of Pakistan. If so, it would be hard to miss the irony, as it was Pakistan’s provision of a sanctuary to the Taliban for so many years that allowed it to wage war. Now, in a modern-day version of Frankenstein, it is possible that Afghanistan will become a sanctuary for taking the war to Pakistan – potentially a nightmare scenario, given Pakistan’s fragility, large population, nuclear arsenal, and history of war with India.
The hasty and poorly planned US withdrawal may not even provide sufficient time to evacuate now-vulnerable Afghans who worked with the US and Afghan governments. Beyond the local consequences, the grim aftermath of America’s strategic and moral failure will reinforce questions about US reliability among friends and foes far and wide.
Biden was recently asked if he harbored any regrets about his decision to withdraw all US troops from Afghanistan. He replied that he did not. He should.
5. Afghanistan conflict: As Kabul falls, Biden backlash grows
Afghanistan conflict: As Kabul falls, Biden backlash grows
By Boer Deng & Sam Farzaneh & Tara McKelvey
BBC News, Washington
Published
31 minutes ago
Share page
image captionAfghan-American Hadia Essazada is haunted by past trauma and fearful for the future
The lightning advance of the Taliban in retaking the country has led Afghan Americans, former generals and leading statesmen to blame President Joe Biden for a hasty US withdrawal. But he appears to have the public on his side - for now.
Hadia Essazada wept as she recounted the horror the Taliban visited on her household, first beating her father, and then killing her brother.
The first time "they were beating my father with an iron rod because they were looking for my elder brother", who had fought to resist their rule in the 1990s, she told BBC Persian.
They fled their house in the northern city of Mazar-I-Sharif, but "after six months when we returned to our home, Taliban again came to visit us. And they took my younger brother".
"I don't know how many days had passed when a shopkeeper in our neighbourhood came to my father to tell him his son was killed," she said.
The Taliban had executed him and dragged his body through the streets. Relatives were not allowed to collect his body for burial for weeks, and by then, dogs had been allowed to desecrate the remains.
Ms Essazada, today in her 20s and living in the US, said she now feared for the security of both Afghanistan and her new home, America, now that the Taliban is in control once more.
"The Taliban has not changed a bit," she said, predicting that the West will be targeted by militants who she believes will be given shelter by the group. "Do you really want to go back to Afghanistan again?"
Biden's promise to get out
To his critics, the president's decision to wind down America's longest conflict has undone 20 years of work and sacrifice, paved the way for a humanitarian catastrophe and called into question US credibility.
Many of those closest to the conflict - Afghans, soldiers and statesmen - have long been sceptical of the president's view that the Kabul government could be expected to maintain the country's security by itself.
With the fall of the capital city on Sunday, some wonder whether it is only a matter of time before the American electorate comes to regret Mr Biden's move to deliver on the long-held promise of getting America out.
image sourceReuters
image captionThe hasty withdrawal from Kabul has prompted comparisons with the fall of Saigon in 1975 (below)
image sourceReuters
His decision to pull out is hardly a surprise. Since his days as vice-president to Barack Obama, he has always insisted that the war should be limited in its mission.
As a senator from Delaware in 2001, he joined a unanimous vote to approve the use of military force in Afghanistan. But he opposed the deployment of more troops Mr Obama authorised in 2009, the so-called "surge".
"Biden was pretty darn clear on Afghanistan," Brett Bruen, a former diplomat who sat in the Obama administration's National Security Council meetings, told the BBC. "He said we should get the heck out of there."
Mr Biden pushed his case and would sometimes make it personal, Mr Bruen recalled. "It was an effort to win over the room," he said.
As a White House candidate in 2019, Mr Biden reminded voters that he would be the first president since Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s to have a child serve in an active conflict.
In his memoir Richard Holbrooke, who was special envoy to Afghanistan in the early Obama years, remembered Mr Biden angrily telling him he was "not sending my boy back there to risk his life on behalf of [Afghan] women's rights... That's not what they're there for".
But his long experience in foreign policy has probably done even more to shape the president's outlook, Mr Bruen said. "He's lived through so many of these conflicts, not just Vietnam and the Iraq War but also Kosovo [and] Grenada. I think there's a certain soberness to the way he looks at these challenges, and also a weariness."
Running for office, Mr Biden told CBS in 2019 that the US should only have troops in Afghanistan "to make sure that it's impossible for the Taliban and for Isis or al-Qaeda to re-establish a foothold there".
That has not come to pass. On Sunday, Taliban fighters reached the Afghan capital amid little resistance following a scramble by the US and its allies to airlift personnel out of the country.
image captionCrowds filled Kabul Airport to try to escape the Taliban advance
Within hours, Karzai International Airport had suspended commercial flights and government forces at Afghanistan's main prison near Bagram Air Base had surrendered to insurgents.
Mr Biden was forced on Saturday to approve the deployment of thousands of additional US troops "to make sure we can have an orderly and safe drawdown of US personnel and other allied personnel" and carry out a "safe evacuation" of Afghans at "special risk" from the Taliban.
Early warnings
A leaked US intelligence report this month had warned that the western-backed Afghan government could collapse within 90 days of US troop departures.
Mr Biden's predecessor Donald Trump accused him of "weakness, incompetence, and total strategic incoherence" but some have pointed to a withdrawal deal his team hatched with the Taliban last year as partly to blame.
Some of the objections to the Biden withdrawal plan echo warnings made years ago.
Asked in 2009 whether his proposal to reduce troop numbers could succeed, Stanley McChrystal, then the US Commander in Kabul, replied: "The short answer is no."
With the swift Taliban takeover of the last few weeks, that prediction has proved correct.
Gen David Petraeus, who replaced Mr McChrystal as commander, told the BBC: "The situation obviously is just disastrous."
"We should literally reverse the decision," he said. "I feared we would come to regret the decision and we already are. There's no good outcome unless the United States and its allies recognise that we made a serious mistake."
Husain Haqqani, Pakistan's ambassador to the US in 2009, told the BBC: "He [Mr Biden] always said 'our fight was about al-Qaeda, and not the Taliban'. I always thought it was naïve."
Sher Hossain Jaghori, an Afghan-American, lost an arm serving as an interpreter for US troops in 2003.
Now a US citizen, he said was furious about the US withdrawal. Mr Biden has "left the people of Afghanistan in the hands of Taliban," he told BBC Persian.
"I do not trust the US government anymore," he said. "My wife and my son voted for Biden. I told them not to do that. Now they came to me and said they now believe I was right. They are not going to vote again."
media captionUK shadow foreign secretary: withdrawing troops was a "catastrophic miscalculation"
Polls have consistently shown withdrawal to be popular with Americans exhausted by 20 years of spent blood and treasure, and years of promises to get out.
In office, Mr Obama pledged to get out. Running for president, Donald Trump hammered against continuing the "endless war" - he had set a departure date for US troops of 1 May this year.
As recently as last month, an overwhelming majority of Americans - 70% or more - supported Mr Biden's withdrawal, according to polls from Harris and the Chicago Council.
But that was before the lightning advance of the Taliban.
As the situation on the ground shifts - and with veterans aghast at reports of the executions of Afghans who had served with them, former allied posts overtaken by Taliban fighters and aid groups warning of a humanitarian crisis to come - comparisons are already being made to the ignoble withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975.
"Theoretically Americans wanted out," Mr Breun said. "But practically when they see these images of the Taliban driving through the streets, American forces fleeing in a Saigon-esque fashion, it's a very hard pill to swallow."
6. After the fall of Kabul, what’s next for Afghanistan?
Interesting analysis here (and not the discussion of CHina and the Uygurs as well).
Excerpt:
David Kilcullen, professor of international and political studies at the Australian Defence Force Academy, says the Taliban have got a lot better at governing but the future is uncertain. ‘They have trained governance cadres and they are much better at communications and messaging. They also run a shadow government in most provinces and a kind of guerrilla government in major cities.’
This is a critical source of revenue for the Taliban, says Kilcullen. ‘They have a pretty effective local taxation system, and take cuts of drug, agricultural and timber production.’
But once the big push is over, unity may become a problem. There’s been a long history of dissention among the Quetta, Peshawar and Miran Shah shuras that direct Taliban activities.
Kilcullen notes that anti-Taliban strategy has always aimed to encourage this. But he says the current Taliban supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, has proved much more able than his predecessor at keeping the factions together.
After the fall of Kabul, what’s next for Afghanistan? | The Strategist
After their rapid victory in Afghanistan, do the Taliban have the capacity to govern and keep unified control?
David Kilcullen, professor of international and political studies at the Australian Defence Force Academy, says the Taliban have got a lot better at governing but the future is uncertain. ‘They have trained governance cadres and they are much better at communications and messaging. They also run a shadow government in most provinces and a kind of guerrilla government in major cities.’
This is a critical source of revenue for the Taliban, says Kilcullen. ‘They have a pretty effective local taxation system, and take cuts of drug, agricultural and timber production.’
But once the big push is over, unity may become a problem. There’s been a long history of dissention among the Quetta, Peshawar and Miran Shah shuras that direct Taliban activities.
Kilcullen notes that anti-Taliban strategy has always aimed to encourage this. But he says the current Taliban supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, has proved much more able than his predecessor at keeping the factions together.
Under the previous leader, Mullah Omar, who was killed by a drone strike in 2013, there was open revolt against the Quetta Shura. ‘And there’s always problems with young, aggressive field commanders going their own way who need to be disciplined. But in the initial push they will be unified,’ says Kilcullen.
He says it’s also important to remember that the Taliban remain closely affiliated with al-Qaeda and Islamic State Khorasan (IS-K), as well as the Pakistan-based Haqqani Network (HQN). Last year, the New York Times published an oped attributed to HQN leader Sirajuddin Haqqani in which he implied that HQN will have a strong hand in the next iteration of the Afghan state.
Kilcullen says that many still think of HQN as separate from the Taliban, or at least quasi-autonomous. While it has suited HQN’s interests to maintain that fiction, in reality it is completely integrated with the Taliban. HQN militants often serve as the shock troops for the Taliban, while remaining close to Directorate S, the unit of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) that runs Pakistan’s clandestine relationship with the Taliban.
This connection with Pakistan explains why HQN is also helping China, a close Islamabad ally, to run operations against Uyghur co-religionists in Afghanistan.
What might Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan, army chief Qamar Javed Bajwa, and ISI Director-General Faiz Hameed be most worried about now? To a point, these three represent competing tensions when it comes to Pakistan’s relationship with the Taliban, says Kilcullen.
‘There’s the official and unofficial Pakistan position. Officially, Pakistan supports a negotiated outcome and would not support a forceful takeover. But the ISI and elements of the army have covertly backed the Taliban for decades as insurance against the influence of India in Afghanistan,’ he says.
‘Bajwa will be very concerned about refugee flows. The EU is promising assistance, so they will be very keen to facilitate that. He’ll also be worried about how a Taliban victory might be a morale boost for Pakistan’s version of the Taliban, Tehrik e Taliban’.
Tehrik e Taliban was ‘defanged’ in 2016 by Pakistani security forces but has shown recent signs of resurgence. There are varying reports of over 100 attacks in Pakistan attributed to the group since May. And it is one of many anti-government terrorist organisations operating in Pakistan.
Khan needs to concentrate on economic development. For that to happen, he needs a stable government in Kabul, and a stable security situation at home. Both may not prove possible. Continued investment in the region by China is also important to Islamabad, which would welcome more Chinese involvement in Afghanistan to balance the influence of India.
‘It’s clear that China has anointed the Taliban as Afghanistan’s next rulers,’ says Kilcullen, pointing to the public meeting in July between China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Mullah Barader, the head of the Taliban political committee.
But at the most recent Shanghai Cooperation Organisation meeting, also in July, Wang signalled that China’s support might be contingent on the Taliban helping counter Uyghur groups, IS-K and the East Turkestan Islamic Movement.
