"[T]he reason it’s such a mess is that the policy is one that the military has been revolting against across two presidents, and they were hoping as recently as last Thursday or Friday to jam Biden up into sending more troops."
Any sources for this? All the coverage I've seen places the blame squarely on Biden's people for failing to adequately plan for the evacuation. I'd be very interested to see coverage of him being effectively undercut.
The military has been jamming every president up into sending more troops since like 2003 so I think it's safer to assume that burden of proof is on proving they weren't tbh.
I’m sure we could dig it up. However, I used to work with a TON of vets and even ran across a military contractor in Germany once that were very much in the “we need to stay or it’s all going to hell” camp. It’s a very military-centric ideology that’s not really reflected in many other areas of American life. So, if you read articles purporting to say the civilian leadership in DC screwed it up, good chance the author’s source was in the military or a contractor.
A possibility you're not really addressing is the status quo from 2016 to 2019, in which we did not have any withdrawal agreement with the Taliban but in which we kept a force of about 10,000 there while suffering casualties of about 1 a month. Was this not sustainable? Maybe not. Was this too much of a cost? Maybe. But you don't really address it.
The other thing you just sort of assert in a short paragraph is that "the reason it’s such a mess is that the policy is one that the military has been revolting against across two presidents, and they were hoping as recently as last Thursday or Friday to jam Biden up into sending more troops." Is your contention here that the US military deliberately sabotaged the withdrawal by refusing to prepare for what they saw was going to be an obvious clusterfuck? That seems like a significant accusation.
During the 2016-2019 time period, the Taliban was slowly but steadily gaining territory. So, sure, I guess we could have sustained a slow but steady death of the Afghan government, but why bother?
how much of the foreign correspondent / NATSEC reporter hot take machine is being fueled not by ideological or rational thoughts on the Biden administration actions and Afghanistan's prospects, but instead by an opportunity to essentially virtue signal indirectly to sources, friends, and colleagues with family and friends made durinf the last two decadea now in very difficult positions that "I'm MAD, too...And I'm doing what i can!" as a way of deflecting guilt and allowing them to look at folks in the eyes next time they meet?
Well, he resisted the urge to basically call the moiety of foreign policy experts and pundits a bunch of corrupt paid-off people controlled by the Almighty "Blob". Also, his tone was un-Twitter-like.
I would say they've been wrong on Afghanistan, Iraq, and "democratization" of the Middle East in particular. They've also underestimated the potential of the Internet to weaken democracy, just like damn near all of us.
Everything else, though, they've been largely right on, beyond their own expectations. Extreme poverty and inequality really have plummeted around the world. War and mass bloodshed really have diminished as trade has increased. Former great powers really have traded in their guns (for, if not plowshares, then cars people around the world want to buy).
Despite our own personal experience in the relatively-declining, middle-aged, late-period neurotic 21st-century USA, an American-dominated world really has been a more peaceful one. One threatened by American retreat and higher walls, by the same token, is almost certainly a more unstable, scary place.
We just don't hear about any of that stellar overall so-called "Blob" record, because it doesn't involve war, and things not war are boring. Failure and dysfunction are exciting.
We could learn from the larger, less exciting big picture, or we could decide only the latter is worth noting, and the whole "Blob" legacy worth dismantling as punishment. I hope for the former and fear the latter.
"Our European allies spend a much larger share of GDP on defense than we do."
Can someone point me to a source for this? Everything I've seen online says the US spends significantly more of its GDP (3.4%) on the military than our EU allies, with Poland the highest at ~ 2%.
I hope this is a free Slow Boring. There's been a breathtaking amount of crap being said about the events in Afghanistan. We need smart commentary like this post to be as widely available as possible.
Nicole Wallace may have slightly exaggerated the ratio when she said 95 percent of the American people were in favor of this withdrawal and 95 percent of journalists would be against it. But not by much. Of the soldiers being interviewed who actually had extensive in country experience you see a lot of stories from soldiers who lamented the pointless loss of their comrades and not so many from soldiers who said it was an inevitable end. There's a lot of those too. So there's a question I have for all those journalists in country and out who have been crawling all over Afghanistan, many of whom are still there. Why didn't any of you predict the swift collapse of the Afghan government? Who were you talking to that led you to believe it wouldn't happen? Why were you bullshitting us all this time?
"Another fallacy is to make Biden look bad by saying 'well you may agree with the policy, but the execution of the policy here was a mess.' And certainly, the execution doesn’t look great. But the reason it’s such a mess is that the policy is one that the military has been revolting against across two presidents, and they were hoping as recently as last Thursday or Friday to jam Biden up into sending more troops."
This is surprisingly poorly thought out. What's your evidence that that's the reason why this is such a mess? People have been screaming about how we need to expedite visa processing for months. The Joint Chiefs didn't force Biden to hang out at Camp David for several days without commenting on the subject, refuse to take any questions, and then go back to vacation. No one made Biden refrain from attempting to evacuate the thousands of US citizens ahead of time, or warning them that a collapse was imminent.
Biden didn't have to keep every jot and tittle of Trump's deal: he could have said "the Taliban aren't keeping up their end of the bargain, so while we're pulling our troops out, we'll allow support contractors to remain so the Afghani Air Force isn't grounded and they can deal with this resurgent threat." He chose not to. That's on him, not Trump, and not generals who take orders from him.
The real question is: how much of this was a surprise to the military and intelligence community, and how much did Biden just ignore them, and let the disaster play out? This is one of the worst foreign policy disasters in generations, and Congress should have hearings on the subject. Even if you agree that the US should have pulled out of Afghanistan - a position I am sympathetic towards, and I think is probably correct! - the complete lack of responsibility here for how this was handled is appalling.
Matt also discussed how this is "A useful signal to allies" but didn't address the signal to our enemies, which is arguably just as important. Maybe our allies will shape up and spend more on defense, maybe not - maybe they'll decide they can't rely on us at all. But is there any doubt that all China and Russia see is weakness upon weakness? This is just another point in favor of the view that when the chips are now, American will fold. This increases the odds that a serious war will break out.
It remains utterly fascinating to me that people view the US willingly bogging itself down in an endless quagmire deeply unpopular with the voting public for TWENTY YEARS as a sign that the US will *fold*.
It's not the US sticking around for 20 years that's a sign that the US will fold.
It's that the US negotiated a bad deal under Trump (which Biden decided he just had to keep, despite having no problem junking anything else Trump did if he didn't like it), decided to leave without concern for the terms of the bad deal we negotiated (which the Taliban were not abiding by), the sustainability of our allies (who we set up to rely on us, and then withdrew support for, even though we could have withdrawn all US troops and relied on civilian volunteers), the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe among people who relied on us (tens of thousands of people who haven't been able to come because of...bureaucratic inefficiency that takes years to process applications), or the safety of our own citizens and the citizens of our allies (with thousands of them left in Taliban-conquered territory with as of yet unclear results).
The events of the last month do not communicate that we're a superpower strategically re-racking priorities and making tough choices. It communicates that we're getting in over our head, don't know how to get out, and will act recklessly to extricate ourselves.
And Biden thinks this is going just fine, and seems to take no responsibility for how the same END (get American troops out of Afghanistan) could have been accomplished BETTER. He made a decision that it's not in the US interest to continue, so the rest of the details just don't matter.
That's the problem. E.g. if I were Taiwan, I'd be pretty concerned that Biden is going to decide defending Taiwan isn't in the national interest, especially if we take heavy losses in the initial volley. Because if so, he'll clearly just ditch them without a bit of support. Is that more likely than not? No. But it's likelier than it was six months ago, and more importantly, China knows it.
"E.g. if I were Taiwan, I'd be pretty concerned that Biden is going to decide defending Taiwan isn't in the national interest, especially if we take heavy losses in the initial volley."
This is not really a coherent position. Taking significant casualties in a surprise attack under peacetime conditions makes war more likely, not less, as the public will be incensed and demand retribution.
