It’s not guilt, shame or regret I feel. It’s the sense of having done a terrible duty.
By Timothy Kudo
Mr. Kudo is a former Marine captain who served in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. He is working on a novel about the Afghanistan war.
April 14, 2021
When President Biden announced on Wednesday that the United States would withdraw all its troops from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, 2021, he appeared to be finally bringing this “forever war” to an end. Although I have waited for this moment for a decade, it is impossible to feel relief. The Sept. 11 attacks took place during my senior year of college, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that followed consumed the entirety of my adult life. Although history books may mark this as the end of the Afghanistan war, it will never be over for many of my generation who fought.
Sometimes there are moments, no more than the span of a breath, when the smell of it returns and once again I’m stepping off the helicopter ramp into the valley. Covered in the ashen dust of the rotor wash, I take in for the first time the blend of wood fires burning from inside lattice-shaped mud compounds, flooded fields of poppies and corn, the sweat of the unwashed and the wet naps that failed to mask it, chicken and sheep and the occasional cow, the burn pit where trash and plastic smoldered through the day, curries slick with oil eaten by hand on carpeted dirt floors, and fresh bodies buried shallow, like I.E.D.s, in the bitter earth.
It’s sweet and earthy, familiar to the farm boys in the platoon who knew that blend of animal and human musk but alien to those of us used only to the city or the lush Southern woods we patrolled during training. Later, at the big bases far from the action, surrounded by gyms and chow halls and the expeditionary office park where the flag and field grade officers did their work, it was replaced by a cologne of machinery and order. Of common parts installed by low-bid contractors and the ocher windblown sand of the vast deserts where those behemoth bases were always located. Relatively safe after the long months at the frontier but dull and lifeless.
Then it’s replaced by the sweet, artificial scents of home after the long plane ride back. Suddenly I’m on a cold American street littered with leaves. A couple passes by holding hands, a bottle of wine in a tote bag, dressed for a party, unaware of the veneer that preserves their carelessness.
I remain distant from them, trapped between past and present, in the same space you sometimes see in the eyes of the old-timers marching in Veterans Day parades with their folded caps covered in retired unit patches, wearing surplus uniforms they can’t seem to take off. It’s the space between their staring eyes and the cheering crowd where those of us who return from war abide.
My war ended in 2011, when I came home from Afghanistan eager to resume my life. I was in peak physical shape, had a college degree, had a half-year of saved paychecks and would receive an honorable discharge from the Marine Corps in a few months. I was free to do whatever I wanted, but I couldn’t bring myself to do anything.
Initially I attributed it to jet lag, then to a need for well-deserved rest, but eventually there was no excuse. I returned to my friends and family, hoping I would feel differently. I did not.
“Relax. You earned it,” they said. “There’s plenty of time to figure out what’s next.” But figuring out the future felt like abandoning the past. It had been just a month since my last combat patrol, but I know now that years don’t make a difference.
At first, everyone wanted to ask about the war. They knew they were supposed to but approached the topic tentatively, the way you hold out a hand to an injured animal. And as I went into detail, their expressions changed, first to curiosity, then sympathy and finally to horror.
I knew their repulsion was only self-preservation. After all, the war cost nothing to the civilians who stayed home. They just wanted to live the free and peaceful lives they’d grown accustomed to — and wasn’t their peace of mind what we fought for in the first place?
After my discharge, I moved to an apartment near the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, overlooking downtown Manhattan. I’d sit and stare across the river to the gap in the skyline where I tried to imagine those two towers I’d never seen in person as people passed by laughing and posing for pictures. Part of me envied their innocence; another part was ashamed of them, and of me for wanting to be like them, and of the distance between us.
But necessity forced me to move on and ignore those thoughts. I found a job, I dated, I made new friends, and I spent time with family. I pretended to be the man everyone expected me to be again after the war. But the memories remained.
I reached those milestones others measured their life by, but they meant nothing to me. As the thoughts became more demanding, I dismissed them with distractions. I worked longer hours, broke up with partners, sought different friends to replace the old. But like that nightmare in which the harder you run, the slower you move, the thoughts were impossible to evade.
Now with the hangover after a night of drinking alone comes the stabbing thought: Did I survive the war for this? The once simple pleasure of an idle Sunday is undeserved because it has been paid for by the fallen and is no longer mine alone to spend. My dreams have been replaced by memories.
The past isn’t a psychological problem that can be medicated, changed or forgotten; it’s all I am. Those times when I do forget, it’s the forgetting itself that feels wrong. The actions and decisions I made at war are the most important thing I have. After all, I wasn’t a victim but a collaborator.
It’s not guilt, shame or regret but that feeling of having done a terrible duty. And when it ended, the only thing left was to shoulder the burden and keep walking in the long line of march as we’d trained to do so many times before. A person can bear any burden for a good enough reason, but the more the weight digs into my shoulders, the less I recall why I joined in the first place.
I’d written a letter on the eve of my deployment, in case I was killed, and it’s the last evidence I have of who I was before the war and why I fought. The first paragraph reads, “It was worth it,” then it continues about honor, duty and patriotism before closing with a final farewell and a request for burial at Arlington.
“It was worth it.” The words reverberate. The weight feels a little heavier, and I whisper them like a mantra and continue marching. But now the war is ending, and those words are enigmatic.
Was it worth it? Everything has been because I’d been able to answer yes to that question. But what if the answer is no?
For a long time, my faith that the war might be won quieted moments of doubt. I’d been back for only a few weeks when one evening I received message after message telling me to turn on the television. President Barack Obama announced that we’d finally killed Osama bin Laden, and the news cut to crowds outside the White House and ground zero, cheering. After almost a decade of war, it could end.
I remember I once asked a village elder whether he knew why I was there. He responded that we’d always been there. Confused, I asked him about the attacks on America. He said, “But you are Russians, no?” After 30 years of war, it didn’t matter to him who was fighting but only that there was still fighting.
And what of the Afghan people, who will remain at war long after we leave? What of the kids who followed us on patrol and attended the schools we built? Did they grow up to be Taliban, just as our children grew old enough to fight in this war?
My first night in Afghanistan, a platoon sergeant told me he stayed awake each night thinking about what the children playing barefoot in the dirty, bomb-strewn roads dreamed about at night. After seven months, he had no answer. When my deployment ended, I too was no closer to an answer.
But now I know: They dream of war.
