The Arab Spring and "the War on Terror"

[HanoiVillan]

5 hours ago, chrisp65 said:

Weren’t we told a few days ago this was no Saigon 2.0?

I think this needs pushing back on. This is really quite different from Saigon. Firstly, a huge number of people have been evacuated - more than 100,000 in the last few weeks. Many of these have been foreigners of course, but there is a much larger number of Afghans leaving than there were South Vietnamese (Kissinger forbade them being allowed onto helicopters from Saigon; some crews disobeyed orders, but this is not like that); and more importantly, in this instance the losers (us, NATO countries) are being allowed by the winners (the Taliban) to get people and stuff together and leave. Until yesterday it had been surprisingly peaceful, and even yesterday's attack hasn't come from the Taliban but from their internal opponents. It's actually not the normal way wars end that the losers get to gather their stuff, bring out the people they want to take, get a few weeks to do it, etc etc. By any historical standard, this has been pretty amicable.

When pushed on alternative, more orderly approaches, critics generally fall back on either 'well I'd have told people to leave months ago', which in practice just means leading to the same military collapse months earlier, or 'well I'd have kept Bagram open', which is not really a practical solution for getting people out since it's well away from Kabul over a load of mountainous countryside.

There are lots of things that people want from this evacuation, many of which are mutually contradictory. An example of one is 'we must evacuate everyone we possibly can, as fast as possible'. Another is 'we must make sure we collect every bit of military hardware and every document we've ever produced'. Another is 'we must not cooperate with the Taliban or tell them who we want them to let through'. Any one of these is a reasonable enough position to hold, but they are in tension with each other. If you do it quickly, shit will get left behind. If you want to bring every person and dog that you can, you won't have room for all the guns and computers. If you want to get lots of people through, but the Taliban control the capital and the area all around the airport, you're gonna have to give them some info about who it is you want them to let through. I'm not saying these are easy choices, but most comment about this doesn't even acknowledge that there are choices.

[Genie]

At least 95 killed in the suicide bombings including 2 British nationals, and the child of another British national

[chrisp65]

50 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

I think this needs pushing back on. This is really quite different from Saigon. Firstly, a huge number of people have been evacuated - more than 100,000 in the last few weeks. Many of these have been foreigners of course, but there is a much larger number of Afghans leaving than there were South Vietnamese (Kissinger forbade them being allowed onto helicopters from Saigon; some crews disobeyed orders, but this is not like that); and more importantly, in this instance the losers (us, NATO countries) are being allowed by the winners (the Taliban) to get people and stuff together and leave. Until yesterday it had been surprisingly peaceful, and even yesterday's attack hasn't come from the Taliban but from their internal opponents. It's actually not the normal way wars end that the losers get to gather their stuff, bring out the people they want to take, get a few weeks to do it, etc etc. By any historical standard, this has been pretty amicable.

When pushed on alternative, more orderly approaches, critics generally fall back on either 'well I'd have told people to leave months ago', which in practice just means leading to the same military collapse months earlier, or 'well I'd have kept Bagram open', which is not really a practical solution for getting people out since it's well away from Kabul over a load of mountainous countryside.

There are lots of things that people want from this evacuation, many of which are mutually contradictory. An example of one is 'we must evacuate everyone we possibly can, as fast as possible'. Another is 'we must make sure we collect every bit of military hardware and every document we've ever produced'. Another is 'we must not cooperate with the Taliban or tell them who we want them to let through'. Any one of these is a reasonable enough position to hold, but they are in tension with each other. If you do it quickly, shit will get left behind. If you want to bring every person and dog that you can, you won't have room for all the guns and computers. If you want to get lots of people through, but the Taliban control the capital and the area all around the airport, you're gonna have to give them some info about who it is you want them to let through. I'm not saying these are easy choices, but most comment about this doesn't even acknowledge that there are choices.

 

900,000 left Vietnam under the Orderly Departure in agreement with the North

U.S. Prisoners were released by the North as part of the agreement of the U.S. leaving

The U.S. managed to get over 100,000 out on ships and planes most of which were settled in the U.S.

When the U.S. withdrew their puppet government was defeated, admittedly taking 2 years. The sudden fall of Saigon saw 7,000 US troops, US citizens, and Vietnamese aides all needing to be got out by helicopter.

I think it’s a lot like Saigon.

It’s not an exact blow by blow replica, but it’s more than similar enough for it to be held up as an example of something similar.