The issue is that it's not going to be under normal peacetime conditions. It's not like tomorrow China is going to attack the US out of the blue. Rather it's going to come out of a period of clearly escalating tensions as they prepare for the invasion (which they can't hide) with saber rattling on both sides and clear Chinese statements that they view this as an internal issue of territorial sovereignty. If the US doesn't just fold and acknowledge that we won't intervene, China's likeliest course of action is to pre-emptively attack US bases and assets in the region (as David R. stated below very well).
What I think is under appreciated here is that the modal scenarios are:
(1) The US blinks, and then China takes Taiwan in an assault/extended blockade/threat, depending on how much they resist once they realize they're on their own. This would have to be pretty clearly communicated for China to believe it, and would nuke our credibility from orbit. If we don't do this, or the Chinese just don't believe us when we start hedging, then....
(2) This blows up into a broader regional war as China attacks US territory in Guam, USN assets at sea, and US bases in Japan. (South Korea is more of a wildcard with a lot of variables) It's quite possible that the US could sustain more casualties in the first 48 hours than in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and occupations put together. In turn, in any shooting war that we did not immediately withdraw from, the US would have no choice but to attack military bases and assets in mainland southern China to a massive scale, which they would view as escalatory.
In this sort of scenario, the willingness of the US in general, and Biden in particular, to sustain large numbers of American casualties in order to intervene in a far-off, long running "civil war" - because One China is de jure unchallenged even if it is a de facto absurdity - thousands of miles from home is *directly applicable*. People who are insisting that the Chinese won't see it that way are simply not thinking about this from the Chinese perspective.
You could draw on other scenarios, but especially when you add in our response to Russia's seizure of Crimea, Obama not enforcing his redline in Syria, Trump ditching our Kurdish allies, etc. our adversaries really do have significant reasons to doubt our resolve at this stage. And that in and of itself is destabilizing even if (and perhaps especially if!) the US actually would intervene in a Taiwan crisis.
I would like to return again to this statement, which I was specifically commenting on:
"E.g. if I were Taiwan, I'd be pretty concerned that Biden is going to decide defending Taiwan isn't in the national interest, especially if we take heavy losses in the initial volley"
It is the latter part of this which I was responding to, which I still find very unconvincing. As the US's policy of "strategic ambiguity" specifically rules out committing to Taiwan's defense in advance, TW planners already must expect that the US may not come to their aid, and will be looking for ways to drag the US in. The one thing which will guarantee sustained US involvement in any conflict between Taiwan and China is a preemptive Chinese attack on US bases that inflicts heavy casualties. While a bit macabre to consider, China attacking the US in the opening moves of the invasion is probably one of Taiwan's preferred scenarios.
The idea that the implications of this withdrawal are "especially" concerning for American resolve in a scenario of a massive Chinese first strike on US bases is incorrect. In fact, that's exactly the opposite of the scenario which -could- be rendered more concerning by this, which is a long-term gray-zone conflict short of actual war.
It's entirely possible that the events in Afghanistan may concern TW planners in terms of American resolve (frankly, I doubt it, as it's been stated over and over again by the admin that they want to withdraw in order to free up resources for priority theaters, i.e. China), but I don't think that there's any way they're looking at this and thinking "gee, if the PLA Rocket Force shoots a bunch of missiles into the US's bases in Japan and kills thousands of Americans, America is going to just pack up and go home". That's just not how it works for any population which suffers that kind of attack and is capable of retaliating, and they know it. Any such concerns would be directed rather at the oft-mooted "gray zone" scenarios where China is somehow strongarming Taiwan below the threshold of actual war in a way which puts the burden on the US to engage in a long-term political/economic struggle over the island.
Jumping on this a day late, but I'd also note that "maybe if we catch them with their pants down in the first few hours and inflict enough damage, they'll just decide the Western Pacific's not worth it and go home" is the exact train of thought that Japan had in 1941, and we all know how *that* worked out.
OK, fair enough. After thinking it over, I will withdraw the "especially" here.
The issue is that this botched withdrawal gives them good reason to doubt our resolve in many different scenarios. I think that definitely includes scenarios where the US suffers significant losses early on, so I think we still disagree there. But if what you are saying is that this gives them *even better* reason to doubt American resolve in gray-zone conflicts short of a shooting war, then I think you are correct. I was being hasty there by stating that it was "especially" true in a heavy losses scenario.
"China is somehow strongarming Taiwan below the threshold of actual war in a way which puts the burden on the US to engage in a long-term political/economic struggle over the island."
It seems like the most likely way to do this is by laying a large amount of mines around the Taiwan such that it essentially blockades the island until the Taiwanese agree to unification. Its a way to apply force/pressure without a direct attack upon Taiwan or US assets. The US could respond with by airlifting supplies like it did with Berlin, but the costs would be severe as would the impact on Taiwan's economy.
I agree that is their strong belief. I guess where we part ways is that I think it's possible (albeit unlikely) that that could change under limited circumstances. This is not enough on its own, as I said. But it's a point in favor of weakened American commitment.
Yes, I think the Chinese will quite likely decide our involvement in any conflict over Taiwan for us. Japan in the past 6 months has been increasingly signaling that it will proactively join in any conflict over Taiwan, so the PLA likely now views that as a given.
This is not one of the worst foreign policy disasters in generations.
The bien pensant folks are clutching their pearls now and wallowing in Monday morning quarterbacking pinning the loss of Afghanistan on Biden and saying it was totally clear that things would fall apart in a matter of days (damn, are they prescient these brilliant folks) and they get mad when Biden points out this is payday for 20 years of idiotic US policy (and he does not let Obama off the hook).
But a disaster for the United States? Check back with me in a month. Hell, check back with me in a week.
As Don Draper said, "This never happened. It will shock you how much this never happened."
The 20-year duration of the war is one of the worst foreign policy disasters since Vietnam (right after the Iraq War existing at all). The withdrawal is a mess, and has been badly bungled by the administration, but the withdrawal itself is not a historic foreign policy disaster. People have been made hysterical by the immediacy of traumatic social media posts and will come back down to earth.
Vietnam was a disaster because it killed 56,000 Americans, deeply divided our society, and led to the end of the post-WWII belief in the competence, honesty, and reliability of American governance.
Afghanistan? In a while, no one will remember it happened.
Not even the 20 year bungle was a "disaster." It was instead a badly carried out brushfire war of precious little significance to the United States' larger aims and abilities. Great Britain fought three Afghan wars in the 19th century, none of which had any larger meaning for the grand national strategy of Britain or affected its relations with its strategic rivals.
Sometimes when you're big and rich and powerful, you can waste some time, effort and resources on meaningless little wars that are big for the people there but not so important for you.
It was not obvious that Afghanistan would fall apart so quickly, and I never said that it was. But it was clearly the case that Biden was warned that this was a live possibility and that we needed to do more to prepare for it, including by expediting the approval process for our allies on the ground.
Biden was warned about this months ago, when there were over 18,000 applicants for special visas:
In July, Biden said "we’ve already approved 2,500 Special Immigrant Visas to come to the United States. Up to now, fewer than half have exercised their right to do that. Half have gotten on aircraft and com — commercial flights and come, and the other half believe they want to stay — at least thus far."
Yesterday, Biden said "Operation Allies Refugee [Refuge], which I announced back in July, has already moved 2,000 Afghans who are eligible for Special Immigration Visas and their families to the United States."
You do the math here. You really think this is the best we can do? I think it's pretty clear this was botched, and would still be a mess even if we had another 60 or 90 days before Kabul fell. Biden made this decision, and did not take the necessary steps for the US to minimize the humanitarian catastrophe to follow. That's on him.
As far as this being one of the worst foreign policy disasters in generations - it's pointless to argue that now. I think it clearly is, you think it clearly is not. Time will tell.