More broadly, China is intent on preserving its resource investments in Afghanistan. And although its Belt and Road Initiative doesn’t encompass Afghanistan, it is an important transit route across Central Asia to other nations like Iran, with which China has just inked a 25-year economic and security agreement.
But can the Taliban be a trusted partner for Beijing?
Kilcullen says many Uyghur militants who were fighting in Syria have gone back to Afghanistan. ‘So how the Taliban treats those groups will an indicator. Will they hand them over to China, or keep them in reserve for leverage?’
The Taliban will have other points of leverage with China, he says. ‘For instance, they can control access to resources, access to transport routes and telecommunications access. To some extent China can hedge against this by sending in private security companies to guard assets.’
7. Japan’s New China Reality
A depressing subtitle.
Japan’s New China Reality
A top official recognizes America’s relative decline in the Pacific.
WSJ · by The Editorial Board
The remarks came in an interview with Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald. Mr. Kishi “said the shifting power balance between the US and China ‘has become very conspicuous’ while a military battle over Taiwan had ‘skewed greatly in favour of China,’” the paper reports. He added that China “is trying to change the status quo unilaterally backed by force and coercion” and said “we must build a structure where we can protect ourselves.”
Japanese officials are normally soft-spoken in public, but China’s immense military buildup has become impossible to ignore. According to a new Lowy Institute report by military analyst Thomas Shugart, China has “become the world’s premier sea power by most measures,” adding 80 warships to its navy in the last five years while the U.S. added 36.
Measured by warship tonnage, China’s naval expansion since 2016 easily outpaced the expansion of the U.S. Pacific fleet and the allied “Quad” navies of India, Japan and Australia combined, the report finds. The U.S. Navy retains some qualitative advantages, but quantity eventually overwhelms quality.
Japan, which mostly relies on the U.S. for its defense, has a front-row seat to this realignment in sea power. Meanwhile, the Biden Administration has proposed an inflation-adjusted cut to America’s defense budget. The Senate Armed Services Committee added $25 billion last month, but with Congress preparing a $3.5 trillion welfare-state expansion, observers in Tokyo have good reason to doubt the U.S. can ever afford to underwrite Pacific security in the way it has since World War II.
Mr. Kishi told the Herald that “the defence stability of Taiwan is very important, not just for Japan’s security, but for the stability of the world as well,” reflecting the emerging consensus on Japan’s center-right around defending the island.
Beijing is serious about bringing Taiwan under its control. That would put the People’s Liberation Army in a position to directly threaten parts of the Japanese archipelago, which the U.S. is treaty-bound to defend.
A more assertive Japan is probably inevitable and necessary if Chinese hegemony in Asia is to be averted. Yet the U.S. is taking a risk as it lets the military balance erode and China’s ambitions expand. If U.S. deterrence fails and war breaks out in the Pacific, Americans as well as Japanese will pay the price.
WSJ · by The Editorial Board
8. Xi’s Dictatorship Threatens the Chinese State
George Soros writing in the Wall Street Journal criticizing Xi.
Xi’s Dictatorship Threatens the Chinese State
In his quest for personal power, he’s rejected Deng Xiaoping’s economic reform path and turned the Communist Party into an assemblage of yes-men.
At the heart of this conflict is the reality that the two nations represent systems of governance that are diametrically opposed. The U.S. stands for a democratic, open society in which the role of the government is to protect the freedom of the individual. Mr. Xi believes Mao Zedong invented a superior form of organization, which he is carrying on: a totalitarian closed society in which the individual is subordinated to the one-party state. It is superior, in this view, because it is more disciplined, stronger and therefore bound to prevail in a contest.
Relations between China and the U.S. are rapidly deteriorating and may lead to war. Mr. Xi has made clear that he intends to take possession of Taiwan within the next decade, and he is increasing China’s military capacity accordingly.
He also faces an important domestic hurdle in 2022, when he intends to break the established system of succession to remain president for life. He feels that he needs at least another decade to concentrate the power of the one-party state and its military in his own hands. He knows that his plan has many enemies, and he wants to make sure they won’t have the ability to resist him.
It is against this background that the current turmoil in the financial markets is unfolding, catching many people unaware and leaving them confused. The confusion has compounded the turmoil.
Although I am no longer engaged in the financial markets, I used to be an active participant. I have also been actively engaged in China since 1984, when I introduced Communist Party reformers in China to their counterparts in my native Hungary. They learned a lot from each other, and I followed up by setting up foundations in both countries. That was the beginning of my career in what I call political philanthropy. My foundation in China was unique in being granted near-total independence. I closed it in 1989, after I learned it had come under the control of the Chinese government and just before the Tiananmen Square massacre. I resumed my active involvement in China in 2013 when Mr. Xi became the ruler, but this time as an outspoken opponent of what has since become a totalitarian regime.
I consider Mr. Xi the most dangerous enemy of open societies in the world. The Chinese people as a whole are among his victims, but domestic political opponents and religious and ethnic minorities suffer from his persecution much more. I find it particularly disturbing that so many Chinese people seem to find his social-credit surveillance system not only tolerable but attractive. It provides them social services free of charge and tells them how to stay out of trouble by not saying anything critical of Mr. Xi or his regime. If he could perfect the social-credit system and assure a steadily rising standard of living, his regime would become much more secure. But he is bound to run into difficulties on both counts.
To understand why, some historical background is necessary. Mr. Xi came to power in 2013, but he was the beneficiary of the bold reform agenda of his predecessor Deng Xiaoping, who had a very different concept of China’s place in the world. Deng realized that the West was much more developed and China had much to learn from it. Far from being diametrically opposed to the Western-dominated global system, Deng wanted China to rise within it. His approach worked wonders. China was accepted as a member of the World Trade Organization in 2001 with the privileges that come with the status of a less-developed country. China embarked on a period of unprecedented growth. It even dealt with the global financial crisis of 2007-08 better than the developed world.
Mr. Xi failed to understand how Deng achieved his success. He took it as a given and exploited it, but he harbored an intense personal resentment against Deng. He held Deng Xiaoping responsible for not honoring his father, Xi Zhongxun, and for removing the elder Xi from the Politburo in 1962. As a result, Xi Jinping grew up in the countryside in very difficult circumstances. He didn’t receive a proper education, never went abroad, and never learned a foreign language.
Xi Jinping devoted his life to undoing Deng’s influence on the development of China. His personal animosity toward Deng has played a large part in this, but other factors are equally important. He is intensely nationalistic and he wants China to become the dominant power in the world. He is also convinced that the Chinese Communist Party needs to be a Leninist party, willing to use its political and military power to impose its will. Xi Jinping strongly felt this was necessary to ensure that the Chinese Communist Party will be strong enough to impose the sacrifices needed to achieve his goal.
Mr. Xi realized that he needs to remain the undisputed ruler to accomplish what he considers his life’s mission. He doesn’t know how the financial markets operate, but he has a clear idea of what he has to do in 2022 to stay in power. He intends to overstep the term limits established by Deng, which governed the succession of Mr. Xi’s two predecessors, Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin. Because many of the political class and business elite are liable to oppose Mr. Xi, he must prevent them from uniting against him. Thus, his first task is to bring to heel anyone who is rich enough to exercise independent power.
That process has been unfolding in the past year and reached a crescendo in recent weeks. It started with the sudden cancellation of a new issue by Alibaba’s Ant Group in November 2020 and the temporary disappearance of its former executive chairman, Jack Ma. Then came the disciplinary measures taken against Didi Chuxing after it floated an issue in New York in June 2021. It culminated with the banishment of three U.S.-financed tutoring companies, which had a much greater effect on international markets than Mr. Xi expected. Chinese financial authorities have tried to reassure markets but with little success.
Mr. Xi is engaged in a systematic campaign to remove or neutralize people who have amassed a fortune. His latest victim is Sun Dawu, a billionaire pig farmer. Mr. Sun has been sentenced to 18 years in prison and persuaded to “donate” the bulk of his wealth to charity.
This campaign threatens to destroy the geese that lay the golden eggs. Mr. Xi is determined to bring the creators of wealth under the control of the one-party state. He has reintroduced a dual-management structure into large privately owned companies that had largely lapsed during the reform era of Deng. Now private and state-owned companies are being run not only by their management but also a party representative who ranks higher than the company president. This creates a perverse incentive not to innovate but to await instructions from higher authorities.
China’s largest, highly leveraged real-estate company, Evergrande, has recently run into difficulties servicing its debt. The real-estate market, which has been a driver of the economic recovery, is in disarray. The authorities have always been flexible enough to deal with any crisis, but they are losing their flexibility. To illustrate, a state-owned company produced a Covid-19 vaccine, Sinopharm, which has been widely exported all over the world, but its performance is inferior to all other widely marketed vaccines. Sinopharm won’t win any friends for China.
To prevail in 2022, Mr. Xi has turned himself into a dictator. Instead of allowing the party to tell him what policies to adopt, he dictates the policies he wants it to follow. State media is now broadcasting a stunning scene in which Mr. Xi leads the Standing Committee of the Politburo in slavishly repeating after him an oath of loyalty to the party and to him personally. This must be a humiliating experience, and it is liable to turn against Mr. Xi even those who had previously accepted him.
In other words, he has turned them into his own yes-men, abolishing the legacy of Deng’s consensual rule. With Mr. Xi there is little room for checks and balances. He will find it difficult to adjust his policies to a changing reality, because he rules by intimidation. His underlings are afraid to tell him how reality has changed for fear of triggering his anger. This dynamic endangers the future of China’s one-party state.
Mr. Soros is founder of the Open Society Foundations.
9. Biden’s Afghanistan Surrender
This is a leadership issue. The CINC is responsible for all that his government/military does or fails to do. It is as simple as that. Per President Truman: the buck stops here.
My recommendation would be for the CINC to publicly accept responsibility for Afghanistan. It happened. There is no turning back the clock and there are no good excuses. The only thing the President can do is acknowledge the tragedy without spin. And then he needs to tell us what is his plan for the way ahead.
How to help our Afghan allies who are in great danger?
How to deal with a Taliban led Afghanistan?
How to prevent the re-emergence of Afghanistan as a terrorist safe haven?
And more. So much more.
Biden’s Afghanistan Surrender
The President tries to duck responsibility for a calamitous withdrawal.
WSJ · by The Editorial Board
With that statement of capitulation, the Afghan military’s last resistance collapsed. Taliban fighters captured Kabul, and President Ashraf Ghani fled the country while the U.S. frantically tried to evacuate Americans. The jihadists the U.S. toppled 20 years ago for sheltering Osama bin Laden will now fly their flag over the U.S. Embassy building on the 20th anniversary of 9/11.
***
Our goal all along has been to offer constructive advice to avoid this outcome. We criticized Donald Trump’s deal with the Taliban and warned about the risks of his urge to withdraw in a rush, and we did the same for Mr. Biden. The President’s advisers offered an alternative, as did the Afghanistan Study Group. Mr. Biden, as always too assured of his own foreign-policy acumen, refused to listen.
Mr. Biden’s Saturday self-justification exemplifies his righteous dishonesty. “One more year, or five more years, of U.S. military presence would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country,” Mr. Biden said. But the Afghans were willing to fight and take casualties with the support of the U.S. and its NATO allies, especially air power. A few thousand troops and contractors could have done the job and prevented this rout.
Worse is his attempt to blame his decisions on Mr. Trump: “When I came to office, I inherited a deal cut by my predecessor—which he invited the Taliban to discuss at Camp David on the eve of 9/11 of 2019—that left the Taliban in the strongest position militarily since 2001 and imposed a May 1, 2021 deadline on U.S. forces. Shortly before he left office, he also drew U.S. forces down to a bare minimum of 2,500. Therefore, when I became President, I faced a choice—follow through on the deal, with a brief extension to get our forces and our allies’ forces out safely, or ramp up our presence and send more American troops to fight once again in another country’s civil conflict.”