As time goes by, the most meaningful part of my life — and only its prologue — is being erased by time, by the enemy and even by my country. Although Afghanistan will dominate a few headlines now that it is ending, it no longer leads the evening news, and when it does appear in print, it’s buried deep in the back pages along with the rest of the violence that happens only to people in other countries. Unable or unwilling to solve the problem, the average American is once again content to forget it exists, just as we were on Sept. 10, 2001.
But to me it feels wrong to forget or to move on. Maybe that’s because the only recourse I have left is to remember. I am terrified of the day when I will have the final memory of what happened over there — not because it will be my last but because it will pass unnoticed. The dead, like the war, will finally be forgotten, and there will be nothing to mark their grave.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/14/opin ... e=Homepage
I Fought in Afghanistan. I Still Wonder, Was It Worth It?
Re: I Fought in Afghanistan. I Still Wonder, Was It Worth It?
The Afghanistan War Will End as It Began: In Blood
Ambassador Roya Rahmani.Credit...Lexey Swall for The New York Times
May 5, 2021
By Elliot Ackerman
Mr. Ackerman, a former Marine and intelligence officer who served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, is a contributing Opinion writer.
This past week saw a spate of violence as the Biden administration began its withdrawal from Afghanistan. On Friday, a truck laden with explosives detonated south of Kabul, killing 27. On Saturday, a professor at Kabul University was fatally shot, and that same day Kandahar airfield came under rocket attack.
Last month, when President Biden first announced the withdrawal, I was having lunch with the Afghan ambassador to the United States, Roya Rahmani. I fought in Afghanistan and over the past couple of years Ambassador Rahmani and I have become friends, periodically catching up over a meal.
Her phone was ringing as we stepped into the dining room at her residence in Washington. With typical Afghan hospitality, we sat down to what turned out was a meal for one, as she would not be eating, in observance of Ramadan. Then, as a steward brought my first course, her phone rang again. This call she had to take. It was the foreign minister. She excused herself as the two of them crafted a statement for her to deliver to the Biden administration. So I sat alone, picking at the vegetables on my plate, in what felt like a dream.
Two days later, I went for an early-morning run with an old friend, whom I’ll call Jack. The two of us had served in Special Operations together, where he still works. Jack has spent so much time in Afghanistan that he holds a tribal membership and, as we passed by the fenced-off Capitol and down along the National Mall, I recounted my lunch, how odd that moment felt, and said, “I can’t believe that’s going to be my memory of how it all ended.”
Jack laughed, and with a doomy pragmatism, predicted that the war wasn’t going to end with a salad at the ambassador’s residence and a news conference by the president; it would end as it began: in blood.
Jack reminded me that removing the 3,500 American troops from Afghanistan is, in military terms, what’s called a “fighting withdrawal,” in which an army leaves the field while still in contact with the enemy. Of all the maneuvers an army can perform (advance, flank, defend, etc.), it is widely accepted that a fighting withdrawal is the most complex and difficult because you are neither attacking nor defending, and so are exceedingly vulnerable.
Unlike the withdrawal from Iraq, in which U.S. troops could drive through the desert into Kuwait as they did in 2011, and unlike the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, in which they could drive across a then-shared border, U.S. troops are currently marooned in Afghanistan, reliant on three principal U.S.-controlled airstrips (Bagram, Jalalabad, Kandahar), making their journey home all the more perilous.
Afghans have a very long memory. During my service there, elders often pointed not just to where they’d fought the Soviets, or to where their great-great-grandfathers had fought the British, but often even to the ruins of the fortresses where their ancestors had fought the armies of Alexander the Great.
Perhaps the most famous fighting withdrawal in Afghan history came at the end of the First Anglo-Afghan War in 1842. That conflict began with a resounding British victory, in 1839, and the installation of a sympathetic government. But that government collapsed, leading to an uprising in Kabul.
Like the U.S. Army today, the British found themselves geographically marooned, and secured favorable terms for withdrawal from their adversaries, but when their column — around 16,500 soldiers and camp followers — left the gates of Kabul on their way to Jalalabad, the Afghans descended, slaughtering all except one: an army surgeon, William Brydon. When Dr. Brydon — the original Lone Survivor — arrived on horseback at the gates of Jalalabad, near death himself, with part of his skull sheared off, a sentry asked him where the army was, to which he responded, “I am the army.”
Although the Soviet army avoided this fate a century later, the regime it left behind fared little better. Mohammad Najibullah, an infamous torturer and former head of Afghanistan’s intelligence service, the KHAD, as well as a K.B.G. agent, had been installed by the Soviets as president and was able to hold onto power for more than two years after they left. As the Soviet Union collapsed, its financial support of his regime evaporated. Mr. Najibullah was soon deposed and eventually found himself at the end of a Taliban executioner’s rope when they took control of Kabul. Which raises the question of how long the United States will continue to support the government of President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan after our withdrawal. One year? Two? Three? What is the “decent interval,” to borrow Nixon’s phrase from our calamitous withdrawal from Vietnam?
As Jack and I ran, we discussed this history and other complex aspects of America’s withdrawal: how many senior members of the Afghan government possessed dual citizenship and would likely depart the country, leaving behind less capable subordinates to fill critical positions; the challenges of collapsing more remote outposts; and whether the State Department would grant visas to those Afghans who’d thrown their lot in with their government and us.
Jack concluded, “America might be done with Afghanistan, but Afghanistan isn’t done with America.” In his view, my lunch at the ambassador’s residence wouldn’t mark the end of the war at all. Not for me. Not for anyone.
After finishing her call, the ambassador apologized for being so inattentive. She confessed that she had an agenda item we hadn’t gotten to discuss. She wanted some advice as she was considering writing a book. Like those of the millions of Afghan girls we are now in the process of abandoning, her story is marked by war and overcoming an oppressive version of Islam championed by the Taliban, a personal journey that leads to a final chapter in which she is appointed as the first female Afghan ambassador to the United States. My advice to her was to keep notes, and I told her that she might not be ready to write that final chapter yet. Because she may not be remembered most for having been her government’s first female ambassador, but rather for having been, as it related to America, its last.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/opin ... e=Homepage
Ambassador Roya Rahmani.Credit...Lexey Swall for The New York Times
May 5, 2021
By Elliot Ackerman
Mr. Ackerman, a former Marine and intelligence officer who served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, is a contributing Opinion writer.