There's a lot of room between this botched evacuation and "worst policy disaster in generations". Here's a list of post-Vietnam foreign policy disasters to compare this with:
- Fall of the Shah / Iranian Revolution / embassy hostages
- Alliance with KSA
- Failure to stop the rise of Al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks
- The invasion of Iraq and its aftermath
- Chavez and the subsequent collapse of Venezuela
- The erosion of the Mexican state and the rise of Narco-terrorists
- The attempt and subsequent failure to build durable and capable institutions of state in Afghanistan
- Failure to mitigate the consequences of the Syrian civil war
OK, but I was talking in terms of American foreign policy disasters. Of your list of 8 events, this is bound up in 2 of them (Failure to stop Al Qaeda, failure to build institutions in Afghanistan) and can't really be separated from them. Two others (the collapse in Venezuela or the erosion of the Mexican state) are not really American foreign policy disasters; they're just crappy things that have happened in the world that we're not particularly responsible for. The alliance with KSA has been bad in a lot of ways, but has not been such a spectacular failure. The Syrian Civil War is probably worse, but again, is not primarily an American foreign policy disaster - what was a disaster from our perspective was dithering around, not having a clear plan, and screwing the Kurds. I do think what just happened in Afghanistan is more significant than what America did/didn't do in Syria.
So that leaves the Iranian revolution and associated issues and the invasion of Iraq. I'm not going to argue that this is worse than those, just that it belongs on the short list with those events as "one of the worst foreign policy disasters in generations."
I don't think that's a crazy assessment, since it sounds like the man who is likely the next chancellor of Germany agrees:
"Nato allies urge rethink on alliance after Biden’s ‘unilateral’ Afghanistan exit"
"Armin Laschet, Germany’s conservative candidate to succeed chancellor Angela Merkel, on Tuesday called the troop withdrawal 'the greatest debacle that Nato has experienced since its foundation'."
Laschet is verging on the hysterical here. Just in the last 10 years I can name you the Libya intervention as a larger debacle.
As for Germany in general, it has been the rot at the heart of NATO for more than a decade through woefully underfunding its defense budget while it continues cozying up to the Russians for economic gain. I can't think of any major NATO state which has less credibility in regards to commenting on the actions of the alliance, and it's not close.
Why do you think the Libya intervention was a larger debacle?
I absolutely agree that Germany has woefully underfunded its defense budget while cozying up to the Russians for economic gain.
I think the relevance of the quote is that the Afghan invasion was the first and only time that Article 5 has been invoked, and it has turned into a disaster. Invoking it next time will be harder if it's not for the clearest of cases (e.g. Russian tanks rolling through Poland). Even the size of the German economy aside (and despite their low spending as a percentage of their economy, in total $ they are third after the US and UK) the opinion of the German government is relevant to the actions of an organization that functions by consensus.
Good piece overall but I think unfair to Taiwan at the end. They could definitely dedicate more resources to their own defense but have gone to nontrivial effort to make any attempted invasion very costly. This piece from Tanner Greer gives a good view of how the average PLA soldier would experience an attempted invasion--many if not most of the horrors he would experience are the direct result of Taiwanese efforts: https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/25/taiwan-can-win-a-war-with-china/
TW is pivoting to a new Overall Defense Concept emphasizing asymmetric warfare but has yet to fully implement it, and is having serious issues with staffing and maintaining its now-volunteer service. Unfortunately, it seems that shifting away from conscription has been a big mistake, especially since reinstituting such policy in a democratic society is extremely costly politically.
The reality is that if we want TW to present a serious independent threat to the current PLA, we probably need to treat it more like Israel and restart direct $ or hardware transfers for defense purposes. Of course, this might precipitate an otherwise avoidable conflict with China. It's a very fraught issue.
I wish we could get people to stop quoting Tanner Greer as an expert on military matters. He's a 20something journalist who's never served in the military, worked for the government, or done literally anything in the defense field whatsoever. He's just an enthusiastic amateur who reads stuff online and purports to be an expert. I actually enjoy some of his cultural pieces, and I don't dislike the guy, but the extent to which he's getting quoted as some kind of military expert is a bit concerning. He knows as much as your opinionated uncle that never served, but has watched a bunch of war movies.
As far as the invasion of Taiwan goes- the battle will be fought at sea and in the air. Once PLA soldiers physically land on the island, it's basically over- no one would expect them to hold out. The real battle is making that landing impossible, so the infantry is kind of irrelevant
If you want the "optimistic white guy analyst" take on Taiwan, Ian Easton is probably a better go-to. He hasn't served in the military, but he has lived and studies in TW and China and has done some work as a defense analyst. I've read his book on the subject & he seems overly optimistic to me, but he's certainly better-credentialed than Greer.
Also, I feel obliged to note that while interdicting sea crossings is extremely important, the war is by no means over once PLA soldiers land on the island. Even in an extremely positive scenario for TW where the US and Japan intervene immediately and a huge % of PLA transport ships and transport aircraft are intercepted, some PLA soldiers WILL land on TW soil. That's unavoidable. The real question will be whether China will be able to sustain the beachhead and push inland, or whether TW + any allies can interdict resupply and reinforcement effectively enough for the Taiwanese army + allied air power to reduce and eliminate the beachhead.
He had visited Taiwan for a significant amount of time before writing that piece, but setting aside the debate over his qualifications, the point is that it's not true that Taiwan is "not really pursuing" a strategy of making an amphibious invasion very costly for China. It's unfair to Taiwan to make that claim and underplaying what they have done, even if we think they should be doing more, is not productive for domestic debates about what our posture should be.
Should also add that making the cost of a Chinese invasion prohibitive is difficult when the Chinese communist party evaluates an invasion of Taiwan at least partly on ideological grounds rather than in strictly rational cost-benefit terms. Again, Taiwan could do more and we should encourage them to do more, but the idea that Taiwan "is not really pursuing" vigorous self-defense is untrue and unfair.
I have to say I find it kind of odd that people were surprised that a government/military faced with inevitable defeat collapsed immediately instead of gradually ceding territory. Not super knowledgeable about Afghanistan but if there is anything I have learned from listening to a lot of "Hardcore History" it is that retreating and giving up territory slowly is incredibly difficult. It requires very strong leadership and committed soldiers to conduct an orderly "fallback" to other strategic objectives. The real tendency without strong training and leadership + very strong secondary strategic objectives is for the army to "rout" and surrender or be captured en masse.
No idea why we would expect the Afghan army to fight tooth and nail just to prolong the inevitable defeat.
I agree. As an Afghan vet and intelligence analyst who worked the Afghan problem for almost a decade, it really boggles my mind that the administration not only assumed this wouldn't happen but also didn't properly contingency plan in case it did.
I bow to your superior expertise but I'm a bit uncertain as to what contingency planning means for a situation when all "resistance" collapses in a manner of a few days. Perhaps we let red tape inexcusably slow the processing of the Afghans we wanted to help leave, and that's bad. But what were the other reasonable alternatives we could have planned for and been ready to execute on a moment's notice.
For starters, once you see other parts of the country are starting to rapidly fall, you don't wait several days until the Taliban are already in Kabul to start pulling people out. Particularly Americans. There are, according to several reports, about 10k Americans trapped in Afghanistan, most of whom can't get to the Kabul Airport. Also, if one thinks there is a chance that the country might collapse quickly, you don't abandon Bagram, which is a much better facility for the kind of mission we're attempting to do now. We're using Kabul because we have no other choice.
For fuck's sake, you people -- will you never learn to follow the money?
Who benefits most from the disintegration of the entire American adventure in Afghanistan?
Who looks better, the more of a debacle our exit becomes?
Who needed it to happen exactly now, in the middle of August?
Wake up, sheeple! Spencer Ackerman is behind the whole thing!
Or possibly his publisher. Okay, definitely his publisher.
You can't *buy* PR like this. Except by buying off all of the so-called "Afghan Army," which is what was done by the Taliban, allegedly, but was pretty clear a Black Op by Viking Press.