Note that Mr. Biden is more critical of his predecessor than he is of the Taliban. The President has spent seven months ostentatiously overturning one Trump policy after another on foreign and domestic policy. Yet he now claims Afghanistan policy is the one he could do nothing about.
This is a pathetic denial of his own agency, and it’s also a false choice. It’s as if Winston Churchill, with his troops surrounded at Dunkirk, had declared that Neville Chamberlain got him into this mess and the British had already fought too many wars on the Continent.
Mr. Trump’s withdrawal deadline was a mistake, but Mr. Biden could have maneuvered around it. He knows this because his Administration conducted an internal policy review that provided him with options. The Taliban had already violated its pledges under the deal. Mr. Biden could have maintained the modest presence his military and foreign-policy advisers suggested. He could have decided to withdraw but done so based on conditions on the ground while preparing the Afghans with a plan for transition and air support.
Instead he ordered a rapid and total withdrawal at the onset of the annual fighting season in time for the symbolic target date of 9/11. Most of the American press at the time hailed his decision as courageous.
***
The result a mere four months later is the worst U.S. humiliation since the fall of Saigon in 1975. The Taliban is saying it wants a “peaceful transfer of power” in Kabul, but the scenes are still redolent of U.S. defeat. The scramble to destroy classified documents. The helicopters evacuating U.S. diplomats. The abandonment into Taliban hands of valuable U.S. military equipment.
Worst of all is the plight of the Afghans who assisted the U.S. over two decades. Mr. Biden said Saturday that the 5,000 U.S. troops he is sending will help in evacuating Afghans and Americans. But there are thousands of translators, their families, and other officials who are in peril from Taliban rule and didn’t get out in time. (See nearby.) The Biden Administration was far too slow to get them out of the country despite urgent warnings. The murder of these innocents will compound the stain on the Biden Presidency.
The consequences of all this will play out over many months and years, and none will be good. The illusion, indulged on the left and right, that the U.S. can avoid the world’s horrors while gardening its entitlement state, is sure to come home to haunt. Adversaries are taking Mr. Biden’s measure, and there will be more trouble ahead. The costs will be all the more painful because the ugliness of this surrender was so unnecessary.
WSJ · by The Editorial Board
10. Kabul Is Not Quite Saigon, and It Was All Too Easy
Again, I wonder if we are not missing the excellent political preparation of the environment that facilitated the ease of military operations. They military was likely neutralized through cooption (deals for money and survival) and coercion (e.g., night letters)
Kabul Is Not Quite Saigon, and It Was All Too Easy
Where was the Afghan military and the warlords?
Advertisement
The right-wing politics of U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell are not everyone’s cup of tea. But he’s an old stager and he was right about the Taliban shaping-up to retake of Afghanistan, when he said: “This debacle was not only foreseeable, it was foreseen.”
“The Biden Administration has reduced U.S. officials to pleading with Islamic extremists to spare our Embassy as they prepare to overrun Kabul,” he said.
“The latest news of a further drawdown at our Embassy and a hasty deployment of military forces seem like preparations for the fall of Kabul. President Biden’s decisions have us hurtling toward an even worse sequel to the humiliating fall of Saigon in 1975.”
The sheer speed of the fall as the militia fanned out across the country was as breathtaking as it was heartbreaking for the Afghans who believed in America and those who backed Washington’s efforts over two decades to rescue what was a failed state.
It was an embarrassment for the victims of the 9/11 attacks – orchestrated by Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network, who lived, fought, and plotted with the Taliban – and the bombings and strikes across the planet that followed in the War on Terror.
To abandon Afghanistan and essentially hand it back to the Taliban – a terrorist group that owed much of its history to key supporters in Pakistan like the former prime minister Benazir Bhutto – was humiliating.
Comparisons between the fall of Kabul and Saigon in the aftermath of a U.S. military withdrawal are inevitable. But while the similarities are striking there are also key differences.
Significantly was an overriding North Vietnamese fear of U.S. President Richard Nixon and the very real prospect of a resumption of bombings should they cross the 17th parallel into South Vietnam in violation of the peace agreement reached in 1973.
Watergate changed that. As Nixon stumbled towards resignation the North Vietnamese were emboldened and gambled that a lame duck administration, and then a new president in Gerald Ford, would abandon their allies in South Vietnam once the communist tanks had crossed the border.
Hanoi had two years to prepare and the south crumbled.
Like the North Vietnamese communists, the Taliban never had any intention of honoring the peace agreement struck last year with Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump, as flimsy as it was.
But unlike the communists the Taliban held no fears of the Americans, who just wanted out. They launched a well-planned, well-armed offensive and by Sunday their objective had proven all too easy.
The U.S. spent $88 billion on training and equipping the Afghan army – two-thirds of its total foreign aid budget allocated to Afghanistan since 2002. Where were they as the Taliban advanced?
And the notorious warlords, many of them sworn enemies of the Taliban: where were they?
Afghanistan’s endless civil wars, the factional and ethnic brawling of the last half-century, had resulted in an ocean of constantly shifting alliances and double dealing that gave rise to an old adage, “you can rent an Afghan but you can’t buy one.”
Back in 2009, CNN reported that some experts believed the U.S. military was paying militiamen to quit the Taliban in what was dubbed a “temporary loyalty program.”
Warlords are paid to fight and sometimes they are paid not to fight and in the handful of weeks leading up to the fall of Kabul, the military evaporated and the warlords simply opened the gates and let the Taliban march through in their convoys of Japanese SUVs.
The question is: Who paid them?
Advertisement
For clues, one should look at who has the most to gain from the Taliban’s return to power.
Put simply, an offensive of this magnitude would not be possible without the knowledge of Pakistan or its intelligence services, who are adept at whispering from the sidelines.
The Taliban shattered what was called the Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan. Biden is neither a Nixon nor a Ford, but the future of his administration is hanging on what comes next and his options – including a resumption of military strikes – are many.
Luke Hunt has written about Afghanistan since his first of many tours in 1998 and he authored the Vietnam war book, Punji Trap. He can be followed on Patreon and on Twitter @lukeanthonyhunt.
11. Responding to China’s Unending Grey-Zone Prodding
Excerpt:
China’s grey-zone activities grind remorselessly on, but in so doing they educate all about the grey zone’s characteristics, while simultaneously generating pushback. In relying on a resilient peace, grey-zone operations are both a feature of our time and a product of it. The UK, while remote to the Indo-Pacific centres of grey-zone activity, could make some useful contributions to their resolution.
Responding to China’s Unending Grey-Zone Prodding
The best way to counter China’s grey-zone activities may be a measured forward-planning approach that proceeds step-by-step.
Dr Peter Layton11 August 2021
China remains hard at work using its innovative grey-zone tactics to further its ceaseless quest for strategic advantage over its neighbours. In March it sent some 220 fishing vessels to anchor in neat rows and crowd out Whitsun Reef, a territory claimed by the Philippines. In June, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force conducted a radio-silent formation flight of 16 strategic air transport aircraft across the South China Sea to within around 60 nautical miles north of the East Malaysian coast, sparking an intercept by two Royal Malaysian Air Force Hawk aircraft. More worryingly, in June 2020, as part of its salami-slicing grey-zone tactics on the India–China border, the PLA killed some 20 Indian soldiers.
In a new publication from Canberra’s Air and Space Power Centre, I examine Chinese grey-zone activities and possible responses in some detail. In general, grey-zone activities involve purposefully pursuing political objectives through carefully designed operations; moving cautiously towards objectives rather than seeking decisive results quickly; acting to remain below key escalatory thresholds so as to avoid war; and using all instruments of national power, particularly non-military and non-kinetic tools.
These characteristics mean the grey zone is not the same as hybrid war. The latter is – as the name suggests – a type of warfare, which deliberately uses armed violence to try to conclusively win a campaign, as exemplified by Russia’s involvements in Ukraine, Syria and Libya. Some may also observe that Russia’s hybrid warfare aims for negative outcomes, such as stopping Ukraine joining the EU or NATO, the Assad regime in Syria being overthrown or Libya’s disruptive warlord Khalifa Haftar becoming irrelevant.
In contrast, Chinese grey-zone activities do not use armed violence; the Indian soldiers killed in June 2020 were engaged in a physical altercation that featured wooden clubs and thrown stones. Moreover, China has more positive aims – at least from its point of view – in seeking to gradually gain territory on its periphery without resorting to armed conflict. Beyond this, grey-zone activities aim to gain strategic advantage, in the sense that others will modify their behaviour and actions by taking account of China’s interests.
In broad terms, China uses the grey zone while Russia employs hybrid warfare; the two techniques and countries should not be conflated.
A Carefully Controlled Approach
Given the nature of the grey zone, such actions do not just happen. They are implemented in a well-designed campaign plan approved and controlled by the highest levels of the Communist Party of China and the PLA. Grey-zone actions are not those of tactical commanders freelancing.
Importantly, grey-zone operations are designed to avoid military escalation. This requires the operations to be tightly controlled at the tactical level by senior leaders. Grey-zone activities are, in essence, carefully scripted brinkmanship.
Accordingly, grey-zone operations are appropriate only for a time of resilient peace that is able to absorb a grey-zone shock and bounce back, not a fragile peace that might suddenly shatter and start a war. If the peace is tenuous with all sides postured and ready to fight, grey-zone operations will be too risky to undertake. The implication is that targets of grey-zone actions need to be cooperative; they should be invested in keeping the peace, not wishing to break it. Countries seeking to maintain the status quo are particularly vulnerable to such self-deterrence.
Colourful Responses
The response to China’s grey-zone activities may need to be symmetrical, in the sense of also being incremental and slowly nibbling away at the edges. A measured forward-planning approach that proceeds step-by-step into the future might be apposite. In contrast, conventional planning works backward from an identified end state.
A step-by-step approach could proceed carefully and evolve along the way so as to avoid triggering a military response from China. The Party’s leaders would then adjust to each step and become accustomed to the new normal before the next one develops. This incremental approach means each individual pushback does not appear dangerously threatening or escalatory as it is undertaken.
In thinking about implementing a measured forward-planning approach, some broad issues might be useful to consider.
First, grey-zone actions occur within a deliberately protracted campaign. China’s continuing grey-zone activities in the East China Sea began in earnest around 2012, with air incursions sharply rising from a few dozen annually to several hundred today. Similarly, in the South China Sea, large-scale island construction started in 2013 together with the steadily increasing use of what PLA Rear Admiral Zhang Zhaozhong calls a ‘cabbage strategy’, where a coral reef or atoll is surrounded by Chinese ships – ‘wrapped layer by layer like a cabbage’ – so that other countries’ ships are progressively prevented from gaining access.
Responses to such campaigns may need to be similarly lengthy. A counter-campaign may last years, produce intermittent advances and repeated reversals, and deliver no decisive outcomes. Such drawn-out operations would be taxing for all, China included.
Second, an important part of a successful grey-zone counter is the capability to respond quickly to new developments. Allowing a new Chinese grey-zone step to become the accepted new normal may make reversing it, or even registering disapproval, problematic. However, responding in a timely manner means each country involved needs high-quality crisis management mechanisms. The UK has long experience in such matters, including in developing them using pre-crisis wargaming and scenario exercising. Such expertise may be of particular value for ASEAN states with South China Sea interests: Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia. China’s increasing assertiveness makes progressively more serious incidents involving the ASEAN states’ civilian entities and military forces more likely in the future. Existing national crisis management mechanisms could be stress-tested and continually improved to stay in front of the evolution of Chinese grey-zone techniques.
Third, high-quality intelligence is essential. This means not only quantitative intelligence about Chinese military and civilian participants, but also qualitative intelligence about each of the various actors, so as to understand how they might react. For this, first-rate intelligence resources, collection systems and analysts are essential. As the paper discusses, nanosats may be particularly useful; the UK has world-class expertise in this emerging field.