[Davkaus]

1 hour ago, HanoiVillan said:

 

When pushed on alternative, more orderly approaches, critics generally fall back on either 'well I'd have told people to leave months ago', which in practice just means leading to the same military collapse months earlier,

I'm not sure I follow on this point. The argument, as I understand it isn't we'd have got everyone out months earlier, but that we'd have got civilians out before the military presence left the country. Afghanistan would still have fallen to the Taliban, but we wouldn't have been in the position of having to evacuate British civilians or Afghans who had worked with the brits.

I guess the aim was that there'd be no need for them to leave at all because the Afghan army would hold the line though, so it all comes down to what the intel was saying about the viability of the Taliban being kept at bay. 

[Davkaus]

More brilliant satire by the Foreign Secretary that brought you "The sea was closed"

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58360592

Quote

Two British nationals, and the child of another British national, died in the explosion at Kabul airport, the foreign secretary has said.

Dominic Raab said two others were also injured in the suicide bomb attack on Thursday.

"It is a tragedy that as they sought to bring their loved ones to safety in the UK they were murdered by cowardly terrorists," he said.

At least 95 people were killed in the attack.

Mr Raab said he was "deeply saddened" by the deaths.

He added: "Yesterday's despicable attack underlines the dangers facing those in Afghanistan and reinforces why we are doing all we can to get people out. We are offering consular support to their families.

"We will not turn our backs on those who look to us in their hour of need, and we will never be cowed by terrorists."

We had to leave at some point, certainly, but I don't think a person with any sense of perspective or humility can boldly claim "we will not turn our backs" and "we will never be cowed by terrorists" while we desperately pull out as many people as we can before a deadline we had no say in, before we run away with our tail between our legs leaving others to their fate. Admittedly we'll be taking some more in, to an arbitrary schedule we defined, as long as they live that long. We're not turning our back on you, we'll be watching the whole time. Try not to lose your head, eh?

Edited August 27, 2021 by Davkaus

[HanoiVillan]

30 minutes ago, Davkaus said:

I'm not sure I follow on this point. The argument, as I understand it isn't we'd have got everyone out months earlier, but that we'd have got civilians out before the military presence left the country. Afghanistan would still have fallen to the Taliban, but we wouldn't have been in the position of having to evacuate British civilians or Afghans who had worked with the brits.

I guess the aim was that there'd be no need for them to leave at all because the Afghan army would hold the line though, so it all comes down to what the intel was saying about the viability of the Taliban being kept at bay. 

The point essentially is that if you evacuated all the civilians doing the civilian part of government, it would be extremely obvious to everyone that you thought the government was going to collapse, so all the Afghan army units that surrendered or joined the Taliban would have just done the same thing earlier when they saw the writing on the wall.

Clearly we thought that the Afghan government wouldn't collapse for a while after we'd left the country; they did though, so there's no alternative hypothetical scenario where they don't collapse under pressure.

[blandy]

1 hour ago, HanoiVillan said:

here are lots of things that people want from this evacuation, many of which are mutually contradictory. An example of one is 'we must evacuate everyone we possibly can, as fast as possible'. Another is 'we must make sure we collect every bit of military hardware and every document we've ever produced'. Another is 'we must not cooperate with the Taliban or tell them who we want them to let through'. Any one of these is a reasonable enough position to hold, but they are in tension with each other.

Donald Trump (or his Ambassador) signed a deal for the murcans to leave in 14 months. That was around Feb last year, they were due to leave by May, and that got extended to end August time. So 17 months. That’s more than enough time to collect Afghan interpreters, guides, aides, all kinds of hardware… and ship them out of the then open Bahgram base, or Kabul, or both.

Everyone seems to have sat around for most of the time, doing Jack and then it’s been a mad dash at the last minute.

The world has known for over a year that this was coming. The mess is much much worse than it needed to be.

[blandy]

9 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

Clearly we thought that the Afghan government wouldn't collapse for a while after we'd left the country

I’m not so sure who you mean by “we” here. Intelligence was warning it would fold quickly back in July and earlier. The politicians ignored it.

[HanoiVillan]

1 minute ago, blandy said:

I’m not so sure who you mean by “we” here. Intelligence was warning it would fold quickly back in July and earlier.

Yes, that's right, but the problem is the definition of 'quickly'. The Americans thought it would be after they had departed; it wasn't.

[bickster]

2 minutes ago, blandy said:

I’m not so sure who you mean by “we” here. Intelligence was warning it would fold quickly back in July and earlier. The politicians ignored it.