I think there is a lot that is correct in this piece, but your history of the beginnings is just plain wrong, namely the idea that Afghanistan was under-resourced from the beginning because of Iraq.
This is the post-hoc reasoning that Democrats created after the Iraq war turned to shit, but it's simply not an accurate take on history.
The Bush administration originally wanted to go big in Afghanistan, but the military refused for a number of reasons, which I'll touch in a minute, and instead, the strategy involved the CIA taking the lead along with Special Forces to buttress Karzai and the Northern Alliance. In other words, using US airpower to give opponents of the Taliban the ability to break the strategic and tactical stalemate that existed for years.
But the main reason that going big was never in the cards was two-fold - and had nothing to do with Iraq:
- The first part of this was logistics - Afghanistan was a landlocked country with bad infrastructure. It was was simply not possible to support a large military presence there without both the acquiescence of Pakistan, but also a lot of time to do basic infrastructure stuff like build roads.
- But an even bigger reason we adopted using a "light footprint" in Afghanistan was based on trying to avoid the Soviet experience. It's really important to understand that, at the beginning, the history and lessons of the Soviet experience in Afghanistan were foremost in the minds of military planners. We did not want to appear to be like another invading Soviet-style army that we thought would trigger a general uprising and resistance. Afghanistan at that time was a country that was seen to have a culture of extreme xenophobia. So any notion of "going big" in Afghanistan crashed against that wall.
- Finally, way back in the early oughts, "nation-building" was simply not considered to be a military role. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, the military's job was to defeat the enemy forces and then provide security so that the other functions of government could come in and do the nation-building part. We know now that never happened. The US never built that capacity and over time the military was expected to take on this role. So the ACTUAL resource problem was the failure to create a modern version of the kinds of "colonial" administrations that existed 100 years earlier. Instead, Bush and then Obama took the easy way out and militarized what should have been a civilian nation and capacity-building role, particularly after the "revolt of the diplomats" in 2007.
So the reality is that even if Bush didn't have eyes on Iraq, we still would have gone small in Afghanistan. And by early 2002, this strategy had achieved all our objectives except the head of UBL which, at that time, was considered less important than destroying AQ's infrastructure, networks, and ability to plan and implement the kinds of major attacks they were known for. The importance of UBL as a Bush "failure" was another post-hoc creation for domestic US political purposes as a line of attack against Bush. The idea that our plans in Afghanistan would have been any different had UBL been killed is completely lacking in any evidence. And indeed, once we did finally kill UBL, nothing changed and our involvement went another entire decade! Killing UBL was a catharsis, but strategically irrelevant, particularly in terms of the nation-building effort.
Let's also do a counter-factual - suppose we had done the first "plausible" approach you listed - take out the Taliban and AQ and then leave the Northern alliance in charge. I happen to think this is what we should have done, but it would have come with some pretty big downsides. It would continue the Afghan civil war. It would enable the "warlords" to run rampant again, which was a big factor in the Taliban origin story. And, a lot more bad things would have happened. And the Democratic narrative on Bush would not be much different.
But speaking of the Taliban for a minute, the surrender offer you mention was only one of many, which were not serious, were not taken seriously, and, post-hoc, should not be taken seriously. Mullah Omar was not a dictator - he presided over a shura of leadership that made collective decisions. The notion that this Taliban leadership would toss away all their political goals so that Omar, alone, could live peaceably in Kandahar is laughable.
Finally, the whole idea that things would be different if only Bush has properly "resourced" Afghanistan is similarly flawed. And it's also one of those assertions that is paper-thin since none of the people who claim to believe this (that I've talked to at least) can explain what that means, what more "resources" specifically would have accomplished, what strategy would have worked instead, and what the end goals would be and if they could actually be achieved. Instead, it's the underpants gnome strategy of "more resources" then "profit!" I think the reality is that no amount of US "resources" could make the fundamental changes in Afghan society that would turn them into a unified country, much less one with liberal democratic values. And regardless, the American people - as should be blindingly obvious now - were not willing or prepared to engage in an actual multi-generational project to attempt to turn Afghanistan into something resembling an actual nation.
As much as I’m not a fan of Trump, one thing about his tone on foreign policy that was refreshing was a lack of moralizing language. I think a lot of the media and political leadership does a poor job of making it clear that a lot of times our choices in these areas are between, by our cultural standards, bad and worse.
No, no, I'm assured by the media and the overwhelming majority of US politicians that every nation of the world is filled with millions of Jeffersonian small-D democrats yearning to breathe free!
I think Matt's basic point is that under Bush there was a mismatch between US goals (nation building) and resources and attention(*) applied to that goal. It was probably never an achievable goal no matter the resources, but that just means it shouldn't have been the goal. Under-resourcing it made it all the worse.
So the implied goal was to declare victory and get out. In that sense, blowing the capturing/killing of UBL at Tora Bora was disastrous. Whether or not it would have hurt AQ is debatable, but it almost certainly would have been the symbolic victory that an American departure would need for political if no other reasons.
(*) The diversion of attention -- from the White House, through CENTCOM and all the way down -- from Afghanistan to Iraq may have been more important for bogging us down in Afghanistan than any under-resourcing of efforts there. Basically, no one cared about Afghanistan any more and put it on the back burner. No way to win a war.
To me, that argument doesn't make much sense. If no amount of resources could achieve US goals, then, by definition, any amount of resources would also have been too few. So what is the argument for providing more resources? I'm not sure this is the case, but if is Matt arguing that the Bush administration should have thrown away *more* resources into the black hole of Afghanistan in a hopeless quest to remake Afghanistan, then that is a really bad argument If the goal isn't achievable regardless of the resources, how does it make sense to increase our sunk costs? By that logic, it would have been better if Bush had resourced the effort even less.
I don't think he was arguing for more resources. I believe his focus was on the wrong goals being pursued. He (like me!) was on the "Kill Osama and get the hell out" bandwagon.
This is a profoundly nihilistic take. There are plenty of US policy issues where (a) leadership in both parties agrees on a broad strategic vision and (b) there is no 'optimal' solution. I still think analysis and criticism of leaders' approaches to these issues are valid and important.
Biden and Trump both wanted to avoid extended lockdowns to prevent COVID. COVID was probably going to infect a lot of people. Those two facts do not mean that criticism of Trump's approach to COVID is somehow illegitimate or inappropriate.
Basically the reasoning here appears to be:
Even the best possible execution of a withdrawal was likely to be disastrous --> This withdrawal was disastrous --> This was the best possible execution of a withdrawal
Imagine you're leaning against a huge wall with a crack in it. While you're leaning on it, the crack becomes bigger and it's clear that when you stop leaning on it the wall will collapse.
The disaster has happened. It might not look like a disaster, but the only thing that would make it worse is if it collapses *on you*.
You make a quick getaway, and the wall collapses. It looks like a disaster, but it's the best outcome.
It seems like we're out in a reasonably orderly way without additional casualties. Success!
Fact check? From what I found, defense spending as a percentage of GDP is lower in European countries than in the United States of America.
How to know if it was a 'loss' unless we know what the objective was? If this is a loss, what was/is Iraq?
"[T]he reason it’s such a mess is that the policy is one that the military has been revolting against across two presidents, and they were hoping as recently as last Thursday or Friday to jam Biden up into sending more troops."
Any sources for this? All the coverage I've seen places the blame squarely on Biden's people for failing to adequately plan for the evacuation. I'd be very interested to see coverage of him being effectively undercut.
Matt said: "(the military) were hoping as recently as last Thursday or Friday to jam Biden up into sending more troops"
Is there evidence for that?
The military has been jamming every president up into sending more troops since like 2003 so I think it's safer to assume that burden of proof is on proving they weren't tbh.