This past week saw a spate of violence as the Biden administration began its withdrawal from Afghanistan. On Friday, a truck laden with explosives detonated south of Kabul, killing 27. On Saturday, a professor at Kabul University was fatally shot, and that same day Kandahar airfield came under rocket attack.
Last month, when President Biden first announced the withdrawal, I was having lunch with the Afghan ambassador to the United States, Roya Rahmani. I fought in Afghanistan and over the past couple of years Ambassador Rahmani and I have become friends, periodically catching up over a meal.
Her phone was ringing as we stepped into the dining room at her residence in Washington. With typical Afghan hospitality, we sat down to what turned out was a meal for one, as she would not be eating, in observance of Ramadan. Then, as a steward brought my first course, her phone rang again. This call she had to take. It was the foreign minister. She excused herself as the two of them crafted a statement for her to deliver to the Biden administration. So I sat alone, picking at the vegetables on my plate, in what felt like a dream.
Two days later, I went for an early-morning run with an old friend, whom I’ll call Jack. The two of us had served in Special Operations together, where he still works. Jack has spent so much time in Afghanistan that he holds a tribal membership and, as we passed by the fenced-off Capitol and down along the National Mall, I recounted my lunch, how odd that moment felt, and said, “I can’t believe that’s going to be my memory of how it all ended.”
Jack laughed, and with a doomy pragmatism, predicted that the war wasn’t going to end with a salad at the ambassador’s residence and a news conference by the president; it would end as it began: in blood.
Jack reminded me that removing the 3,500 American troops from Afghanistan is, in military terms, what’s called a “fighting withdrawal,” in which an army leaves the field while still in contact with the enemy. Of all the maneuvers an army can perform (advance, flank, defend, etc.), it is widely accepted that a fighting withdrawal is the most complex and difficult because you are neither attacking nor defending, and so are exceedingly vulnerable.
Unlike the withdrawal from Iraq, in which U.S. troops could drive through the desert into Kuwait as they did in 2011, and unlike the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, in which they could drive across a then-shared border, U.S. troops are currently marooned in Afghanistan, reliant on three principal U.S.-controlled airstrips (Bagram, Jalalabad, Kandahar), making their journey home all the more perilous.
Afghans have a very long memory. During my service there, elders often pointed not just to where they’d fought the Soviets, or to where their great-great-grandfathers had fought the British, but often even to the ruins of the fortresses where their ancestors had fought the armies of Alexander the Great.
Perhaps the most famous fighting withdrawal in Afghan history came at the end of the First Anglo-Afghan War in 1842. That conflict began with a resounding British victory, in 1839, and the installation of a sympathetic government. But that government collapsed, leading to an uprising in Kabul.
Like the U.S. Army today, the British found themselves geographically marooned, and secured favorable terms for withdrawal from their adversaries, but when their column — around 16,500 soldiers and camp followers — left the gates of Kabul on their way to Jalalabad, the Afghans descended, slaughtering all except one: an army surgeon, William Brydon. When Dr. Brydon — the original Lone Survivor — arrived on horseback at the gates of Jalalabad, near death himself, with part of his skull sheared off, a sentry asked him where the army was, to which he responded, “I am the army.”
Although the Soviet army avoided this fate a century later, the regime it left behind fared little better. Mohammad Najibullah, an infamous torturer and former head of Afghanistan’s intelligence service, the KHAD, as well as a K.B.G. agent, had been installed by the Soviets as president and was able to hold onto power for more than two years after they left. As the Soviet Union collapsed, its financial support of his regime evaporated. Mr. Najibullah was soon deposed and eventually found himself at the end of a Taliban executioner’s rope when they took control of Kabul. Which raises the question of how long the United States will continue to support the government of President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan after our withdrawal. One year? Two? Three? What is the “decent interval,” to borrow Nixon’s phrase from our calamitous withdrawal from Vietnam?
As Jack and I ran, we discussed this history and other complex aspects of America’s withdrawal: how many senior members of the Afghan government possessed dual citizenship and would likely depart the country, leaving behind less capable subordinates to fill critical positions; the challenges of collapsing more remote outposts; and whether the State Department would grant visas to those Afghans who’d thrown their lot in with their government and us.
Jack concluded, “America might be done with Afghanistan, but Afghanistan isn’t done with America.” In his view, my lunch at the ambassador’s residence wouldn’t mark the end of the war at all. Not for me. Not for anyone.
After finishing her call, the ambassador apologized for being so inattentive. She confessed that she had an agenda item we hadn’t gotten to discuss. She wanted some advice as she was considering writing a book. Like those of the millions of Afghan girls we are now in the process of abandoning, her story is marked by war and overcoming an oppressive version of Islam championed by the Taliban, a personal journey that leads to a final chapter in which she is appointed as the first female Afghan ambassador to the United States. My advice to her was to keep notes, and I told her that she might not be ready to write that final chapter yet. Because she may not be remembered most for having been her government’s first female ambassador, but rather for having been, as it related to America, its last.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/opin ... e=Homepage
Re: I Fought in Afghanistan. I Still Wonder, Was It Worth It?
Afghans Fleeing Home Are Filling the Lowliest Jobs in Istanbul
After years working on American bases in Afghanistan and fearful of the Taliban, Afghans are heading to Turkey and Europe.
By Carlotta Gall
May 6, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET
ISTANBUL — In a derelict house in one of the oldest quarters of Istanbul, a group of Afghan migrants were welcoming new arrivals — two teenagers who had survived the perilous two-month journey on the migrant trail from Afghanistan.
“Wherever there is money and food,” said Idris, 18, in April. “Wherever we can earn money to send back to our families who are hungry, we will stay.” He and several other Afghans gave only one name, since they were in the country without documentation.
A former athlete from Kabul, he said they had just arrived overnight in Istanbul after a 60-hour trek over the mountains from Iran into Turkey. A high school student who came with him was hunched over a cellphone, calling his mother in Afghanistan.
The number of Afghans arriving in Turkey has soared over the last seven years as the United States and NATO forces have wound down their military presence. With the Taliban gaining strength and the last American forces preparing to leave this summer, more turmoil could force an even greater exodus, according to refugee officials and the migrants themselves.
More than 200,000 Afghans were caught entering Turkey illegally in 2019, many of whom were deported back to Afghanistan. But despite a reduction of overall numbers in the last year because of the pandemic, Afghans still represent by far the largest migrant group making the dangerous crossing by sea or land to Greece.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is among those calling for the Biden administration to set up a large visa program to manage an expected outpouring of Afghans after the disengagement of U.S. troops.