They needed people to shout run like f*** to the Afghan people at the last minute

[HanoiVillan]

5 hours ago, sne said:

Back in the day at least the strategy would have been to torch your stuff (and salting the earth) before you retreated.

That's true, and a good point, but I think the two things we have to bear in mind are 1] there's just vast quantities of materiel all across the country, there's no way you can destroy everything, and even a small proportion of a very vast number will be a very big number, and 2] vast amounts of the equipment will have been in the hands of Afghan security forces which have either been killed, surrendered or switched sides; in practice, bombing this stuff means bombing the Taliban and restarting hostilities (which to be fair, seems to be what the American national security establishment want).

[chrisp65]

3 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

The point essentially is that if you evacuated all the civilians doing the civilian part of government, it would be extremely obvious to everyone that you thought the government was going to collapse, so all the Afghan army units that surrendered or joined the Taliban would have just done the same thing earlier when they saw the writing on the wall.

Clearly we thought that the Afghan government wouldn't collapse for a while after we'd left the country; they did though, so there's no alternative hypothetical scenario where they don't collapse under pressure.

There are plenty of scenarios where they don’t collapse under pressure. Just not many where we only do the last 7 days differently.

We could have known how many were in their army we were funding, we appear to be quoting 300,000, others are suggesting its as low as 50,000.

We could have made sure they were being paid. Perhaps not sponsored two decades of political corruption. We could even have re looked at the borders, if there is a ‘country’ Taliban that is fundamentally at odds with culturally different ‘city’ Afghans.

I could come up with a dozen different ways of doing it differently, using amateur non-military, non-diplomatic common sense hindsight. Perhaps flick through some reference material on what we could have done better in hindsight with Korea, Vietnam, Libya, Iran…

The way this has ended shows we have learnt next to nothing in 50 or 60 years of the U.S. being the world policeman.

We prop up failed unpopular governments, and then we disengage, but not until after we’ve wasted a few young lives and a few billion dollars.

[Jareth]

Hey guys chill, it's all good, Pen Farthing and 200 dogs and cats are at the airport. 

[Jareth]

 

[Davkaus]

Were the Taliban going to execute the dogs or something?

[Jareth]

7 minutes ago, Davkaus said:

Were the Taliban going to execute the dogs or something?

No, just all the families of the interpreters who are now behind the dogs in the queue. Cos Bozza's wife. What a shit show. 

[HanoiVillan]

2 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

There are plenty of scenarios where they don’t collapse under pressure. Just not many where we only do the last 7 days differently.

I don't think there are any scenarios where they don't collapse under pressure. There are scenarios where we left before we ever bothered setting them up in the first place, but the puppet government didn't have control of even half of the country for *years* before the withdrawal. You mentioned Vietnam before, so here may be a similarity between the two American-backed governments: the Afghan government probably came to understand, as the South Vietnamese did before them, that the plan was to train them until they were plausibly self-sufficient, and then withdraw completely, and then since they didn't want the Americans to leave, they set about ensuring that the pre-condition never came about. It's no surprise that a government that was barely in charge of any of the country outside some of its urban centres, and was utterly reliant on American support for its money, its equipment, and what illusory power it held, could only collapse when that support was removed.

[chrisp65]

14 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

I don't think there are any scenarios where they don't collapse under pressure. There are scenarios where we left before we ever bothered setting them up in the first place, but the puppet government didn't have control of even half of the country for *years* before the withdrawal. You mentioned Vietnam before, so here may be a similarity between the two American-backed governments: the Afghan government probably came to understand, as the South Vietnamese did before them, that the plan was to train them until they were plausibly self-sufficient, and then withdraw completely, and then since they didn't want the Americans to leave, they set about ensuring that the pre-condition never came about. It's no surprise that a government that was barely in charge of any of the country outside some of its urban centres, and was utterly reliant on American support for its money, its equipment, and what illusory power it held, could only collapse when that support was removed.

We’re just not going to agree here, and that’s fine.

To suggest there is no possible scenario where this doesn’t happen suggests to me you think there’s something exceptionally superior about the Taliban or exceptionally weak about the non Taliban. I can’t accept either of those scenarios.

Twenty years of funding the wrong people the wrong way to try and achieve the wrong things does not mean there was nothing else we could have done.

[HanoiVillan]

58 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

Twenty years of funding the wrong people the wrong way to try and achieve the wrong things does not mean there was nothing else we could have done.

Sometimes the problem is with the concept, not with the execution

[flamingsombrero]

Posh word removed and some cats > brown people 

Three cheers for the good guys!!