I’m sure we could dig it up. However, I used to work with a TON of vets and even ran across a military contractor in Germany once that were very much in the “we need to stay or it’s all going to hell” camp. It’s a very military-centric ideology that’s not really reflected in many other areas of American life. So, if you read articles purporting to say the civilian leadership in DC screwed it up, good chance the author’s source was in the military or a contractor.
A possibility you're not really addressing is the status quo from 2016 to 2019, in which we did not have any withdrawal agreement with the Taliban but in which we kept a force of about 10,000 there while suffering casualties of about 1 a month. Was this not sustainable? Maybe not. Was this too much of a cost? Maybe. But you don't really address it.
The other thing you just sort of assert in a short paragraph is that "the reason it’s such a mess is that the policy is one that the military has been revolting against across two presidents, and they were hoping as recently as last Thursday or Friday to jam Biden up into sending more troops." Is your contention here that the US military deliberately sabotaged the withdrawal by refusing to prepare for what they saw was going to be an obvious clusterfuck? That seems like a significant accusation.
During the 2016-2019 time period, the Taliban was slowly but steadily gaining territory. So, sure, I guess we could have sustained a slow but steady death of the Afghan government, but why bother?
We were spending something like $40B a year in that period, I believe. Totally unsustainable.
I agree it's a significant accusation but given the WaPo reporting on this, it seems fairly plausible.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-confidential-documents/
how much of the foreign correspondent / NATSEC reporter hot take machine is being fueled not by ideological or rational thoughts on the Biden administration actions and Afghanistan's prospects, but instead by an opportunity to essentially virtue signal indirectly to sources, friends, and colleagues with family and friends made durinf the last two decadea now in very difficult positions that "I'm MAD, too...And I'm doing what i can!" as a way of deflecting guilt and allowing them to look at folks in the eyes next time they meet?
Well, he resisted the urge to basically call the moiety of foreign policy experts and pundits a bunch of corrupt paid-off people controlled by the Almighty "Blob". Also, his tone was un-Twitter-like.
Give him that.
I would say they've been wrong on Afghanistan, Iraq, and "democratization" of the Middle East in particular. They've also underestimated the potential of the Internet to weaken democracy, just like damn near all of us.
Everything else, though, they've been largely right on, beyond their own expectations. Extreme poverty and inequality really have plummeted around the world. War and mass bloodshed really have diminished as trade has increased. Former great powers really have traded in their guns (for, if not plowshares, then cars people around the world want to buy).
Despite our own personal experience in the relatively-declining, middle-aged, late-period neurotic 21st-century USA, an American-dominated world really has been a more peaceful one. One threatened by American retreat and higher walls, by the same token, is almost certainly a more unstable, scary place.
We just don't hear about any of that stellar overall so-called "Blob" record, because it doesn't involve war, and things not war are boring. Failure and dysfunction are exciting.
We could learn from the larger, less exciting big picture, or we could decide only the latter is worth noting, and the whole "Blob" legacy worth dismantling as punishment. I hope for the former and fear the latter.
"Our European allies spend a much larger share of GDP on defense than we do."
Can someone point me to a source for this? Everything I've seen online says the US spends significantly more of its GDP (3.4%) on the military than our EU allies, with Poland the highest at ~ 2%.
He fixed it.
I hope this is a free Slow Boring. There's been a breathtaking amount of crap being said about the events in Afghanistan. We need smart commentary like this post to be as widely available as possible.
Indeed. I've shared this with a few of my friends through Twitter. I think it's a free one??
It is. I was able to open it in an incognito window.
Nicole Wallace may have slightly exaggerated the ratio when she said 95 percent of the American people were in favor of this withdrawal and 95 percent of journalists would be against it. But not by much. Of the soldiers being interviewed who actually had extensive in country experience you see a lot of stories from soldiers who lamented the pointless loss of their comrades and not so many from soldiers who said it was an inevitable end. There's a lot of those too. So there's a question I have for all those journalists in country and out who have been crawling all over Afghanistan, many of whom are still there. Why didn't any of you predict the swift collapse of the Afghan government? Who were you talking to that led you to believe it wouldn't happen? Why were you bullshitting us all this time?
Great point - good question for all the media folks who are clucking and tutting at the Biden Administration.
"Another fallacy is to make Biden look bad by saying 'well you may agree with the policy, but the execution of the policy here was a mess.' And certainly, the execution doesn’t look great. But the reason it’s such a mess is that the policy is one that the military has been revolting against across two presidents, and they were hoping as recently as last Thursday or Friday to jam Biden up into sending more troops."
This is surprisingly poorly thought out. What's your evidence that that's the reason why this is such a mess? People have been screaming about how we need to expedite visa processing for months. The Joint Chiefs didn't force Biden to hang out at Camp David for several days without commenting on the subject, refuse to take any questions, and then go back to vacation. No one made Biden refrain from attempting to evacuate the thousands of US citizens ahead of time, or warning them that a collapse was imminent.
Biden didn't have to keep every jot and tittle of Trump's deal: he could have said "the Taliban aren't keeping up their end of the bargain, so while we're pulling our troops out, we'll allow support contractors to remain so the Afghani Air Force isn't grounded and they can deal with this resurgent threat." He chose not to. That's on him, not Trump, and not generals who take orders from him.
The real question is: how much of this was a surprise to the military and intelligence community, and how much did Biden just ignore them, and let the disaster play out? This is one of the worst foreign policy disasters in generations, and Congress should have hearings on the subject. Even if you agree that the US should have pulled out of Afghanistan - a position I am sympathetic towards, and I think is probably correct! - the complete lack of responsibility here for how this was handled is appalling.
Matt also discussed how this is "A useful signal to allies" but didn't address the signal to our enemies, which is arguably just as important. Maybe our allies will shape up and spend more on defense, maybe not - maybe they'll decide they can't rely on us at all. But is there any doubt that all China and Russia see is weakness upon weakness? This is just another point in favor of the view that when the chips are now, American will fold. This increases the odds that a serious war will break out.
It remains utterly fascinating to me that people view the US willingly bogging itself down in an endless quagmire deeply unpopular with the voting public for TWENTY YEARS as a sign that the US will *fold*.
I mean, really?
It's not the US sticking around for 20 years that's a sign that the US will fold.
It's that the US negotiated a bad deal under Trump (which Biden decided he just had to keep, despite having no problem junking anything else Trump did if he didn't like it), decided to leave without concern for the terms of the bad deal we negotiated (which the Taliban were not abiding by), the sustainability of our allies (who we set up to rely on us, and then withdrew support for, even though we could have withdrawn all US troops and relied on civilian volunteers), the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe among people who relied on us (tens of thousands of people who haven't been able to come because of...bureaucratic inefficiency that takes years to process applications), or the safety of our own citizens and the citizens of our allies (with thousands of them left in Taliban-conquered territory with as of yet unclear results).
The events of the last month do not communicate that we're a superpower strategically re-racking priorities and making tough choices. It communicates that we're getting in over our head, don't know how to get out, and will act recklessly to extricate ourselves.
And Biden thinks this is going just fine, and seems to take no responsibility for how the same END (get American troops out of Afghanistan) could have been accomplished BETTER. He made a decision that it's not in the US interest to continue, so the rest of the details just don't matter.
That's the problem. E.g. if I were Taiwan, I'd be pretty concerned that Biden is going to decide defending Taiwan isn't in the national interest, especially if we take heavy losses in the initial volley. Because if so, he'll clearly just ditch them without a bit of support. Is that more likely than not? No. But it's likelier than it was six months ago, and more importantly, China knows it.
"E.g. if I were Taiwan, I'd be pretty concerned that Biden is going to decide defending Taiwan isn't in the national interest, especially if we take heavy losses in the initial volley."
This is not really a coherent position. Taking significant casualties in a surprise attack under peacetime conditions makes war more likely, not less, as the public will be incensed and demand retribution.