In one abandoned compound in Istanbul, 28 Afghans live in makeshift shelters eking out a living by scouring dumpsters for paper and plastic for recycling.
Afghans are the lowest in the pecking order of casual laborers who fill this teeming city of 20 million. As many as 200,000 are living in Turkey, according to refugee officials. They make up the second-largest migrant group in the country, after Syrians and are by far the most impoverished. They do the lowliest jobs while risking frequent detention and deportation by the Turkish police.
Across the city in a neighborhood of condemned housing, another group of Afghans sat on blankets on the floor in a tiny hallway to break fast together for Ramadan. Trained electricians and plasterers from years working on military bases in Afghanistan, they now work as illegal subcontractors in Turkey, often going unpaid for months.
They said they all had to abandon their families and homes because of threats from the Taliban for their work with the American military or American contracting companies.
“The Taliban were getting closer to our village. That was the main reason,” said Najibullah Qarqin, 25, who worked as an electrician for four years on U.S. bases and diplomatic compounds. “This is why I am here, because of security.”
Ethnic Turkmens from northwestern Afghanistan, he and his friends worked for Turkish and American contractors building military bases around the country for as many as eight years. Mr. Qarqin and several others had even worked on U.S. Embassy buildings in Kabul and in Nouakchott, Mauritania.
Their employers told them they would take them to America at the end of the contract under the Special Immigrant Visa program, Mr. Qarqin said, which allows for some Afghans who worked for the American military or some American companies to resettle in the United States. But with no jobs and violence escalating, it seemed safer to leave immediately for Turkey.
“Some friends made it,” he said. “They are in America now.”
Work dried up in 2014 as the United States began winding down its involvement in Afghanistan and transferring responsibility for security to the Afghan government. The group of friends made their way to Turkey, some legally through the Turkish companies that had hired them in Afghanistan, and some making the two-month trek mostly on foot with smugglers from southern Afghanistan through Pakistan and Iran to Turkey.
Juma Muradi, 44, a painter and plasterer, said he had made the dangerous journey three times after being deported by the Turkish authorities twice. The last trip was the hardest, he said, as stricter border patrols forced the smugglers to take them higher into the mountains. He passed the bodies of two Afghans from an earlier group — they had died on the trail. Of the 200 in his group, most were detained by border guards, he said, and only 40 made it through to Turkey.
“If there was peace in my country, I would never take this risk,” he said.
Yet after six years helping build American military bases around the country, he had ended up jobless, watching the Taliban taking over his rural district of Andkhoi in northwestern Afghanistan, and sought work abroad. He now shares a three-room house with seven others in a rundown neighborhood that is scheduled for demolition.
Mr. Muradi said he worried for his wife and four children on their own at home, since he had no immediate family there to protect them. The Taliban are a mile from his home and have traded mortar fire with government forces sometimes hitting the village, he said.
Their village no longer has cellphone service, so he can talk to his family only when they climb a nearby mountain to catch a signal, he said.
Turkey provides a safe refuge at least, but for many it is just a staging post where they can earn money for the next leap to Europe. Most said they were barely surviving. The group of Turkmens have an advantage in that they can speak Turkish, which is close to their own language. But all of them said the fear of deportation made working in Turkey untenable in the long term.
“There is not enough work here, and when there is work, they do not pay you on time,” said Nurullah Mohammadi, 26, an electrician. The pandemic has deepened Turkey’s economic recession, and some contractors are up to a year behind in payments, he said.
The electricians were working on a hospital project, but without work permits they were working illegally as subcontractors, accepting lower wages, 10-hour shifts and no insurance or social security. Even those who arrived legally on visas are not entitled to work or to set up their own business.
“The lira lost its value, so now when we send money home it is worth much less than before, and things are very expensive here,” said Baba Geldi, 39, who worked on American construction projects at the Kabul and Kandahar airports.
He, like many other Afghans, said he planned to move on from Turkey to Europe, but the legal avenues are few. Smugglers’ prices to Europe have soared to as much as $6,000 per person as border controls have tightened, but touts openly negotiate with Afghans seeking passage to Europe on one of Istanbul’s main squares.
Yet returning to Afghanistan is not an option for many of those who worked for the Americans. The Taliban control the road to Mr. Mohammadi’s village, he said, so his family has already been forced to leave and moved to Kabul, the capital. “I would rather stay in my home country, but I cannot,” he said.
Most of the men in the recycling yard are waiting for the end of the fasting month to head for Europe. They have few belongings and barely a change of clothes each, and share the strongest pair of shoes for work. They have a few phones between them, and Idris was trying to sell his to send the money home to his family.
“Some will die, some will be deported,” said Muhammad Haroon, 19, who had trained as a teacher but has been collecting garbage in Istanbul for more than two years.
Most of the Afghans expressed deep disappointment at the failure of the American intervention in Afghanistan.
“When they came, they said they would eliminate terrorism and destroy Al Qaeda,” said Mr. Muradi. “At that time, there were very few Taliban, but now there are thousands and thousands of them and I am feeling angry. What have the Americans done to our country?”
Like many Afghans, he called on the United States to put pressure on Pakistan to cease its support for the Taliban.
“The world knows we have been at war for 40 years,” he said, “and the world should have mercy on us to stop the war.”
Ruhullah Khapalwak contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/06/worl ... e=Homepage
After years working on American bases in Afghanistan and fearful of the Taliban, Afghans are heading to Turkey and Europe.
By Carlotta Gall
May 6, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET
ISTANBUL — In a derelict house in one of the oldest quarters of Istanbul, a group of Afghan migrants were welcoming new arrivals — two teenagers who had survived the perilous two-month journey on the migrant trail from Afghanistan.
“Wherever there is money and food,” said Idris, 18, in April. “Wherever we can earn money to send back to our families who are hungry, we will stay.” He and several other Afghans gave only one name, since they were in the country without documentation.
A former athlete from Kabul, he said they had just arrived overnight in Istanbul after a 60-hour trek over the mountains from Iran into Turkey. A high school student who came with him was hunched over a cellphone, calling his mother in Afghanistan.
The number of Afghans arriving in Turkey has soared over the last seven years as the United States and NATO forces have wound down their military presence. With the Taliban gaining strength and the last American forces preparing to leave this summer, more turmoil could force an even greater exodus, according to refugee officials and the migrants themselves.