Last, selective institution building among regional participants could usefully develop mechanisms for resolving unexpected grey-zone crises. These may feature military-to-military deconfliction hotlines to help avoid unwanted escalation and accidents. The UK, as a key Five Power Defence Arrangements (FPDA) country, could take the initiative to suggest talks with China to devise South China Sea risk management procedures and processes. Importantly, the FPDA not only has multilateral heft, but in not representing any particular country would not be perceived as unintentionally legitimising China’s South China Sea claims by discussing airspace safety matters with it.
China’s grey-zone activities grind remorselessly on, but in so doing they educate all about the grey zone’s characteristics, while simultaneously generating pushback. In relying on a resilient peace, grey-zone operations are both a feature of our time and a product of it. The UK, while remote to the Indo-Pacific centres of grey-zone activity, could make some useful contributions to their resolution.
The views expressed in this Commentary are the author’s, and do not represent those of RUSI or any other institution.
Have an idea for a Commentary you’d like to write for us? Send a short pitch to commentaries@rusi.org and we’ll get back to you if it fits into our research interests. Full guidelines for contributors can be found here.
12. The GOP quietly removed a webpage hailing Trump's peace deal with the Taliban as the militant group seized power in Afghanistan
I post this with a very good warning from a tweet from Jim Ludes:
If your hot take on Afghanistan views these events through an exclusively partisan frame, reducing the human rights calamity happening before our eyes to the latest in American partisan fights, you are part of the problem.
The GOP quietly removed a webpage hailing Trump's peace deal with the Taliban as the militant group seized power in Afghanistan
Then-President Donald Trump at Bagram Air Field, Afghanistan.
AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File
- The GOP has removed a page hailing Trump's 2020 deal with the Taliban.
- The removal was made on Sunday, amid scenes of chaos in Kabul as the Taliban seized back power.
- Both Trump and Biden have sought to blame each other for the debacle.
10 Things in Politics: The latest in politics & the economy
The Republican Party has removed a page from its website that praised former President Donald Trump's peace deal with the Taliban and bid to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan.
The webpage, which was first posted on the Republican National Committee's website during last year's presidential election, had hailed Trump's foreign policy achievements. An archived version of the page can be found here.
The internet-archive site Wayback Machine noted that the page was removed on August 15, as chaotic scenes emerged from Kabul of US forces evacuating officials from its embassy as Taliban militants seized back control of the country.
Here is a screenshot of the archived version of the webpage, which was recorded on Wayback Machine:
An archived version of a Republican National Committee webpage that touted former President Donald Trump's peace deal with the Taliban.
And here's what it looked like as of Monday morning:
Screenshot taken on August 16, 2021, showing an error message on a page that previously praised Trump's withdrawal deal with the Taliban.
RNC
The page had praised Trump's attempts to end the US' two-decade military involvement in Afghanistan, describing how he "continued to take the lead in peace talks as he signed a historic peace agreement with the Taliban in Afghanistan, which would end America's longest war."
It was referring to a February 2020 conditional peace deal between Trump and the Taliban, which committed the US to cutting the number of troops in Afghanistan if the Taliban did not provide support to terrorist groups.
The page went on to claim that Trump's rival, now-President Joe Biden, had a "history of pushing for endless wars" and listed times he had called for more troops to be deployed in Afghanistan.
Biden had remained committed to withdrawing US troops from Afghanistan while in office, pledging earlier this year to complete the pullout by September 11 despite the Taliban's rapidly gathering gaining strength and seizing back swaths of territory from embattled Afghan security forces.
Observers have drawn parallels between the US' withdrawal from Afghanistan with its shambolic retreat from Saigon in 1975 after its defeat in the Vietnam War.
Trump had made his pledge to end America's so-called "forever wars" in the Middle East and Central Asia one of the centerpieces of his reelection campaign last year. Biden had long opposed US involvement in Afghanistan, though on the campaign trail he signaled that he was considering keeping a small US military presence in the country, a decision he later reversed.
Sign up for notifications from Insider! Stay up to date with what you want to know.
Subscribe to push notifications
13. How America Failed in Afghanistan
Again I will say:
This is a leadership issue. The CINC is responsible for all that his government/military does or fails to do. It is as simple as that. Per President Truman: the buck stops here.
My recommendation would be for the CINC to publicly accept responsibility for Afghanistan. It happened. There is no turning back the clock and there are no good excuses. The only thing the President can do is acknowledge the tragedy without spin. And then he needs to tell us what is his plan for the way ahead.
How to help our Afghan allies who are in great danger?
How to deal with a Taliban led Afghanistan?
How to prevent the re-emergence of Afghanistan as a terrorist safe haven?
And more. So much more.
How America Failed in Afghanistan
The New Yorker staff writer Steve Coll on the humanitarian catastrophe that is now likely to engulf Afghan civilians, and how Joe Biden is shifting the blame.
by Isaac Chatiner
On Sunday, as the Taliban entered Kabul—the last remaining major Afghan city not under the group’s control—the President of the country, Ashraf Ghani, fled to Tajikistan, making clear that the U.S.-backed Afghan government had collapsed. Five months ago, in April, President Joe Biden announced that all U.S. and NATO troops would be withdrawn from Afghanistan by the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Critics have accused the Administration of conducting a rushed, poorly planned, and chaotic withdrawal since then. On Thursday, the U.S. government announced that it would be sending in marines and soldiers to help evacuate embassy personnel. But the speed of the Taliban advance has stunned American officials, and left desperate Afghans trying to flee the country. Responding to criticism about his plan, Biden has sought to shift blame to the Afghan government and its people, saying, “They have got to fight for themselves.”
I spoke by phone with my colleague, the New Yorker staff writer Steve Coll, about the situation in Afghanistan. The dean of Columbia Journalism School, Coll is the author of “Ghost Wars” and “Directorate S,” which together chronicle much of the history of the past several decades in Afghanistan and Pakistan. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why it has been so hard for the United States to train the Afghan army, the different humanitarian crises facing the country, and the Biden Administration’s “outrageous” callousness toward a situation America played a role in creating.
What about the events of the past few weeks has surprised you, and what was the predictable result of Biden’s policy announcement in April?
I think the speed of the political collapse in Afghanistan surprised a lot of people. The pathway of the collapse was predicted and predictable. This has happened in Afghan political and military history a couple of times before. But there was a speed and momentum of people recalculating where their interests lay, and switching sides, and capitulating without violence that I don’t think the Biden Administration had expected when it announced its timetable in the spring.
You could argue that this shows the Biden Administration’s policy was a mistake, but you could also argue that, if this was going to happen so quickly after two decades of American troops in Afghanistan, there was no way to make this work without pledging to stay forever. How do you think about those two ways of looking at the situation, or do you think that dichotomy isn’t helpful?
I think that dichotomy describes two poles that represent the range of choices that the Biden Administration faced, and in between those poles had been, more or less, the policy going back to the second term of the Barack Obama Administration—which was a smaller, sustained deployment. There were twenty-five hundred troops there when the Biden Administration came to office. The rate of casualties incurred by NATO forces was almost at the level of traffic accidents for much of the past couple of years. So a sustained, smaller deployment—not free, but nothing like the expenditures of the past—linked to a search for some more sustainable political outcome had been visible. The Trump Administration followed that path, too, picking it up from the Obama Administration, and the Trump White House had become quite ambitious about it. It had negotiated with the Taliban an agreement that had a timetable, including regarding American withdrawal. But, until the Trump Administration got to that point, it had been following the same pathway as its predecessor.
I think in between was this question of whether the benefits of a messy degree of stability justified having the small-to-medium deployment that America has in other parts of the world. That is what you are going to hear in Washington. The counter-argument to the Biden Administration’s policy is not going to be forever war and the defeat of the Taliban; it is going to be a critique of the haste with which it pulled the plug on what was not a large deployment, and one that was not incurring a lot of casualties.
Why, ultimately, was it so hard to stand up the Afghan military to a greater extent than America did? Was it some lack of political legitimacy? Some problem with the actual training?
I don’t know what proportion of the factors, including the ones you listed, to credit. But I think that the one additional reason it didn’t work was the sheer scale of the ambition. And this was visible in Iraq as well. Building a standing army of three hundred thousand in a country that has been shattered by more than forty consecutive years of war and whose economy is almost entirely dependent on external aid—that just doesn’t work. What did work was what at various stages people thought might be possible, which was to build a stronger, more coherent, better-trained force, which has effectively been the only real fighting force on behalf of the Kabul government over the past few years. This force is referred to as commandos or Special Forces, but it is basically twenty or thirty thousand people. That you can build with a lot of investment and hands-on training. But you can’t just create an army of three hundred thousand. I remember talking to the Pakistani generals about this circa 2012. And they all said, “You just can’t do that. It won’t work.” They turned out to be right.
The writer Anand Gopal, who has reported extensively from Afghanistan wrote, “The US designed the Afghan state to meet Washington’s counterterrorism interests, not the interests of Afghans, and what we see today is the result.” Do you agree?
I assume what that means is that the state-building project, such as it was—and about which there were varying degrees of commitment, including very little at the very beginning, after the fall of the last Taliban government—was undermined by the dependence on independent militias and commanders whose role in security was seen as necessary, especially early on, because the main U.S.-led NATO agenda in Afghanistan and the region was counterterrorism. The men under arms—the power brokers or warlords—were seen as essential to that agenda, and it was very difficult to build a normal state when the militias were beyond political accountability—never mind the rule of law—and dominating so many regions of the country.
Over time, there was a recognition that this was not sustainable, and there were efforts to try to fold them into a more normal-looking state and constitutional military, but that project was never accompanied by a push for accountability or an end to the effective independence and corruption associated with those regional militias. I assume you can say that is all the fault of the Western design, but I am not sure I buy that. Afghanistan had these fighting forces on its soil on 9/11 because of the continuous war that had been triggered by the Soviet invasion in 1979, and they didn’t require a U.S.-dictated constitutional design to persist. Of course, they persisted. The real complication about the design of the Afghan state that is now collapsing has at least as much to do with Afghans coming into the country from exile—the same dynamic that we saw in Iraq. Often, very talented and committed people who had been forced out of the country by the wars going back to the late nineteen-seventies tried to bargain with the leaders in Afghanistan about what kind of constitutional and power-sharing system should be designed. They were trying to create a system that would accommodate the power of the militias who had never left, in a very centralized constitutional design.
President Biden’s attitude toward Afghanistan of late has seemed to be one of annoyance, while he’s also putting a strong emphasis on the need for Afghans to stand up and fight for their country. How do you feel about an American President putting that forward after the U.S. has been intimately involved in that country for decades?
I try to tamp down my emotions about it, because I think it is an outrageous critique. I can understand the frustration that American decision-makers have had with their partners in the Kabul government for the past twenty years. It has been a very rocky road, and it isn’t all the fault of U.S. Presidents and Vice-Presidents and national-security advisers. But to suggest that the Afghan people haven’t done their bit is a kind of blame-shifting that I think is not only unjustifiable but outrageous. The Afghans now have suffered generation after generation of not just continuous warfare but humanitarian crises, one after the other, and Americans have to remember that this wasn’t a civil war that the Afghans started among themselves that the rest of the world got sucked into. This situation was triggered by an outside invasion, initially by the Soviet Union, during the Cold War, and since then the country has been a battleground for regional and global powers seeking their own security by trying to militarily intervene in Afghanistan, whether it be the United States after 2001, the C.I.A. in the nineteen-eighties, Pakistan through its support first for the mujahideen and later the Taliban, or Iran and its clients. To blame Afghans for not getting their act together in light of that history is just wrong.
Next door to Afghanistan, in what is now Pakistan, the British stayed a very long time and then left so abruptly, in 1947, that it resulted in incredible bloodletting. Do you see a callback to that imperial age, in the sense that the outside power wants to wash its hands of the situation and says that it is done without much care for how it leaves?