The issue is that it's not going to be under normal peacetime conditions. It's not like tomorrow China is going to attack the US out of the blue. Rather it's going to come out of a period of clearly escalating tensions as they prepare for the invasion (which they can't hide) with saber rattling on both sides and clear Chinese statements that they view this as an internal issue of territorial sovereignty. If the US doesn't just fold and acknowledge that we won't intervene, China's likeliest course of action is to pre-emptively attack US bases and assets in the region (as David R. stated below very well).
What I think is under appreciated here is that the modal scenarios are:
(1) The US blinks, and then China takes Taiwan in an assault/extended blockade/threat, depending on how much they resist once they realize they're on their own. This would have to be pretty clearly communicated for China to believe it, and would nuke our credibility from orbit. If we don't do this, or the Chinese just don't believe us when we start hedging, then....
(2) This blows up into a broader regional war as China attacks US territory in Guam, USN assets at sea, and US bases in Japan. (South Korea is more of a wildcard with a lot of variables) It's quite possible that the US could sustain more casualties in the first 48 hours than in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and occupations put together. In turn, in any shooting war that we did not immediately withdraw from, the US would have no choice but to attack military bases and assets in mainland southern China to a massive scale, which they would view as escalatory.
In this sort of scenario, the willingness of the US in general, and Biden in particular, to sustain large numbers of American casualties in order to intervene in a far-off, long running "civil war" - because One China is de jure unchallenged even if it is a de facto absurdity - thousands of miles from home is *directly applicable*. People who are insisting that the Chinese won't see it that way are simply not thinking about this from the Chinese perspective.
You could draw on other scenarios, but especially when you add in our response to Russia's seizure of Crimea, Obama not enforcing his redline in Syria, Trump ditching our Kurdish allies, etc. our adversaries really do have significant reasons to doubt our resolve at this stage. And that in and of itself is destabilizing even if (and perhaps especially if!) the US actually would intervene in a Taiwan crisis.
I would like to return again to this statement, which I was specifically commenting on:
"E.g. if I were Taiwan, I'd be pretty concerned that Biden is going to decide defending Taiwan isn't in the national interest, especially if we take heavy losses in the initial volley"
It is the latter part of this which I was responding to, which I still find very unconvincing. As the US's policy of "strategic ambiguity" specifically rules out committing to Taiwan's defense in advance, TW planners already must expect that the US may not come to their aid, and will be looking for ways to drag the US in. The one thing which will guarantee sustained US involvement in any conflict between Taiwan and China is a preemptive Chinese attack on US bases that inflicts heavy casualties. While a bit macabre to consider, China attacking the US in the opening moves of the invasion is probably one of Taiwan's preferred scenarios.
The idea that the implications of this withdrawal are "especially" concerning for American resolve in a scenario of a massive Chinese first strike on US bases is incorrect. In fact, that's exactly the opposite of the scenario which -could- be rendered more concerning by this, which is a long-term gray-zone conflict short of actual war.
It's entirely possible that the events in Afghanistan may concern TW planners in terms of American resolve (frankly, I doubt it, as it's been stated over and over again by the admin that they want to withdraw in order to free up resources for priority theaters, i.e. China), but I don't think that there's any way they're looking at this and thinking "gee, if the PLA Rocket Force shoots a bunch of missiles into the US's bases in Japan and kills thousands of Americans, America is going to just pack up and go home". That's just not how it works for any population which suffers that kind of attack and is capable of retaliating, and they know it. Any such concerns would be directed rather at the oft-mooted "gray zone" scenarios where China is somehow strongarming Taiwan below the threshold of actual war in a way which puts the burden on the US to engage in a long-term political/economic struggle over the island.
Jumping on this a day late, but I'd also note that "maybe if we catch them with their pants down in the first few hours and inflict enough damage, they'll just decide the Western Pacific's not worth it and go home" is the exact train of thought that Japan had in 1941, and we all know how *that* worked out.
OK, fair enough. After thinking it over, I will withdraw the "especially" here.
The issue is that this botched withdrawal gives them good reason to doubt our resolve in many different scenarios. I think that definitely includes scenarios where the US suffers significant losses early on, so I think we still disagree there. But if what you are saying is that this gives them *even better* reason to doubt American resolve in gray-zone conflicts short of a shooting war, then I think you are correct. I was being hasty there by stating that it was "especially" true in a heavy losses scenario.
"China is somehow strongarming Taiwan below the threshold of actual war in a way which puts the burden on the US to engage in a long-term political/economic struggle over the island."
It seems like the most likely way to do this is by laying a large amount of mines around the Taiwan such that it essentially blockades the island until the Taiwanese agree to unification. Its a way to apply force/pressure without a direct attack upon Taiwan or US assets. The US could respond with by airlifting supplies like it did with Berlin, but the costs would be severe as would the impact on Taiwan's economy.
I agree that is their strong belief. I guess where we part ways is that I think it's possible (albeit unlikely) that that could change under limited circumstances. This is not enough on its own, as I said. But it's a point in favor of weakened American commitment.
Yes, I think the Chinese will quite likely decide our involvement in any conflict over Taiwan for us. Japan in the past 6 months has been increasingly signaling that it will proactively join in any conflict over Taiwan, so the PLA likely now views that as a given.
This is not one of the worst foreign policy disasters in generations.
The bien pensant folks are clutching their pearls now and wallowing in Monday morning quarterbacking pinning the loss of Afghanistan on Biden and saying it was totally clear that things would fall apart in a matter of days (damn, are they prescient these brilliant folks) and they get mad when Biden points out this is payday for 20 years of idiotic US policy (and he does not let Obama off the hook).
But a disaster for the United States? Check back with me in a month. Hell, check back with me in a week.
As Don Draper said, "This never happened. It will shock you how much this never happened."
The 20-year duration of the war is one of the worst foreign policy disasters since Vietnam (right after the Iraq War existing at all). The withdrawal is a mess, and has been badly bungled by the administration, but the withdrawal itself is not a historic foreign policy disaster. People have been made hysterical by the immediacy of traumatic social media posts and will come back down to earth.
Vietnam was a disaster because it killed 56,000 Americans, deeply divided our society, and led to the end of the post-WWII belief in the competence, honesty, and reliability of American governance.
Afghanistan? In a while, no one will remember it happened.
Not even the 20 year bungle was a "disaster." It was instead a badly carried out brushfire war of precious little significance to the United States' larger aims and abilities. Great Britain fought three Afghan wars in the 19th century, none of which had any larger meaning for the grand national strategy of Britain or affected its relations with its strategic rivals.
Sometimes when you're big and rich and powerful, you can waste some time, effort and resources on meaningless little wars that are big for the people there but not so important for you.
It was not obvious that Afghanistan would fall apart so quickly, and I never said that it was. But it was clearly the case that Biden was warned that this was a live possibility and that we needed to do more to prepare for it, including by expediting the approval process for our allies on the ground.
Biden was warned about this months ago, when there were over 18,000 applicants for special visas:
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/06/04/lawmakers-urge-biden-to-evacuate-afghan-allies-immediately-491899
In July, Biden said "we’ve already approved 2,500 Special Immigrant Visas to come to the United States. Up to now, fewer than half have exercised their right to do that. Half have gotten on aircraft and com — commercial flights and come, and the other half believe they want to stay — at least thus far."
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/07/08/remarks-by-president-biden-on-the-drawdown-of-u-s-forces-in-afghanistan/
Yesterday, Biden said "Operation Allies Refugee [Refuge], which I announced back in July, has already moved 2,000 Afghans who are eligible for Special Immigration Visas and their families to the United States."
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/08/16/remarks-by-president-biden-on-afghanistan/
You do the math here. You really think this is the best we can do? I think it's pretty clear this was botched, and would still be a mess even if we had another 60 or 90 days before Kabul fell. Biden made this decision, and did not take the necessary steps for the US to minimize the humanitarian catastrophe to follow. That's on him.
As far as this being one of the worst foreign policy disasters in generations - it's pointless to argue that now. I think it clearly is, you think it clearly is not. Time will tell.