More than 200,000 Afghans were caught entering Turkey illegally in 2019, many of whom were deported back to Afghanistan. But despite a reduction of overall numbers in the last year because of the pandemic, Afghans still represent by far the largest migrant group making the dangerous crossing by sea or land to Greece.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is among those calling for the Biden administration to set up a large visa program to manage an expected outpouring of Afghans after the disengagement of U.S. troops.
In one abandoned compound in Istanbul, 28 Afghans live in makeshift shelters eking out a living by scouring dumpsters for paper and plastic for recycling.
Afghans are the lowest in the pecking order of casual laborers who fill this teeming city of 20 million. As many as 200,000 are living in Turkey, according to refugee officials. They make up the second-largest migrant group in the country, after Syrians and are by far the most impoverished. They do the lowliest jobs while risking frequent detention and deportation by the Turkish police.
Across the city in a neighborhood of condemned housing, another group of Afghans sat on blankets on the floor in a tiny hallway to break fast together for Ramadan. Trained electricians and plasterers from years working on military bases in Afghanistan, they now work as illegal subcontractors in Turkey, often going unpaid for months.
They said they all had to abandon their families and homes because of threats from the Taliban for their work with the American military or American contracting companies.
“The Taliban were getting closer to our village. That was the main reason,” said Najibullah Qarqin, 25, who worked as an electrician for four years on U.S. bases and diplomatic compounds. “This is why I am here, because of security.”
Ethnic Turkmens from northwestern Afghanistan, he and his friends worked for Turkish and American contractors building military bases around the country for as many as eight years. Mr. Qarqin and several others had even worked on U.S. Embassy buildings in Kabul and in Nouakchott, Mauritania.
Their employers told them they would take them to America at the end of the contract under the Special Immigrant Visa program, Mr. Qarqin said, which allows for some Afghans who worked for the American military or some American companies to resettle in the United States. But with no jobs and violence escalating, it seemed safer to leave immediately for Turkey.
“Some friends made it,” he said. “They are in America now.”
Work dried up in 2014 as the United States began winding down its involvement in Afghanistan and transferring responsibility for security to the Afghan government. The group of friends made their way to Turkey, some legally through the Turkish companies that had hired them in Afghanistan, and some making the two-month trek mostly on foot with smugglers from southern Afghanistan through Pakistan and Iran to Turkey.
Juma Muradi, 44, a painter and plasterer, said he had made the dangerous journey three times after being deported by the Turkish authorities twice. The last trip was the hardest, he said, as stricter border patrols forced the smugglers to take them higher into the mountains. He passed the bodies of two Afghans from an earlier group — they had died on the trail. Of the 200 in his group, most were detained by border guards, he said, and only 40 made it through to Turkey.
“If there was peace in my country, I would never take this risk,” he said.
Yet after six years helping build American military bases around the country, he had ended up jobless, watching the Taliban taking over his rural district of Andkhoi in northwestern Afghanistan, and sought work abroad. He now shares a three-room house with seven others in a rundown neighborhood that is scheduled for demolition.
Mr. Muradi said he worried for his wife and four children on their own at home, since he had no immediate family there to protect them. The Taliban are a mile from his home and have traded mortar fire with government forces sometimes hitting the village, he said.
Their village no longer has cellphone service, so he can talk to his family only when they climb a nearby mountain to catch a signal, he said.
Turkey provides a safe refuge at least, but for many it is just a staging post where they can earn money for the next leap to Europe. Most said they were barely surviving. The group of Turkmens have an advantage in that they can speak Turkish, which is close to their own language. But all of them said the fear of deportation made working in Turkey untenable in the long term.
“There is not enough work here, and when there is work, they do not pay you on time,” said Nurullah Mohammadi, 26, an electrician. The pandemic has deepened Turkey’s economic recession, and some contractors are up to a year behind in payments, he said.
The electricians were working on a hospital project, but without work permits they were working illegally as subcontractors, accepting lower wages, 10-hour shifts and no insurance or social security. Even those who arrived legally on visas are not entitled to work or to set up their own business.
“The lira lost its value, so now when we send money home it is worth much less than before, and things are very expensive here,” said Baba Geldi, 39, who worked on American construction projects at the Kabul and Kandahar airports.
He, like many other Afghans, said he planned to move on from Turkey to Europe, but the legal avenues are few. Smugglers’ prices to Europe have soared to as much as $6,000 per person as border controls have tightened, but touts openly negotiate with Afghans seeking passage to Europe on one of Istanbul’s main squares.
Yet returning to Afghanistan is not an option for many of those who worked for the Americans. The Taliban control the road to Mr. Mohammadi’s village, he said, so his family has already been forced to leave and moved to Kabul, the capital. “I would rather stay in my home country, but I cannot,” he said.
Most of the men in the recycling yard are waiting for the end of the fasting month to head for Europe. They have few belongings and barely a change of clothes each, and share the strongest pair of shoes for work. They have a few phones between them, and Idris was trying to sell his to send the money home to his family.
“Some will die, some will be deported,” said Muhammad Haroon, 19, who had trained as a teacher but has been collecting garbage in Istanbul for more than two years.
Most of the Afghans expressed deep disappointment at the failure of the American intervention in Afghanistan.
“When they came, they said they would eliminate terrorism and destroy Al Qaeda,” said Mr. Muradi. “At that time, there were very few Taliban, but now there are thousands and thousands of them and I am feeling angry. What have the Americans done to our country?”
Like many Afghans, he called on the United States to put pressure on Pakistan to cease its support for the Taliban.
“The world knows we have been at war for 40 years,” he said, “and the world should have mercy on us to stop the war.”
Ruhullah Khapalwak contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/06/worl ... e=Homepage
Re: I Fought in Afghanistan. I Still Wonder, Was It Worth It?
A City Under Siege: What the War Looks Like on Afghanistan’s Front Line
As bullets from a Taliban machine gun ricocheted through the street below, an Afghan soldier wearing an “I Heart Kabul” T-shirt took a brief rest. “There has been fighting day and night.”
By Thomas Gibbons-Neff
May 13, 2021
LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan — The war is just on the other side of this wall, a partly destroyed cinder block barricade in southern Afghanistan.
A week ago, a family lived in a house on the property. They have since fled, and their home has been converted into a fighting position held by a half-dozen soldiers, along with their spent shell casings and empty energy drink cans.