I agree with that. There is a lot to learn, and, in fairness to the Biden Administration, it inherited from the Trump Administration a terrible situation, because of the concessions the Trump Administration had made to the Taliban about the timing of a U.S. withdrawal. I said earlier that the U.S. deployment that Biden pulled was small, and the violence faced by them was de minimis, but that was true largely because of the terms of the flawed deal that the Trump Administration had negotiated with the Taliban, in which one of the commitments by the Taliban was not to attack U.S. troops in exchange for a hard deadline of May of this year for the last troops to leave. So, when the Biden Administration, in the pressure-filled first weeks of its term, reviewed the situation, it understandably feared that, if it tried to repudiate or rewrite the agreement that the Trump Administration had reached, it might transform a relatively quiet and stable experience for the U.S. military into another bloody round of combat that would undermine the Administration’s plans and foreign-policy priorities. So it pulled the plug and got exactly that result, which is now all that anyone is talking about.
But, to go back to your original observation, I do think that the haste and indifference, the blaming of the Afghans, the linkage of the decision to narrow U.S. interests and the anniversary of 9/11, all of that did have an air of—maybe “contempt” is not too strong a word for it—about what the consequences of this would be in Afghanistan. The decisions of the Obama Administration, and the Trump Administration in the first couple of years, reflected a rare political consensus in the United States that there was a willingness to sustain a relatively small troop deployment and expenditures in Afghanistan for a path out that would not lead to what we are watching now. And the President himself seems to have personally decided that that was a fool’s errand, and that he would not persist with what he perceived to be the illusions around that kind of search. But there was no crisis in expenditure or war from the American perspective that would have required such a quick decision.
O.K., but doesn’t the speed at which this is now happening suggest that the Taliban would never have negotiated something in good faith for a long-term solution.
It certainly suggests that the Taliban were not serious about ever sharing power in the way that the United States and its European allies and many sections of the Afghan government and society had hoped they might. But the problem was not a naïve faith that the Taliban had lessened their unwillingness to share power, because they hadn’t. They had been terribly stubborn throughout the negotiations. They declined even to talk to the Afghan government on very ideological grounds of historical legitimacy. So there was no reason to say that the Taliban had passed the test of credible international diplomacy, but they were talking. And the hope was that, over time, they could be drawn gradually to demonstrations of reduced violence in which the conversation about political futures would not be dominated by the violence and revolutionary ambitions of the Taliban’s history. Look at the negotiations with the FARC in Colombia. How long did those last? Twenty years? Even now, you have a messy result, but these are not negotiations that typically result quickly in an agreement. You would expect it to be a very slow process.
What was flawed about the Trump Administration’s agreement was not a misunderstanding of the Taliban necessarily, but the timeline it set. The Administration basically used the negotiations as cover to leave before it had achieved any of the things that it said the negotiations were designed to do.
But is there any tension between saying, essentially, on the one hand that the deployment was not costing that many Americans lives and on the other that we got the Taliban to stop killing so many Americans only because we promised to leave? Could we have kept that balance if we weren’t promising to leave?
The American casualty rate was low even before the Taliban agreed to stop attacking Americans. This is not to say that each loss wasn’t painfully felt and meaningful, but coverage on the rate of casualty had disappeared from the news cycle starting around 2015 or 2016, when the deployment was down to the ten-thousand range. The problem with sustainability outside the negotiations was the way in which the war was being prosecuted after NATO troops were drawn way down; essentially, it was an air war connected to the Special Forces on the ground. A harder question about this middle-way policy is how long you are going to bomb the Taliban into submission. The reason there was a military stalemate from roughly 2006 to this summer was that the American-led coalition, including the Afghan forces on the ground, had a monopoly on air power, and the Taliban had no answer for air power. But, of course, bombing in a country like Afghanistan is never precise, and there are civilian casualties and a sense of siege in some of the areas where air power was brought to bear. How long was that going to be the answer?
Your books on the region suggest that the Taliban may not have initially come to power, nor survived this long, had it not been for the aid and comfort of the Pakistani security apparatus—its military and intelligence services. How is Pakistan feeling about what’s happening now? I sense maybe there’s a tiny bit more anxiety than usual about what this might mean for Pakistan.
It seems likely that it is partially a case of watching what you wish for. I am sure they did not forecast the speed with which events are unfolding this summer, and they may also have expected that the role of negotiations and the timetable by which political change would occur in Afghanistan would allow them to build a platform for greater international legitimacy and credibility for a potential Taliban government. One of the reasons that I would be anxious if I were them is that this is happening in a way that is already inducing governments such as Germany’s—not usually first out of the box on these things—to say that they won’t provide any aid to a government that imposes sharia against the will of its people.
Zalmay Khalilzad, Biden’s negotiator, is trying to tell the Taliban that they won’t be recognized by anyone if they take power this way. Well, we’ll see. In the nineteen-nineties, there were only three governments in the world that recognized the Taliban: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. And this time around, too, Pakistan will be one of them, I expect. But things are different. The Saudis and the Emiratis have a new geopolitical outlook. But China is not the same country that it was in the nineties. How will China support Pakistan in trying to manage a second Taliban regime, especially one that may attract sanctions or other kinds of pressure from the United States and its allies? It isn’t the nineties, but Pakistan is still in the same awkward place that it was last time around. And to the extent that the Taliban return to a kind of internationalism of their interpretation of Islam and welcome Al Qaeda types or other forms of radicals, allow the Islamic State to incubate on Afghan soil, or don’t have the interest or the capacity to do something about it, you can be sure that, as it did the last time, all of that will blow back on Pakistan in one way or another, be that in the form of international pressure or instability.
How do you see the next month playing out?
It is important for the international community to recognize that Afghanistan is entering another devastating humanitarian crisis of the kind it has seen too many times before, between refugee flows, insecurity in the areas that the Taliban have seized, uncertainty about how the Taliban will handle their enemies—will there be mass executions or internments? Then, you add to that the COVID crisis and the humanitarian challenges in rural Afghanistan that were already in place before this summer, and you are looking at a really dark season for the Afghan population. I don’t expect the Biden Administration to change its policy, and even if it did I don’t expect that it could reverse the Taliban’s momentum without bombing Afghanistan to smithereens. But it can certainly take responsibility for the lion’s share of the response to this unfolding humanitarian crisis, which after all does involve a little bit of self-interest, because, if Afghanistan generates another massive refugee flow toward Europe, that will have political consequences that will wash right through the West.
More New Yorker Conversations
14. The Long Game of Partner Warfare: Colombia and Operation Jaque
Excerpts:
Two Key Lessons for Irregular Warfare
First, successful irregular warfare operations often require long-term investment. Investment in the Andean Ridge started in the late 1980s but did not pay dividends until the 2000s. By the late 1990s, the FARC was so strong that some analysts believed the group would be capable of achieving victory in five years. The group nearly doubled in size between 1997 and 2004. Yet the US investment paid off with the hostage recovery in 2008 and a peace accord in 2016, both seemingly unfathomable only years prior. Building partner capacity takes time.
...
Second, success in irregular warfare is often measured by how little assistance is required. The Colombians planned and executed Operation Jaque with little assistance from the Americans. In fact, US officials were not notified of the full plan until late June, only days before its execution. But the fact that the United States was not directly involved with the mission planning does not mean America’s irregular warfare efforts were not a success. Quite the opposite, the hallmark of true irregular warfare is building host-nation or indigenous forces capable of executing unilateral operations.
The Long Game of Partner Warfare: Colombia and Operation Jaque - Modern War Institute
On February 13, 2003, US Southern Command contractors were flying a routine counternarcotics aerial surveillance mission over the Colombian jungle when the single engine on their Cessna Grand Caravan failed. Forced to crash-land on a “postage-stamp-sized” jungle clearing in territory controlled by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the five-man crew escaped the wreckage without injury. But their luck immediately turned. FARC guerrillas executed the pilot, Tommy Janis, and Colombian intelligence sergeant Alcides Cruz. They seized the remaining three Americans as captives. More than five years later, Colombian military forces planned and executed a daring raid deep into FARC territory that led to the rescue of the three hostages without a shot being fired.
How did the Colombian military, which received extensive US military assistance in the years prior, pull off this raid? This is an important question given prominent recent cases of US partner forces collapsing spectacularly despite significant US efforts to build their capacity, to include the routing of Iraqi security forces by the Islamic State in 2013–2014 and Afghan forces’ inability to halt current Taliban advances in Afghanistan following the US withdrawal.
Operation Jaque, as the Colombian mission was named, succeeded because of persistent investment by the United States in the Colombian military. Special Operations Command South (SOCSOUTH)—the theater special operations command (TSOC) within US Southern Command—supervised this advisory effort that dated back to the late 1980s. Though the impressive operation was planned and executed directly by Colombian forces, SOCSOUTH played an important indirect and supporting role in freeing the hostages. Operation Jaque, and the broader partner capacity–building effort in Colombia, provides important lessons on how to conduct a sustainable irregular warfare campaign that will lead to a highly capable partner force able to operate independently after receiving US support.
The TSOC and Persistent Engagement Through Regionally Aligned SOF
TSOCs control nearly all special operations within each geographic combatant command. For US Southern Command, SOCSOUTH is the two-star headquarters that controls special operations logistics, planning, and operational command and control across Latin America. Because many special operations units are regionally aligned, enduring relationships and persistent engagement build trust between partner nations and the United States. As an example of this persistent engagement, Special Forces officer Charlie Cleveland, who coauthored a chapter on TSOCs with me in the recently released Routledge Handbook of U.S. Counterterrorism and Irregular Warfare Operations, first deployed to South America in 1987 and eventually rose to command all special operations in the region almost twenty years later as the SOCSOUTH commander.
Building Colombian Capability Over Decades
When the United States launched Plan Colombia in 2000, SOCSOUTH coordinated the operations of the 7th Special Forces Group and others as they trained the Colombian military on counterdrug operations. Training on tactics and intelligence accompanied organizational reforms and the introduction of new helicopters. Though Plan Colombia comprised a significant new investment in Colombian military capacity, it built on more than a decade of previous SOCSOUTH-coordinated investment in the region.
In an early example, the US Department of State asked the Department of Defense to establish and train antinarcotics police units in many of the Andean Ridge countries of Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela beginning in 1987. A captain at the time, Charlie Cleveland commanded the first Special Forces detachment to deploy. He established a forty-day training course he named Garras de Leopardo, or “Claws of the Leopard,” in Bolivia.
From this initial effort, Special Forces continued to build counternarcotic capacity along the Andean Ridge. In 1989, Special Forces detachments established a similar training program in Peru. By 1992, the United States had greatly expanded the operational employment of special operations forces throughout the region with SOCSOUTH coordinating Special Forces deployments to seventeen Latin American countries for 135 missions. Special operations engagement in Colombia expanded throughout the 1990s and exploded in the early 2000s under Plan Colombia, a $1.3 billion counterdrug program.
The 7th Special Forces Group led much of the training, focused on patrolling, marksmanship, immediate-action drills, land navigation, river crossings, mountaineering, first aid, survival skills, airmobile operations, mission planning, and human rights. This training built a Colombian force capable of the prolonged jungle and air assault operations critical for counternarcotic operations. But training was not limited to operational units.
Most often the teams were comprised of two Special Forces intelligence sergeants. These teams were so successful that they quickly expanded to Colombia and nearly one dozen other Latin American countries. Throughout the 1990s, SOCSOUTH built the intelligence and operational capability in Colombia and along the Andean Ridge.
Yet the Colombian military required more than training. It also required organizational changes. Special Forces teams often adopt a “train-the-trainer” approach that builds a cadre of experts in the partner-nation military who can then train their own force. Unfortunately, this approach proved impossible in Colombia: nearly 70 percent of the Colombian army was composed of draftees on one- to two-year enlistments and the officers and noncommissioned officer ranks were thin, with only three officers in an army battalion. Thus, SOCSOUTH tasked the 7th Special Forces Group to build a professional 938-man counterdrug battalion that included forty-six officers and senior noncommissioned officers. The training course’s culmination exercise included operational patrols in the FARC-controlled jungles outside of the Tres Esquinas Air Base.