There's a lot of room between this botched evacuation and "worst policy disaster in generations". Here's a list of post-Vietnam foreign policy disasters to compare this with:
- Fall of the Shah / Iranian Revolution / embassy hostages
- Alliance with KSA
- Failure to stop the rise of Al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks
- The invasion of Iraq and its aftermath
- Chavez and the subsequent collapse of Venezuela
- The erosion of the Mexican state and the rise of Narco-terrorists
- The attempt and subsequent failure to build durable and capable institutions of state in Afghanistan
- Failure to mitigate the consequences of the Syrian civil war
OK, but I was talking in terms of American foreign policy disasters. Of your list of 8 events, this is bound up in 2 of them (Failure to stop Al Qaeda, failure to build institutions in Afghanistan) and can't really be separated from them. Two others (the collapse in Venezuela or the erosion of the Mexican state) are not really American foreign policy disasters; they're just crappy things that have happened in the world that we're not particularly responsible for. The alliance with KSA has been bad in a lot of ways, but has not been such a spectacular failure. The Syrian Civil War is probably worse, but again, is not primarily an American foreign policy disaster - what was a disaster from our perspective was dithering around, not having a clear plan, and screwing the Kurds. I do think what just happened in Afghanistan is more significant than what America did/didn't do in Syria.
So that leaves the Iranian revolution and associated issues and the invasion of Iraq. I'm not going to argue that this is worse than those, just that it belongs on the short list with those events as "one of the worst foreign policy disasters in generations."
I don't think that's a crazy assessment, since it sounds like the man who is likely the next chancellor of Germany agrees:
https://www.ft.com/content/3ea7e87e-ab3a-4e14-8396-8061420942b0
"Nato allies urge rethink on alliance after Biden’s ‘unilateral’ Afghanistan exit"
"Armin Laschet, Germany’s conservative candidate to succeed chancellor Angela Merkel, on Tuesday called the troop withdrawal 'the greatest debacle that Nato has experienced since its foundation'."
Laschet is verging on the hysterical here. Just in the last 10 years I can name you the Libya intervention as a larger debacle.
As for Germany in general, it has been the rot at the heart of NATO for more than a decade through woefully underfunding its defense budget while it continues cozying up to the Russians for economic gain. I can't think of any major NATO state which has less credibility in regards to commenting on the actions of the alliance, and it's not close.
Why do you think the Libya intervention was a larger debacle?
I absolutely agree that Germany has woefully underfunded its defense budget while cozying up to the Russians for economic gain.
I think the relevance of the quote is that the Afghan invasion was the first and only time that Article 5 has been invoked, and it has turned into a disaster. Invoking it next time will be harder if it's not for the clearest of cases (e.g. Russian tanks rolling through Poland). Even the size of the German economy aside (and despite their low spending as a percentage of their economy, in total $ they are third after the US and UK) the opinion of the German government is relevant to the actions of an organization that functions by consensus.
Good piece overall but I think unfair to Taiwan at the end. They could definitely dedicate more resources to their own defense but have gone to nontrivial effort to make any attempted invasion very costly. This piece from Tanner Greer gives a good view of how the average PLA soldier would experience an attempted invasion--many if not most of the horrors he would experience are the direct result of Taiwanese efforts: https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/25/taiwan-can-win-a-war-with-china/
TW is pivoting to a new Overall Defense Concept emphasizing asymmetric warfare but has yet to fully implement it, and is having serious issues with staffing and maintaining its now-volunteer service. Unfortunately, it seems that shifting away from conscription has been a big mistake, especially since reinstituting such policy in a democratic society is extremely costly politically.
The reality is that if we want TW to present a serious independent threat to the current PLA, we probably need to treat it more like Israel and restart direct $ or hardware transfers for defense purposes. Of course, this might precipitate an otherwise avoidable conflict with China. It's a very fraught issue.
For sure--both the US and Taiwan are probably ~10 years behind in retooling for a conflict in the strait.
I wish we could get people to stop quoting Tanner Greer as an expert on military matters. He's a 20something journalist who's never served in the military, worked for the government, or done literally anything in the defense field whatsoever. He's just an enthusiastic amateur who reads stuff online and purports to be an expert. I actually enjoy some of his cultural pieces, and I don't dislike the guy, but the extent to which he's getting quoted as some kind of military expert is a bit concerning. He knows as much as your opinionated uncle that never served, but has watched a bunch of war movies.
As far as the invasion of Taiwan goes- the battle will be fought at sea and in the air. Once PLA soldiers physically land on the island, it's basically over- no one would expect them to hold out. The real battle is making that landing impossible, so the infantry is kind of irrelevant
If you want the "optimistic white guy analyst" take on Taiwan, Ian Easton is probably a better go-to. He hasn't served in the military, but he has lived and studies in TW and China and has done some work as a defense analyst. I've read his book on the subject & he seems overly optimistic to me, but he's certainly better-credentialed than Greer.
https://project2049.net/author/ianeaston/
For a take straight from the horse's mouth, you can read a former ROC Armed Forces Chief of Staff explaining the new ROC Overall Defense Concept here:
https://thediplomat.com/2020/11/taiwans-overall-defense-concept-explained/
You can read the 2019 Taiwan National Defense Report here:
https://www.ustaiwandefense.com/tdnswp/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Taiwan-National-Defense-Report-2019.pdf
Also, I feel obliged to note that while interdicting sea crossings is extremely important, the war is by no means over once PLA soldiers land on the island. Even in an extremely positive scenario for TW where the US and Japan intervene immediately and a huge % of PLA transport ships and transport aircraft are intercepted, some PLA soldiers WILL land on TW soil. That's unavoidable. The real question will be whether China will be able to sustain the beachhead and push inland, or whether TW + any allies can interdict resupply and reinforcement effectively enough for the Taiwanese army + allied air power to reduce and eliminate the beachhead.
Ian Easton is great. The Greer piece I linked draws heavily from his work.
He also wrote a blog post that argues against his first article after he actually visited the country for several months.
He had visited Taiwan for a significant amount of time before writing that piece, but setting aside the debate over his qualifications, the point is that it's not true that Taiwan is "not really pursuing" a strategy of making an amphibious invasion very costly for China. It's unfair to Taiwan to make that claim and underplaying what they have done, even if we think they should be doing more, is not productive for domestic debates about what our posture should be.
Should also add that making the cost of a Chinese invasion prohibitive is difficult when the Chinese communist party evaluates an invasion of Taiwan at least partly on ideological grounds rather than in strictly rational cost-benefit terms. Again, Taiwan could do more and we should encourage them to do more, but the idea that Taiwan "is not really pursuing" vigorous self-defense is untrue and unfair.
I have to say I find it kind of odd that people were surprised that a government/military faced with inevitable defeat collapsed immediately instead of gradually ceding territory. Not super knowledgeable about Afghanistan but if there is anything I have learned from listening to a lot of "Hardcore History" it is that retreating and giving up territory slowly is incredibly difficult. It requires very strong leadership and committed soldiers to conduct an orderly "fallback" to other strategic objectives. The real tendency without strong training and leadership + very strong secondary strategic objectives is for the army to "rout" and surrender or be captured en masse.
No idea why we would expect the Afghan army to fight tooth and nail just to prolong the inevitable defeat.
I agree. As an Afghan vet and intelligence analyst who worked the Afghan problem for almost a decade, it really boggles my mind that the administration not only assumed this wouldn't happen but also didn't properly contingency plan in case it did.
I bow to your superior expertise but I'm a bit uncertain as to what contingency planning means for a situation when all "resistance" collapses in a manner of a few days. Perhaps we let red tape inexcusably slow the processing of the Afghans we wanted to help leave, and that's bad. But what were the other reasonable alternatives we could have planned for and been ready to execute on a moment's notice.