The roof terrace is pockmarked from a rocket-propelled grenade explosion, and there are holes bored out of the mud brick for machine guns and rifles to fire through.
“There has been fighting day and night,” said Cpl. Hamza, 28, an Afghan border force soldier who had been compelled into holding this position — far from any border — after the police and local militias fled.
It is the front line in a now abandoned neighborhood still within the city limits of Lashkar Gah. Bullets from a Taliban machine gun ricocheted through the street below, and the dull thud of grenades shook the large ornate mirror in the room where Corporal Hamza had gone in to briefly rest.
As commandos arrived to reinforce the position, a burst of automatic weapons fire narrowly missed the soldiers disembarking one of the armored vehicles. One bullet punctured a tire, a few hit the steel hull and others kicked up dirt as the troops ran for cover.
Corporal Hamza, who goes by one name, fired his American-supplied M16 rifle at enemy positions across the street. Under his vest that carried his ammunition, he wore a black T-shirt that read “I Heart Kabul.”
When the Taliban pushed toward the city last week — whether they had paid off the police or cut deals with them prompting those positions to quickly collapse — Corporal Hamza and his motley crew of border force soldiers became the last government forces separating the Taliban from the city. (A Taliban official said many of the police officers had been paid off.)
This may be the closest the Taliban have ever gotten to taking Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital of Helmand Province, which is the Taliban’s heartland and a volatile swath of territory that has become synonymous with the U.S. and British military’s failures in Afghanistan over the last 20 years.
At one point last week after the offensive began, the Helmand River was the only barrier keeping the Taliban from overrunning government positions until American and Afghan airstrikes and Afghan troops pushed the Taliban back. The city’s airport shut down to commercial traffic because of mortar and rocket fire, and more than 1,000 families have fled into the more defensible city center.
As the American withdrawal got underway, the Taliban began their latest offensive on the provincial capital on May 1, a date that tied neatly with the poor weather and blowing dust that prevented air support from stopping them. The insurgents struck elsewhere in the country at roughly the same time, taking several Afghan Army bases in the north.
Capt. Shir Agha Safi, an intelligence officer who moves around Helmand Province, had not come to terms with the planned U.S. departure, because the Americans, their foreign-sounding names, and aircraft and drones are still ingrained into almost every part of the war.
“They won’t leave us,” Captain Safi said of the Americans, convinced that the withdrawal was not really happening.
Almost every day Captain Safi talks to the U.S. Army captain who helped him for months by coordinating airstrikes from nearby Camp New Antonik, a scab of a base built between the ruins of Bastion and Leatherneck, former British and American installations that are now decaying relics of the war’s last chapter.
The American flag folded for the last time at Antonik on May 2, leaving freezers full of apple pies, chicken and bean burritos, boxes of medical supplies and fluorescent glow sticks that have since been harvested by Afghan forces nearby. The smell of musk and body odor still lingered in the rooms once inhabited by American troops when the Afghan soldiers came to retrieve anything left behind.
Captain Safi’s link to the U.S. military is now back at Bagram, a sprawling base in Afghanistan that will become one of the United States’ last before the country fully withdraws sometime this summer. Despite his geographical distance, the American captain continues to help direct airstrikes as a key member of a WhatsApp group: the Helmand Targeting Team. The group chat of messages, pictures and grid coordinates is a virtual meeting room for Afghan and American forces planning daily bombing runs in the province.
Around noon on Monday, the day was heating up as Captain Safi stared out over the Helmand River from one of the city’s military bases. Along the river banks, families bathed in the water and children played in the shade. Around him, commandos prepared for their next mission. Some rested under their armored vehicles, others prepared their weapons and gear.
Above him an Afghan A-29, a single prop bomber, swooped down over the western bank of the river, dropping a 250-pound Mk-81 unguided bomb on, what Captain Safi said, was a group of Taliban fighters trying to position themselves to strike the airport.
The plume of smoke, shock wave and finally audible blast barely caught the attention of those enjoying the warm day along the river bank. Traffic moved steadily into the city, busier than usual because of the approaching Eid holiday commemorating the end of Ramadan. Nobody bothered to leave as the flight of aircraft returned three more times, steering into a dive to drop the remaining ordnance hooked under their wings. It would take more than an airstrike to cut this day short for these families who so far had refused to flee.
As the planes departed and the smoke drifted lazily into the air, Captain Safi laid back on a green cot and put his hand to his temple, exhausted. At 28, he had been in the military for 11 years.
“It has been a tough decade,” he said.
It may only get worse. Staring at a map of Lashkar Gah in his command center earlier in the day, Captain Safi gestured at the little blue dots that denoted police checkpoints in the surrounding area — arguably the Afghan government’s front line.
“Ninety percent of them are gone,” Captain Safi said, and he turned back to his radio.
Now, supported by armored personnel carriers outfitted with automatic grenade launchers and heavy machine guns and the better-trained mobile strike team commandos that crew the hulking vehicles, Corporal Hamza and his gang of border forces soldiers were waiting to clear the surrounding neighborhoods still firmly in Taliban hands. The modest goal: to give Lashkar Gah a slightly bigger security bubble of government presence.
But until the police returned to their positions, Corporal Hamza would have to stay on the line, doing a job that was supposed to be someone else’s. His bushy-browed commander, Capt. Ezzatullah Tofan, laid it out plainly, showing a screenshot on his phone to his troops as the PKM machine gun on the roof fired away. The document, Captain Tofan said, indicated that the police and local militias would not return to their posts any time soon.
“You’ll have to keep fighting,” Captain Tofan explained. His men seemed strangely unfazed, as if they knew this had been coming or, at the least, resigned to their fate.
A three-day cease-fire was announced by both sides beginning Thursday to commemorate Eid, leaving the troops here incredulous. It was an excuse, they said, so the Taliban could move fighters and equipment back to the front lines without fear of being attacked.
When the cease-fire ends, the war will once more be on the other side of the wall.
“I’m happy for my family,” Corporal Hamza said of the holiday, “But I will be here.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/worl ... e=Homepage
As bullets from a Taliban machine gun ricocheted through the street below, an Afghan soldier wearing an “I Heart Kabul” T-shirt took a brief rest. “There has been fighting day and night.”
By Thomas Gibbons-Neff
May 13, 2021
LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan — The war is just on the other side of this wall, a partly destroyed cinder block barricade in southern Afghanistan.