Finally, with the adoption of Plan Colombia in 2000, the United States helped the Colombians expand their aviation and airmobile capability with what would eventually be seventy-two helicopters. This support, which included training and maintenance, provided the Colombians the airmobile capability they would need for the counterdrug mission.
In all, American aid and training built new Colombian counterdrug capabilities critical during Operation Jaque. The new and professional counternarcotic battalion was trained and ready, while the fleet of new helicopters ensured they could reach remote sites across Colombia’s mountainous terrain. But most critically, Colombian intelligence identified an opportunity for a truly unique special operation.
Operation Jaque: Success in the Indirect Approach
After the Cessna crashed in the jungle in 2003, SOCSOUTH and Colombia together focused on rescuing the hostages despite intelligence challenges. Twice, SOCSOUTH deployed forward, but found only frustration. Immediately after the crash, Brigadier General Remo Butler, the SOCSOUTH commander, deployed with a small planning staff to mount a recovery operation should the opportunity arise. Unfortunately, the trail went cold and SOCSOUTH returned to the United States. Then, in July 2005, the US Embassy Intelligence Fusion Center developed a lead on the American hostages. While the intelligence did not pan out, SOCOUTH planners came to realize they lacked the operational capability to act on time-sensitive intelligence.
As a result, Cleveland, now a brigadier general who had taken command of SOCSOUTH the previous month, launched a three-year campaign to build joint capacity, plans, and mutual trust by establishing a small headquarters in Colombia. Over time, this forward team developed rescue plans with their Colombian counterparts.
Finally, in 2008, the three-year effort paid off. In January, signals intelligence indicated that the hostages would soon move. Operations commenced in earnest. Over the next two months, the SOCSOUTH-forward team and Colombian Special Operations Command deployed ten Colombian and five US-Colombian reconnaissance teams to the jungle. In February, a Colombian reconnaissance team identified the Americans bathing in a stream, providing the third proof of life since their capture. Unfortunately, the FARC moved the captives before a rescue mission could be launched.
Over the next three months, Operation Jaque took shape. It was a risky operation, but Cleveland and the US ambassador both recommended that Admiral James Stavridis, the US Southern Command commander, sanction the operation. After working with the Colombians over the past three years, and especially closely over the past few months, Cleveland was confident in their ability to pull off the daring operation. Mutual trust had been developed during the planning over the previous three years and during combined operations in the jungle during the previous months.
Operation Jaque was built on an elaborate deception plan. In January and February of 2008, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez had arranged the release of FARC hostages as a humanitarian gesture. Both missions included Mi-17 helicopters, doctors, nurses, and Telesur television journalists. These hostage releases provided an opportunity for Operational Jaque.
By penetrating the FARC’s communications, the Colombians duped “the FARC into collecting the VIP hostages to attend an international propaganda video with their new commander, Alfonso Cano.” The Colombians convinced Gerardo Aguilar Ramírez, the FARC leader who held the hostages, that he was to board a helicopter with the hostages to meet with Cano.
On July 2, 2008, the FARC fell for the ruse. The recently purchased Colombian Mi-17 helicopter, repainted in the “international search and rescue colors” of red and white, landed outside the rebel camp. Not only did the helicopter look similar to the one used by the Venezuelans only months prior, but so did the crew and passengers. The passengers included Colombian soldiers posing as doctors, nurses, a Telesur television team with a camera, and FARC guerillas from Cano’s camp.
The FARC captors loaded the hostages onboard the helicopter and then boarded for what they thought would be a short flight to Cano’s rebel camp. But once the helicopter was airborne, the Colombian forces quickly subdued Ramírez and his bodyguard, the only FARC guerrillas that were armed. Among the fifteen hostages were the three American crew members.
After 1,967 days in captivity, they were finally free. Weeks later, the rescued Americans served as guests of honor at Cleveland’s change of command at Homestead Air Force Base. Cleveland’s three-year effort that began with the establishment of the SOCSOUTH-forward team in July 2005 had paid off.
Two Key Lessons for Irregular Warfare
First, successful irregular warfare operations often require long-term investment. Investment in the Andean Ridge started in the late 1980s but did not pay dividends until the 2000s. By the late 1990s, the FARC was so strong that some analysts believed the group would be capable of achieving victory in five years. The group nearly doubled in size between 1997 and 2004. Yet the US investment paid off with the hostage recovery in 2008 and a peace accord in 2016, both seemingly unfathomable only years prior. Building partner capacity takes time.
In addition to US efforts in Colombia, the Routledge Handbook of U.S. Counterterrorism and Irregular Warfare Operations examines a number of other irregular warfare cases. Overall, cases where investment is long-term and persistent are more likely to succeed, such as in El Salvador and the Philippines. By contrast, the episodic nature of support in Yemen proved ineffective.
Second, success in irregular warfare is often measured by how little assistance is required. The Colombians planned and executed Operation Jaque with little assistance from the Americans. In fact, US officials were not notified of the full plan until late June, only days before its execution. But the fact that the United States was not directly involved with the mission planning does not mean America’s irregular warfare efforts were not a success. Quite the opposite, the hallmark of true irregular warfare is building host-nation or indigenous forces capable of executing unilateral operations.
US Army Special Forces Major Russ Ames best summarized the operation when he remarked, “The highest praise for a [foreign internal defense] effort is when the host nation achieves a level of capability, that, when combined with their local knowledge and language, makes them more effective than [the United States] could ever hope to be. . . . This is the holy grail of Special Forces work.”
In Afghanistan, this was the goal—to move from US-led to Afghan-led operations. But this transition likely came too late. If recent decades are any indicator of the future, irregular warfare is not going away. To be most effective, the United States must maintain persistent engagement. If they do their job well, the TSOCs serve a critical role in facilitating this persistent engagement and providing policymakers with options once crises arise.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
15. Op-Ed: U.S. foreign policy is 'sanctions happy.' Here's why it doesn't work
Sanctions are not just about trying to change rogue or revision powers behavior through the infliction of economic pain. And they should not be implemented as part of a "temper tantrum" on our part (despite the criticism I do think we do give more than a little thought to our sanctions efforts and not execute them in a knee jerk reaction) . He does not address the use of sanctions to try to prevent a rogue regime from obtaining resources with which to continue its malign activities. There is also the moral aspect. Do we want to condone human rights abuses and crimes against humanity by our inaction or would we rather take a kinetic approach?
But in the end sanctions are a tool fo foreign policy and national security. We do have to use them wisely.
Excerpts:
Before defaulting to sanctions, which often reflect our own temper tantrums, we should consider whether they would bring about a different outcome this time around — in Iran, Cuba, North Korea or elsewhere. Still, sanctions can work.
Their most notable success may be bringing about the end of apartheid in South Africa in 1994. They worked because the international sanctions and boycotts were political as well as economic, and they targeted what white South Africans held dear, not just money but participation in international sports. In contrast, when the United States targets individual Russians or Chinese or Iranians, it is almost always a symbolic gesture, like indicting foreigners who will never be extradited. Symbols matter but concrete results are better.
Albert Einstein is often credited with observing that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” He could have been talking about the U.S. sanctions policy. As the U.S. imposes new sanctions on Cuba, we need to move beyond what we hope they will accomplish and ask: What do we expect to gain from them?
Op-Ed: U.S. foreign policy is 'sanctions happy.' Here's why it doesn't work
by Gregory F. Treverton
If anyone still thought that the United States’ “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign against Iran was still working, a drone strike in late July on an Israeli-linked merchant ship in the Indian Ocean should put the lie to that notion. Iranian proxies are accused of carrying out the attack.
A sanctions-happy American foreign policy repeats the same pattern over and over, imposing sanctions on a country we judge profligate and, in turn, impoverishing its people. Yet we expect that those same people will overthrow their offending regime and thank us for our actions. Then we are surprised when it doesn’t happen. As chairman of the National Intelligence Council, I had a ringside seat to this sort of behavior.
Iran is the latest in this long dreary line. The “maximum pressure” sanctions have produced neither regime change nor much visible restraint by Iran when it comes to its other offenses, including its missile program or interventions in the region. The sanctions have given the regime a handy scapegoat for its economic failings.
Before the ayatollahs took power in 1979, and long after, Iranians (especially younger ones) were perhaps the most pro-American people in the greater Middle East. No longer: Now even young Iranians who are no friends of their country’s theocratic regime blame U.S. sanctions for at least part of the country’s economic plight.
Cuba provides another decades-long example. Who knows how the current unrest will play out, but over more than a half century U.S. sanctions were the best thing the Castro regime had going for it. As in Iran, they could be — and were — blamed for anything bad that happened in the country.
More than once in my career, a member of Miami’s Cuban exile community has taken me aside and said a version of this: “Our Cuba policy has failed. Instead, we should have done what we did to Eastern Europe during the Cold War, seduce them with contact and commerce.” The conversation invariably ended with: “Please don’t tell anyone in Miami I said this.”
When the U.S. has succeeded in encouraging changes in regime or behavior by offending states, those successes have rested on policies far different from sanctions. One example is the aforementioned seduction of Eastern Europe. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, set in motion in 1973, was central to that initiative. What the Soviet Union accepted in the hope of sustaining its control of Eastern Europe, Western Europe used as a means of reducing tensions in the region, increasing economic interchange and improving the humanitarian conditions of communist countries.
It took a generation for the seduction to end in regime change in the 1990s in Eastern Europe, but in retrospect there seems little doubt that a policy that pursued increasing contact played an important role.
For example, West Germany tried to make sure that East Germans could access West German television, but two regions in East Germany remained out of reach. In the mid-1980s, East Germany solved the access problem by installing a cable from West Germany to the Dresden area in the east “in the wishful belief that if East Germans could watch West German television at home they would not feel the need to emigrate,” wrote historian Tony Judt.
In the long, hoary history of efforts to contain North Korea’s nuclear program, the singular success — the Agreed Framework of 1994 that froze the country’s nuclear efforts — depended on carrots, or positive inducements, not sticks in the form of sanctions. The United States agreed to provide oil and build “light-water” power reactors fueled by uranium and cooled with water in exchange for North Korea freezing, and later dismantling, reactors more capable of producing weapons-grade fuel, including one in operation and others under construction.
Implementation of the framework was checkered almost from the start, not least because partisan politics made it hard for the U.S. to deliver on its commitments, but the episode did produce what nothing has before or since — a slowdown in North Korea’s nuclear program. It lasted from 1994 until about 2002.
Before defaulting to sanctions, which often reflect our own temper tantrums, we should consider whether they would bring about a different outcome this time around — in Iran, Cuba, North Korea or elsewhere. Still, sanctions can work.
Their most notable success may be bringing about the end of apartheid in South Africa in 1994. They worked because the international sanctions and boycotts were political as well as economic, and they targeted what white South Africans held dear, not just money but participation in international sports. In contrast, when the United States targets individual Russians or Chinese or Iranians, it is almost always a symbolic gesture, like indicting foreigners who will never be extradited. Symbols matter but concrete results are better.
Albert Einstein is often credited with observing that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” He could have been talking about the U.S. sanctions policy. As the U.S. imposes new sanctions on Cuba, we need to move beyond what we hope they will accomplish and ask: What do we expect to gain from them?
Gregory F. Treverton, chairman of the U.S. National Intelligence Council from 2014 to 2017, is a professor of international relations at USC.
16. Chinese state media mocks U.S. over Afghanistan: "More smooth than presidential transition"
Expected Chinese propaganda. I wonder how State's Global Engagement Center (GEC) is going to address the Afghan tragedy and work to counter our adversary's propaganda.
Chinese state media mocks U.S. over Afghanistan: "More smooth than presidential transition"
Newsweek · by Christina Zhao · August 15, 2021
The outspoken editor of a Chinese state media tabloid mocked the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan on Sunday, comparing the government's foreign policy blunder to the presidential transition from former President Donald Trump to President Joe Biden.