For starters, once you see other parts of the country are starting to rapidly fall, you don't wait several days until the Taliban are already in Kabul to start pulling people out. Particularly Americans. There are, according to several reports, about 10k Americans trapped in Afghanistan, most of whom can't get to the Kabul Airport. Also, if one thinks there is a chance that the country might collapse quickly, you don't abandon Bagram, which is a much better facility for the kind of mission we're attempting to do now. We're using Kabul because we have no other choice.
This makes sense. Thanks.
For fuck's sake, you people -- will you never learn to follow the money?
Who benefits most from the disintegration of the entire American adventure in Afghanistan?
Who looks better, the more of a debacle our exit becomes?
Who needed it to happen exactly now, in the middle of August?
Wake up, sheeple! Spencer Ackerman is behind the whole thing!
Or possibly his publisher. Okay, definitely his publisher.
You can't *buy* PR like this. Except by buying off all of the so-called "Afghan Army," which is what was done by the Taliban, allegedly, but was pretty clear a Black Op by Viking Press.
I Am the Walrus?
I think there is a lot that is correct in this piece, but your history of the beginnings is just plain wrong, namely the idea that Afghanistan was under-resourced from the beginning because of Iraq.
This is the post-hoc reasoning that Democrats created after the Iraq war turned to shit, but it's simply not an accurate take on history.
The Bush administration originally wanted to go big in Afghanistan, but the military refused for a number of reasons, which I'll touch in a minute, and instead, the strategy involved the CIA taking the lead along with Special Forces to buttress Karzai and the Northern Alliance. In other words, using US airpower to give opponents of the Taliban the ability to break the strategic and tactical stalemate that existed for years.
But the main reason that going big was never in the cards was two-fold - and had nothing to do with Iraq:
- The first part of this was logistics - Afghanistan was a landlocked country with bad infrastructure. It was was simply not possible to support a large military presence there without both the acquiescence of Pakistan, but also a lot of time to do basic infrastructure stuff like build roads.
- But an even bigger reason we adopted using a "light footprint" in Afghanistan was based on trying to avoid the Soviet experience. It's really important to understand that, at the beginning, the history and lessons of the Soviet experience in Afghanistan were foremost in the minds of military planners. We did not want to appear to be like another invading Soviet-style army that we thought would trigger a general uprising and resistance. Afghanistan at that time was a country that was seen to have a culture of extreme xenophobia. So any notion of "going big" in Afghanistan crashed against that wall.
- Finally, way back in the early oughts, "nation-building" was simply not considered to be a military role. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, the military's job was to defeat the enemy forces and then provide security so that the other functions of government could come in and do the nation-building part. We know now that never happened. The US never built that capacity and over time the military was expected to take on this role. So the ACTUAL resource problem was the failure to create a modern version of the kinds of "colonial" administrations that existed 100 years earlier. Instead, Bush and then Obama took the easy way out and militarized what should have been a civilian nation and capacity-building role, particularly after the "revolt of the diplomats" in 2007.
So the reality is that even if Bush didn't have eyes on Iraq, we still would have gone small in Afghanistan. And by early 2002, this strategy had achieved all our objectives except the head of UBL which, at that time, was considered less important than destroying AQ's infrastructure, networks, and ability to plan and implement the kinds of major attacks they were known for. The importance of UBL as a Bush "failure" was another post-hoc creation for domestic US political purposes as a line of attack against Bush. The idea that our plans in Afghanistan would have been any different had UBL been killed is completely lacking in any evidence. And indeed, once we did finally kill UBL, nothing changed and our involvement went another entire decade! Killing UBL was a catharsis, but strategically irrelevant, particularly in terms of the nation-building effort.
Let's also do a counter-factual - suppose we had done the first "plausible" approach you listed - take out the Taliban and AQ and then leave the Northern alliance in charge. I happen to think this is what we should have done, but it would have come with some pretty big downsides. It would continue the Afghan civil war. It would enable the "warlords" to run rampant again, which was a big factor in the Taliban origin story. And, a lot more bad things would have happened. And the Democratic narrative on Bush would not be much different.
But speaking of the Taliban for a minute, the surrender offer you mention was only one of many, which were not serious, were not taken seriously, and, post-hoc, should not be taken seriously. Mullah Omar was not a dictator - he presided over a shura of leadership that made collective decisions. The notion that this Taliban leadership would toss away all their political goals so that Omar, alone, could live peaceably in Kandahar is laughable.
Finally, the whole idea that things would be different if only Bush has properly "resourced" Afghanistan is similarly flawed. And it's also one of those assertions that is paper-thin since none of the people who claim to believe this (that I've talked to at least) can explain what that means, what more "resources" specifically would have accomplished, what strategy would have worked instead, and what the end goals would be and if they could actually be achieved. Instead, it's the underpants gnome strategy of "more resources" then "profit!" I think the reality is that no amount of US "resources" could make the fundamental changes in Afghan society that would turn them into a unified country, much less one with liberal democratic values. And regardless, the American people - as should be blindingly obvious now - were not willing or prepared to engage in an actual multi-generational project to attempt to turn Afghanistan into something resembling an actual nation.
As much as I’m not a fan of Trump, one thing about his tone on foreign policy that was refreshing was a lack of moralizing language. I think a lot of the media and political leadership does a poor job of making it clear that a lot of times our choices in these areas are between, by our cultural standards, bad and worse.
No, no, I'm assured by the media and the overwhelming majority of US politicians that every nation of the world is filled with millions of Jeffersonian small-D democrats yearning to breathe free!
I think Matt's basic point is that under Bush there was a mismatch between US goals (nation building) and resources and attention(*) applied to that goal. It was probably never an achievable goal no matter the resources, but that just means it shouldn't have been the goal. Under-resourcing it made it all the worse.
So the implied goal was to declare victory and get out. In that sense, blowing the capturing/killing of UBL at Tora Bora was disastrous. Whether or not it would have hurt AQ is debatable, but it almost certainly would have been the symbolic victory that an American departure would need for political if no other reasons.
(*) The diversion of attention -- from the White House, through CENTCOM and all the way down -- from Afghanistan to Iraq may have been more important for bogging us down in Afghanistan than any under-resourcing of efforts there. Basically, no one cared about Afghanistan any more and put it on the back burner. No way to win a war.
To me, that argument doesn't make much sense. If no amount of resources could achieve US goals, then, by definition, any amount of resources would also have been too few. So what is the argument for providing more resources? I'm not sure this is the case, but if is Matt arguing that the Bush administration should have thrown away *more* resources into the black hole of Afghanistan in a hopeless quest to remake Afghanistan, then that is a really bad argument If the goal isn't achievable regardless of the resources, how does it make sense to increase our sunk costs? By that logic, it would have been better if Bush had resourced the effort even less.
I don't think he was arguing for more resources. I believe his focus was on the wrong goals being pursued. He (like me!) was on the "Kill Osama and get the hell out" bandwagon.
This is a profoundly nihilistic take. There are plenty of US policy issues where (a) leadership in both parties agrees on a broad strategic vision and (b) there is no 'optimal' solution. I still think analysis and criticism of leaders' approaches to these issues are valid and important.
Biden and Trump both wanted to avoid extended lockdowns to prevent COVID. COVID was probably going to infect a lot of people. Those two facts do not mean that criticism of Trump's approach to COVID is somehow illegitimate or inappropriate.
Basically the reasoning here appears to be:
Even the best possible execution of a withdrawal was likely to be disastrous --> This withdrawal was disastrous --> This was the best possible execution of a withdrawal
It is not good reasoning.
How was the withdrawal disastrous?
Imagine you're leaning against a huge wall with a crack in it. While you're leaning on it, the crack becomes bigger and it's clear that when you stop leaning on it the wall will collapse.
The disaster has happened. It might not look like a disaster, but the only thing that would make it worse is if it collapses *on you*.
You make a quick getaway, and the wall collapses. It looks like a disaster, but it's the best outcome.
It seems like we're out in a reasonably orderly way without additional casualties. Success!