A week ago, a family lived in a house on the property. They have since fled, and their home has been converted into a fighting position held by a half-dozen soldiers, along with their spent shell casings and empty energy drink cans.
The roof terrace is pockmarked from a rocket-propelled grenade explosion, and there are holes bored out of the mud brick for machine guns and rifles to fire through.
“There has been fighting day and night,” said Cpl. Hamza, 28, an Afghan border force soldier who had been compelled into holding this position — far from any border — after the police and local militias fled.
It is the front line in a now abandoned neighborhood still within the city limits of Lashkar Gah. Bullets from a Taliban machine gun ricocheted through the street below, and the dull thud of grenades shook the large ornate mirror in the room where Corporal Hamza had gone in to briefly rest.
As commandos arrived to reinforce the position, a burst of automatic weapons fire narrowly missed the soldiers disembarking one of the armored vehicles. One bullet punctured a tire, a few hit the steel hull and others kicked up dirt as the troops ran for cover.
Corporal Hamza, who goes by one name, fired his American-supplied M16 rifle at enemy positions across the street. Under his vest that carried his ammunition, he wore a black T-shirt that read “I Heart Kabul.”
When the Taliban pushed toward the city last week — whether they had paid off the police or cut deals with them prompting those positions to quickly collapse — Corporal Hamza and his motley crew of border force soldiers became the last government forces separating the Taliban from the city. (A Taliban official said many of the police officers had been paid off.)
This may be the closest the Taliban have ever gotten to taking Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital of Helmand Province, which is the Taliban’s heartland and a volatile swath of territory that has become synonymous with the U.S. and British military’s failures in Afghanistan over the last 20 years.
At one point last week after the offensive began, the Helmand River was the only barrier keeping the Taliban from overrunning government positions until American and Afghan airstrikes and Afghan troops pushed the Taliban back. The city’s airport shut down to commercial traffic because of mortar and rocket fire, and more than 1,000 families have fled into the more defensible city center.
As the American withdrawal got underway, the Taliban began their latest offensive on the provincial capital on May 1, a date that tied neatly with the poor weather and blowing dust that prevented air support from stopping them. The insurgents struck elsewhere in the country at roughly the same time, taking several Afghan Army bases in the north.
Capt. Shir Agha Safi, an intelligence officer who moves around Helmand Province, had not come to terms with the planned U.S. departure, because the Americans, their foreign-sounding names, and aircraft and drones are still ingrained into almost every part of the war.
“They won’t leave us,” Captain Safi said of the Americans, convinced that the withdrawal was not really happening.
Almost every day Captain Safi talks to the U.S. Army captain who helped him for months by coordinating airstrikes from nearby Camp New Antonik, a scab of a base built between the ruins of Bastion and Leatherneck, former British and American installations that are now decaying relics of the war’s last chapter.
The American flag folded for the last time at Antonik on May 2, leaving freezers full of apple pies, chicken and bean burritos, boxes of medical supplies and fluorescent glow sticks that have since been harvested by Afghan forces nearby. The smell of musk and body odor still lingered in the rooms once inhabited by American troops when the Afghan soldiers came to retrieve anything left behind.
Captain Safi’s link to the U.S. military is now back at Bagram, a sprawling base in Afghanistan that will become one of the United States’ last before the country fully withdraws sometime this summer. Despite his geographical distance, the American captain continues to help direct airstrikes as a key member of a WhatsApp group: the Helmand Targeting Team. The group chat of messages, pictures and grid coordinates is a virtual meeting room for Afghan and American forces planning daily bombing runs in the province.
Around noon on Monday, the day was heating up as Captain Safi stared out over the Helmand River from one of the city’s military bases. Along the river banks, families bathed in the water and children played in the shade. Around him, commandos prepared for their next mission. Some rested under their armored vehicles, others prepared their weapons and gear.
Above him an Afghan A-29, a single prop bomber, swooped down over the western bank of the river, dropping a 250-pound Mk-81 unguided bomb on, what Captain Safi said, was a group of Taliban fighters trying to position themselves to strike the airport.
The plume of smoke, shock wave and finally audible blast barely caught the attention of those enjoying the warm day along the river bank. Traffic moved steadily into the city, busier than usual because of the approaching Eid holiday commemorating the end of Ramadan. Nobody bothered to leave as the flight of aircraft returned three more times, steering into a dive to drop the remaining ordnance hooked under their wings. It would take more than an airstrike to cut this day short for these families who so far had refused to flee.
As the planes departed and the smoke drifted lazily into the air, Captain Safi laid back on a green cot and put his hand to his temple, exhausted. At 28, he had been in the military for 11 years.
“It has been a tough decade,” he said.
It may only get worse. Staring at a map of Lashkar Gah in his command center earlier in the day, Captain Safi gestured at the little blue dots that denoted police checkpoints in the surrounding area — arguably the Afghan government’s front line.
“Ninety percent of them are gone,” Captain Safi said, and he turned back to his radio.
Now, supported by armored personnel carriers outfitted with automatic grenade launchers and heavy machine guns and the better-trained mobile strike team commandos that crew the hulking vehicles, Corporal Hamza and his gang of border forces soldiers were waiting to clear the surrounding neighborhoods still firmly in Taliban hands. The modest goal: to give Lashkar Gah a slightly bigger security bubble of government presence.
But until the police returned to their positions, Corporal Hamza would have to stay on the line, doing a job that was supposed to be someone else’s. His bushy-browed commander, Capt. Ezzatullah Tofan, laid it out plainly, showing a screenshot on his phone to his troops as the PKM machine gun on the roof fired away. The document, Captain Tofan said, indicated that the police and local militias would not return to their posts any time soon.
“You’ll have to keep fighting,” Captain Tofan explained. His men seemed strangely unfazed, as if they knew this had been coming or, at the least, resigned to their fate.
A three-day cease-fire was announced by both sides beginning Thursday to commemorate Eid, leaving the troops here incredulous. It was an excuse, they said, so the Taliban could move fighters and equipment back to the front lines without fear of being attacked.
When the cease-fire ends, the war will once more be on the other side of the wall.
“I’m happy for my family,” Corporal Hamza said of the holiday, “But I will be here.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/worl ... e=Homepage
Re: I Fought in Afghanistan. I Still Wonder, Was It Worth It?
Taliban Seize Kunduz, a Major Afghan City
Kunduz is the first major city to be overtaken by the Taliban since U.S. troops began their withdrawal from the country.