The U.S. evacuated embassy personnel in Kabul by helicopter on Sunday as Taliban fighters advanced on Afghanistan's capital. Just four days ago, U.S. defence officials had estimated that it would take Taliban insurgents 30 days to isolate Kabul and possibly under 90 days to take it over.
"Chinese netizens joked that the power transition in Afghanistan is even more smooth than presidential transition in the US," tweeted Hu Xijin, who heads the Chinese Communist Party's Global Times.
Chinese netizens joked that the power transition in Afghanistan is even more smooth than presidential transition in the US. pic.twitter.com/t1twRIiFme
— Hu Xijin 胡锡进 (@HuXijin_GT) August 15, 2021
Hu's remarks came after the Taliban ordered their militants to enter the city late Sunday following their earlier assurance that they would not take the capitol by force.
"Now there are reports that districts in Kabul have been evacuated, police have left their job of providing security, ministries have been evacuated, and security personnel from the Kabul administration have fled," a Taliban spokesperson said in a statement.
The Taliban issued an assurance to residents of Kabul that militants would not invade homes or attack people, including foreign nationals. But shortly after, the U.S. Embassy warned Americans to shelter in place and steer clear of the airport, which was reportedly under fire.
Amid the rapid Taliban advance, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said Sunday that American diplomats in Kabul were being transported to the airport "to ensure they can operate safely and securely," leaving only a core team.
Blinken defended the administration's decision to withdraw U.S. military presence from the country in a series of cable news interviews, disputing comparisons to the fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975.
"We went to Afghanistan 20 years ago with one mission, and that mission was to deal with the folks who attacked us on 9/11—and we have succeeded in that mission," he told CNN.
Biden, who's at Camp David this weekend, on Saturday increased the number of U.S. troops being sent to Afghanistan to assist with an "orderly and safe drawdown" to 5,000. The president and members of Congress have reportedly been receiving briefings from Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.
The Taliban has captured at least 26 of Afghanistan's 34 provincial capitals in recent weeks in a swift advance that has apparently stunned Biden's top advisers. The group entered the Afghan presidential palace in the evening, where its leaders issued statements to the media.
The U.S. evacuated embassy personnel in Kabul by helicopter on Sunday as Taliban fighters advanced on Afghanistan's capital. In this photo, a U.S. national flag is reflected on the windows of the US embassy building in Kabul on July 30, 2021. Sajjad Hussain/Getty Images
Newsweek · by Christina Zhao · August 15, 2021
17. Afghanistan’s military collapse: Illicit deals and mass desertions
Yep. Just saw this. I think Susannah George gets it. The Taliban conducted excellent politialpreparatin of the environment to facilitate their military operations. They led with "influence" to minimize the need for the kinetic.
Afghanistan’s military collapse: Illicit deals and mass desertions
KABUL — The spectacular collapse of Afghanistan’s military that has allowed Taliban fighters to reach the gates of Kabul on Sunday despite twenty years of training and billions of dollars in American aid began with a series of deals brokered in rural villages between the militant group and some of the Afghan government’s lowest ranking officials.
The deals, initially offered early last year, were often described by Afghan officials as cease-fires, but Taliban leaders were in fact offering money in exchange for government forces to hand over their weapons, according to an Afghan officer and U.S. official.
Over the next year and a half, the meetings advanced to the district level and then rapidly on to provincial capitals, culminating in a breathtaking series of negotiated surrenders by government forces, according to interviews with over a dozen Afghan officers, police, Special Operations troops and other soldiers.
During just the past week, more than a dozen provincial capitals have fallen to Taliban forces with little or no resistance. Early Sunday morning, the government-held city of Jalalabad surrendered to the militants without a shot fired, and security forces in the districts ringing Kabul simply melted away. Within hours, Taliban forces reached the Afghan capital’s four main entrances unopposed.
The pace of the military collapse has stunned many American officials and other foreign observers, forcing the U.S. government to dramatically accelerate efforts to remove personnel from its Kabul embassy.
The Taliban capitalized on the uncertainty caused by the February, 2020 agreement reached in Doha, Qatar between the militant group and the United States calling for a full American withdrawal from Afghanistan. Some Afghan forces realized they would soon no longer be able to count on American air power and other crucial battlefield support and grew receptive to the Taliban’s approaches.
“Some just wanted the money,” an Afghan Special Forces officer said of those who first agreed to meet with the Taliban. But others saw the U.S. the commitment to a full withdrawal as an “assurance” the militants would return to power in Afghanistan and wanted to secure their place on the winning side, he said. The officer spoke on the condition of anonymity because he, like others in this report, were not authorized to disclose information to the press.
The Doha agreement, designed to bring an end to the war in Afghanistan, instead left many Afghan forces demoralized, bringing into stark relief the corrupt impulses of many Afghan officials and their tenuous loyalty to the country’s central government. Some police officers complained that they had not been paid in six months or more.
“They saw that document as the end,” the officer said referring to the majority of Afghans aligned with the government. “The day the deal was signed we saw the change. Everyone was just looking out for himself. It was like [the United States] left us to fail.”
The negotiated surrenders to the Taliban slowly gained pace in the months following the Doha deal, according to a U.S. official and an Afghan officer. Then, after President Biden announced in April that U.S. forces would withdraw from Afghanistan this summer without conditions, the capitulations began to snowball.
As the militants expanded their control, government-held districts increasingly fell without a fight. Kunduz, the first key city overrun by the militants, was captured a week ago. Days of negotiations mediated by tribal elders resulted in a surrender deal that handed over the last government- controlled base to the Taliban.
Soon after, negotiations in the western province of Herat yielded the resignation of the governor, top interior ministry and intelligence officials and hundreds of troops. The deal was concluded in a single night.
“I was so ashamed,” said a Kabul-based interior ministry officer, referring to the surrender of senior interior ministry official Abdul Rahman Rahman in Herat. “I’m just a small person, I’m not that big. If he does that, what should I do?”
Over the past month, the southern province of Helmand also witnessed a mass surrender. And as Taliban fighters closed in on the southeastern province of Ghazni, its governor fled under Taliban protection only to be arrested by the Afghan government on his way back to Kabul.
The Afghan military’s fight against the Taliban has involved several capable and motivated elite units. But they were often dispatched to provide backup for less well trained army and police units that have repeatedly folded under Taliban pressure.
An Afghan Special Forces officer stationed in Kandahar who had been assigned to protect a critical border crossing recalled being ordered by a commander to surrender. “We want to fight! If we surrender, the Taliban will kill us,” the Special Forces officer said.
“Don’t fire a single shot,” the commander told them as the Taliban swarmed the area, the officer later recounted. The border police surrendered immediately, leaving the Special Forces unit on its own. A second officer confirmed his colleague’s recollection of the events.
Unwilling to surrender or fight outmatched, the unit put down their weapons, changed into civilian clothing and fled their post.
“I feel ashamed of what I’ve done,” said the first officer. But he said if he hadn’t fled, “I would have been sold to the Taliban by my own government.”
When an Afghan police officer was asked about his force’s apparent lack of motivation, he explained that they haven’t been getting their salaries. Several Afghan police on the front lines in Kandahar before the city fell said they hadn’t been paid in six to nine months. Taliban payoffs have become ever more enticing.
“Without the United States, there was no fear of being caught for corruption. It brought out the traitors from within our military,” said an Afghan police officer.
Several officers with the Kandahar police force said corruption was more to blame for the collapse than incompetence. “Honestly I don’t think it can be fixed. I think they need something completely new,” said Ahmadullah Kandahari, an officer in Kandahar’s police force.
In the days leading up to Kandahar’s capture earlier this month, the toll on the police had become visible. Bacha, a 34-year-old police commander, had been steadily retreating for more than three months. He had grown hunched and his attire more ragged. In an interview, he said the repeated retreats had bruised his pride — but it going without pay that made him feel desperate.
“Last time I saw you, the Taliban was offering $150 for anyone from the government to surrender and join them,” he told a reporter as the interview drew to a close. “Do you know, what is the price now?”
He didn’t laugh and several his men leaned forward, eager to hear the answer.
Aziz Tassal contributed to this report.
Read more:
Add hyperlink with compelling, reader-friendly headline here
18. A tale of two armies: why Afghan forces proved no match for the Taliban
One fights for money and one for ideology.
A tale of two armies: why Afghan forces proved no match for the Taliban
Poorly led and riddled with corruption, the Afghan army was overrun in a matter of weeks
The Taliban have 80,000 troops in comparison with a nominal 300,699 serving the Afghan government, yet the whole country has been effectively overrun in a matter of weeks as military commanders surrendered without a fight in a matter of hours.
It is a tale of two armies, one poorly equipped but highly motivated ideologically, and the other nominally well-equipped, but dependent on Nato support, poorly led and riddled with corruption.
The US aid spending watchdog for Afghanistan warned last month that the US military had little or no means of knowing the capability of the Afghan National Defense and Security forces (ANDSF) when required to operate independently of the US forces, despite spending $88.3bn (£64bn) on security-related reconstruction in Afghanistan up to March 2021.
It found the US military to be persistently overoptimistic about Afghan military capability, even though it had no reliable evidence to make that assessment, and said the departure of thousands of US contractors, agreed by the US with the Taliban in 2020, “could significantly impact the sustainability of the ANDSF, in particular their ability to maintain aircraft and vehicles”.
An Afghan Air Force Black Hawk helicopter photographed in March this year. Photograph: Wakil Kohsar/AFP/Getty Images
The watchdog had, it said, repeatedly warned about “the corrosive effects of corruption” within the force. With its reliance on advanced equipment, and with widespread illiteracy in its ranks, the force could not reliably maintain its strength and combat readiness.
Of the $88.3bn spent, the watchdog said: “The question of whether that money was well spent will ultimately be answered by the outcome of the fighting on the ground, perhaps the purest monitoring and evaluation exercise.”
The report’s clear warnings are likely to be reviewed by US Congress as it seeks to understand why such vast spending on training the Afghan military has led to a collapse to the Taliban in a matter of weeks, leaving western politicians shocked and bemused.
It also raises the question of why the Biden administration ever thought it was safe to leave Afghan forces on their own after decades of dependence on the US for key skills, including air cover, logistics, maintenance, and training support for ANDSF ground vehicles and aircraft; security; base support; and transportation services.
The US president said as recently as 8 July that there was no likelihood of Afghanistan being overrun.
At the same time, the level of Taliban attacks were increasing. In each three-month period since 29 February 2020, the date of the US-Taliban agreement, there were significantly more enemy-initiated attacks than in their corresponding quarters the previous year.
Yet a week before Biden said Afghanistan would not be overrun, it was reported by the independent Afghan Analysts Network that the Taliban had captured 127 of the 420 district centres, about 25% of the total, and by 21 July, Gen Mark Milley, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, said the figure was more than half.
In June, he said, it had been only 81. It was noticeable that some of the districts falling were in traditionally anti-Taliban areas.
The additional problem was a central government facing a severe fiscal crisis precipitated by the loss of customs revenues and declining aid flows. Many officials complained that they had not been paid for months.
Fear was a further factor. As momentum swung towards the Taliban, fostered by Taliban social media, the speed of events became fuelled by fear of revenge and personal scores being settled under cover of a takeover, particularly in a large city like Kabul.
The Afghan government provided no counter-narrative.
By then the US retreat was well under way and near irreversible; its withdrawal was more than 90% complete by 5 July.
The process included 984 C-17 aircraft loads being transported out of Afghanistan, more than 17,000 pieces of equipment being turned over, and 10 facilities, including Bagram airfield, being handed over to Afghanistan’s Ministry of Defence.
Sigar said $88.3bn had been allocated up to March for security-related reconstruction, compared with $36bn for governance and development, yet it discovered the Pentagon had always always found it “extremely challenging” to evaluate the fighting and administrative capacity of the ANDSF.
It started its multibillion-dollar training of Afghan forces in 2002 and three years later took control of training both the police and military, so US military trainers have had nearly two decades to ready the Afghan forces for a Taliban insurgency.
Troops from the US army training Afghan National Army soldiers in 2009. Photograph: Dima Gavrysh/AP
At the outset, the US began transforming the Afghan National Army from a light-infantry force to a combined-arms service with army, air force, and special forces element.
The Sigar report found that from 2005 the US military had been seeking to evaluate the battle-readiness of the troops they had been training, but by 2010 acknowledged that its monitoring and evaluation procedures “failed to measure more intangible readiness factors, such as leadership, corruption and motivation – all factors that could affect a unit’s ability to put its staffing and equipment to use during actual war-fighting”.
The assessment mechanism changed again in 2013, but in 2014, with few signs of progress emerging, it was decided that the assessment reports should become classified. The focus shifted from battalions to command headquarters.
The report also found a disjunction between what generals told Congress and what lower level officers reported.
Sigar reports, for instance, that in March 2011 testimony to Congress, Gen David Petraeus – then the commander of the International Security Assistance Force – claimed that “investments in leader development, literacy and institutions have yielded significant dividends” for the ANDSF, that Afghan forces were taking on significant combat roles against the Taliban, and that Afghan local police units were increasingly limiting the Taliban’s ability to intimidate communities”.
Many other US generals made similarly optimistic claims. But other reports indicated “the absence of success on virtually every level”.
In a 2012 Armed Forces Journal article, Lt Col Daniel Davis, who spent a year in Afghanistan speaking with US troops and their Afghan counterparts, wrote that his observations “bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by US military leaders about conditions on the ground”.
The Sigar report also lambasted the tendency for politicians and senior military to look for good news. It says there is a “natural desire for good news to pass on up the chain of command”.
“In the words of one former senior military official: ‘As intelligence makes its way up higher, it gets consolidated and watered down; it gets politicised. It gets politicked because once policymakers get their hands on it, and frankly, once operational commanders get their hands on it, they put their twist on it.
“Operational commanders, state department policymakers and Department of Defense policymakers are going to be inherently rosy in their assessments. They will be unaccepting of hard-hitting intelligence.’”
19. Column: The Lessons for Asia as Biden Deserts Afghanistan
Excerpts:
The governments of Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines—from where thousands of young men joined the ISIS—have already been on edge in anticipation of their return from Syria. No one knows how U.S. policymakers look at the world map, but these are Asian countries, too, and many of them are U.S. allies, who now find themselves exposed to far greater risk of jihadi radicalization. All because the world’s only superpower did not have the stamina to finish what it started.
India, whose blue water naval capacity, historical animosity with China, and giant market, make it a particularly important American ally in the region, is a glaring example of the risks of capricious U.S. policies. With no known direct access to the Taliban, India is among the many countries in the region least prepared for the change of guard in Kabul. Only, its situation is made infinitely worse by its running conflict with arch-foe Pakistan, which controls the Taliban. Not to mention the grave security risks the rise of a militant theocratic Muslim state in the neighborhood now poses to India’s Hindu nationalist government, with a manifest record of discrimination towards the country’s Muslim population.
These countries’ complete loss at the rapid turn in the region’s geopolitics highlights the dangers that American whimsy creates for allies. As in Vietnam and Iraq, Afghanistan again serves as a reminder of America’s capacity for mayhem with its ill-thought-out interventions and reckless retreats.
Curiously, America’s irresponsible abdication of Afghanistan comes at a time when it is trying to reassert its leadership in Asia and persuade countries in the region to pick a side in its great-power competition with China. The Chinese have been quick to seize on the debacle to spotlight America’s unreliability as a partner. “Mr. Blinken, where is your pet phrase? You don’t plan to announce to stand with the Afghan people?” tweeted Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of state-controlled Global Times.
Beijing probably need not try so hard. The power of Biden’s Afghan example has made its work a lot easier.
Column: The Lessons for Asia as Biden Deserts Afghanistan
By Debasish Roy Chowdhury
TIME · by letters@time.com
It was a hopeful January day as a new American President took over after four years of a roller coaster called Donald Trump.
“We will repair our alliances and engage with the world once again,” Joe Biden told an anxious world at his inaugural address, declaring the leader of the free world’s intent to lead once more. “We will lead not merely by the example of our power but by the power of our example. We will be a strong and trusted partner for peace, progress, and security.”
The days of Trump’s America First isolationism that had seen the U.S. reject a multilateral trade bloc, rip up old treaties, and insult allies, were over. America was back.
Nowhere was it more evident than in Asia. Relations with South Korea and Japan, both shaken by Trump’s demands to bring more money to the table, were quickly mended. The Biden administration reiterated its commitment to use military force to defend the interests of allies like Japan and Taiwan. A decade after Barack Obama first formulated the “Pivot to Asia” policy—shifting America’s historical focus away from Europe, Latin America and Middle East to the Indo-Pacific region in order to hem in China—Biden’s administration looked ready to take it up a notch.
Kurt Campbell, considered the architect of the strategy, was brought in as the Asia policy tsar with the title of Indo-Pacific Coordinator on the National Security Council. An informal alliance of four maritime democracies in the Asia-Pacific region—comprising the United States, Australia, Japan and India and called the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or “Quad”—was cemented after a decade of dithering. Within two months of taking over, Biden got the leaders of this supposedly “Asian Nato,” a bulwark against a rising and assertive China, to summit, virtually, for the first time.
Not all Asia is equal, though, ordered as they are now according to their relevance to the project of containing China. Afghanistan and Afghan lives do not figure very highly in this new pecking order.
While Biden was revving up the Quad, he was simultaneously working on a full troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, continuing with Trump’s policy to exit what the Americans now call the “endless war.” Last year, Trump made a peace agreement with the Taliban. Not only was the Afghan government kept out of this deal, the U.S. even asked Kabul to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners to meet the Taliban’s conditions. The writing was pretty clear on the wall: Trump’s America had decided to throw the Afghan government under the bus and make peace with the same people it went to war with 20 years ago. If Afghanistan’s political elite saw hopes of a change of heart in Biden’s rise to power, they were quickly dashed.
Afghan families carrying belongings on their way to flee Kabul city, Afghanistan, on August 15, 2021.
Haroon Sabawoon/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
By the time Biden met Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, six months after promising to “engage with the world once again,” America’s plans to withdraw from Afghanistan had been cast in stone—no matter what the consequences. But the U.S. was not abandoning Afghanistan, he reiterated, and let it be known that he was sending three million doses of vaccines to the country to help its people battle COVID-19. To stay alive till the Taliban come.
And now they have. After a breathtakingly swift advance in which province after province fell to them in rapid succession, the Taliban have now captured Kabul. The president has fled and the U.S. has evacuated its embassy. As is now evident, till the very last hour, the U.S. completely misread the speed and determination of the Taliban’s advance. The messy stampede for the exit by the “trusted partner for peace, progress, and security” has now undone all the gains its presence had achieved over two decades in Afghanistan.
The return of the Taliban means the revival of their primitive interpretation of religious laws and tribal culture, reversing years of progress in freedom of expression and human rights. In areas that they have captured, the Taliban have already shut down the media, issued orders prohibiting men from shaving their beards and women from stepping out without a male companion. Taliban fighters are going door-to-door, forcibly marrying girls as young as 12 and forcing women out of workplaces. This is why the UNHCR finds that 80% of the quarter of a million Afghans who have fled since the end of May as the Taliban advanced, are women and children. With the Taliban formally in charge of the country, there will be no place to run to.
Apart from Afghanistan itself, the return of the Taliban poses new security risks for the entire region. It marks the creation of a new hotbed of jihadi terror in the heart of Asia, drawing Islamist fighters from all over South and Southeast Asia, even raising the specter of an ISIS regrouping. The ISIS blitzkrieg also incidentally followed another catastrophic American withdrawal—from Iraq in 2011.
A U.S. military helicopter is pictured flying above the U.S. embassy in Kabul on August 15, 2021.
WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP via Getty Images
The danger of heightened jihadi activity in Afghanistan is particularly acute for the six countries bordering Afghanistan as well as the nearby region, including India and Southeast Asia that are home to vast numbers of Muslim populations, disaffected Muslim youths, and ongoing Islamic insurgencies, such as in Mindanao and Kashmir.
The governments of Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines—from where thousands of young men joined the ISIS—have already been on edge in anticipation of their return from Syria. No one knows how U.S. policymakers look at the world map, but these are Asian countries, too, and many of them are U.S. allies, who now find themselves exposed to far greater risk of jihadi radicalization. All because the world’s only superpower did not have the stamina to finish what it started.
India, whose blue water naval capacity, historical animosity with China, and giant market, make it a particularly important American ally in the region, is a glaring example of the risks of capricious U.S. policies. With no known direct access to the Taliban, India is among the many countries in the region least prepared for the change of guard in Kabul. Only, its situation is made infinitely worse by its running conflict with arch-foe Pakistan, which controls the Taliban. Not to mention the grave security risks the rise of a militant theocratic Muslim state in the neighborhood now poses to India’s Hindu nationalist government, with a manifest record of discrimination towards the country’s Muslim population.
These countries’ complete loss at the rapid turn in the region’s geopolitics highlights the dangers that American whimsy creates for allies. As in Vietnam and Iraq, Afghanistan again serves as a reminder of America’s capacity for mayhem with its ill-thought-out interventions and reckless retreats.
Curiously, America’s irresponsible abdication of Afghanistan comes at a time when it is trying to reassert its leadership in Asia and persuade countries in the region to pick a side in its great-power competition with China. The Chinese have been quick to seize on the debacle to spotlight America’s unreliability as a partner. “Mr. Blinken, where is your pet phrase? You don’t plan to announce to stand with the Afghan people?” tweeted Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of state-controlled Global Times.
Beijing probably need not try so hard. The power of Biden’s Afghan example has made its work a lot easier.
TIME · by letters@time.com
20. 4 soldiers hurt, 3 Reds' guns seized in Isabela clash
The Christian city of Iabela that is the provincial capital of the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao is the site of a clash with the New People's Army (communists). If that does not illustrate the complexity of the situation in the Philippines I do not know what does.
4 soldiers hurt, 3 Reds' guns seized in Isabela clash
CAMP MELCHOR DELA CRUZ, Gamu, Isabela – Four government troops were wounded in a clash with 10 New People's Army (NPA) rebels at the mountains of Barangay Capellan in Ilagan City on Friday.
Maj. Jekyll Dulawan, 5th Infantry Division spokesperson, said the wounded soldiers were airlifted from the site by the Philippine Air Force - Tactical Operations Group 2 members and brought to the military hospital for treatment.
Recovered from the rebels after the 30-minute encounter between a platoon of soldiers of the 95th Infantry Battalion and the communist terrorists at about 7:30 a.m., were an M-16 Armalite rifle, two shotguns, three magazines, 53 bullets for M-16 rifle, five shotgun bullets, and personal belongings.
Bloodstains were reportedly seen along the withdrawal route of the communist rebels, indicating casualties.
Dulawan said villagers had tipped off the presence of rebels belonging to the Regional Sentro De Gravidad (RSDG) of the Komiteng Rehiyon - Cagayan Valley (KR-CV) who were allegedly extorting for food.
Lt. Col. Carlos Sangdaan Jr., 95th Infantry Battalion commander, said they would continue to focus their efforts on getting rid of insurgents.
Meanwhile, Brig. Gen. Danilo Benavides, 502nd Infantry Brigade commander, urged the rebels to surrender.
“Army troops will not stop from chasing you so better grab the opportunity to yield to the government troops. Benefits from the Enhanced Comprehensive Local Integration Program (E-CLIP) await you,” he said.
The Communist Party of the Philippines - NPA is listed as a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the Philippines. (PNA)
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