KABUL, Afghanistan — The Taliban seized the city of Kunduz in northern Afghanistan on Sunday, officials said. It is the first major city to be overtaken by the insurgents since they began their sweeping military offensive in May.
It was the third provincial capital to be overtaken by Taliban in three days, and the series of victories in cities marks a significant change in the insurgents’ offensive as international troops, led by the United States, began withdrawing from Afghanistan.
Kunduz, the capital of a province of the same name, is a significant military and political prize. With a population of 374,000, it is a vital commercial hub near the border with Tajikistan.
“All security forces fled to the airport, and the situation is critical,” said Sayed Jawad Hussaini, the deputy police chief of a district in Kunduz city.
Clashes between government forces and Taliban fighters were continuing in a small town south of the city, where the local army headquarters and the airport are, security officials said.
Security forces, who had retreated to the town earlier in the morning, were preparing a military operation to flush Taliban fighters out of the strategic city on Sunday afternoon, according to security officials.
In the two preceding days, the Taliban had taken two other provincial capitals: Sheberghan, the capital of Jowzjan Province, and Zaranj, the capital of Nimruz Province on the Afghanistan-Iran border. As Kunduz was collapsing on Sunday morning, the Taliban also seized Sar-i-Pul, the capital of a northern province of the same name, officials said.
“Taliban are walking in the streets of the city. Local residents are terrified,” said Sayed Asadullah Danish, a member of the Sar-i-Pul provincial council. Provincial officials had taken shelter in an army base on the outskirts of the city, where clashes were continuing, he added.
After sweeping through the country’s rural areas, the insurgents’ military campaign has shifted to brutal urban combat in recent weeks. They have pushed into cities like Kandahar and Lashkar Gah in the south and Herat in the west.
The strategy has exhausted the Afghan government’s forces and overwhelmed the local militia forces that the government has used to supplement its own troops, a move reminiscent of the chaotic and ethnically divided civil war of the 1990s.
“We are so tired, and the security forces are so tired,” said Mr. Hussaini, the police official in Kunduz. “At the same time we hadn’t received reinforcements and aircraft did not target the Taliban on time.”
The Taliban briefly seized Kunduz in 2015 and again in 2016, gaining control of a province for the first time since American forces invaded in 2001. Both times, Afghan forces pushed back the insurgents with help from American airstrikes. Kunduz is also where an American gunship mistakenly attacked a Doctors Without Borders hospital in 2015, killing 42 people.
On Sunday, after a night of heavy fighting, Taliban fighters flooded into the streets of Kunduz and raised their flag over its main square, a video recorded by a resident showed. Two of the city’s main markets, where shopkeepers sell fabrics and footwear, caught fire, sending dark plumes of smoke over the city.
Since the U.S. withdrawal began, the Taliban have captured more than half of Afghanistan’s 400-odd districts, according to some assessments. Their attacks on provincial capitals have violated the 2020 peace deal between the Taliban and the United States. Under that deal, which precipitated the American withdrawal from the country, the Taliban committed to not attacking provincial centers like Kunduz.
An escalation of American airstrikes against the Taliban in recent weeks was an attempt to ensure the group’s adherence to the deal. That effort appears to have failed, and the peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government have become all but an afterthought as the insurgents push for a military victory throughout Afghanistan.
— Christina Goldbaum, Najim Rahim, Sharif Hassan and Thomas Gibbons-Neff
The withdrawal of U.S. troops helped the Taliban seize territory and control.
With almost all U.S. forces out of Afghanistan, the Taliban mounted a summer-long military campaign that has forced widespread surrenders and retreats by Afghan government forces.
By late July, the Taliban had seized control of approximately half of the country’s roughly 400 districts. Government troops abandoned scores of outposts and bases, often leaving behind weapons and equipment. In many cases, they surrendered without a fight, sometimes after the intercession of village elders dispatched by the Taliban.
The Taliban military victories, especially in northern Afghanistan, where opposition to the militants has traditionally been strongest, provided a violent coda to the U.S. military mission in America’s longest war.
President Biden, declaring that the United States had long ago accomplished its mission of denying terrorists a safe haven in Afghanistan, said in April that all American troops would leave the country by Sept. 11. That date has since been moved up to Aug. 31, at which time the White House has said that all military operations against the Taliban will cease. Troops from NATO countries also have withdrawn.
Mr. Biden conceded that after nearly 20 years of war, America’s longest on foreign soil, it was clear that the U.S. military could not transform Afghanistan into a modern, stable democracy.
Mr. Biden’s decision to withdraw American troops followed a 2020 agreement signed between the Trump administration and the Taliban that called for all American forces to leave Afghanistan by May 1 of this year. In return, the Taliban pledged to cut ties with terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan, reduce violence and negotiate with the American-backed Afghan government.
The primary objectives of the 2020 deal were for Afghan leaders and the Taliban to negotiate a political road map for a new government and constitution, reduce violence and ultimately forge a lasting cease-fire.
But violence continued as the Taliban raced across Afghanistan, securing strategic victories and raising questions about the country’s short-lived experiment with democracy, gender equality and the rejection of extremism.
— David Zucchino
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/08/08 ... ve-updates
Kunduz is the first major city to be overtaken by the Taliban since U.S. troops began their withdrawal from the country.
KABUL, Afghanistan — The Taliban seized the city of Kunduz in northern Afghanistan on Sunday, officials said. It is the first major city to be overtaken by the insurgents since they began their sweeping military offensive in May.
It was the third provincial capital to be overtaken by Taliban in three days, and the series of victories in cities marks a significant change in the insurgents’ offensive as international troops, led by the United States, began withdrawing from Afghanistan.
Kunduz, the capital of a province of the same name, is a significant military and political prize. With a population of 374,000, it is a vital commercial hub near the border with Tajikistan.
“All security forces fled to the airport, and the situation is critical,” said Sayed Jawad Hussaini, the deputy police chief of a district in Kunduz city.
Clashes between government forces and Taliban fighters were continuing in a small town south of the city, where the local army headquarters and the airport are, security officials said.
Security forces, who had retreated to the town earlier in the morning, were preparing a military operation to flush Taliban fighters out of the strategic city on Sunday afternoon, according to security officials.
In the two preceding days, the Taliban had taken two other provincial capitals: Sheberghan, the capital of Jowzjan Province, and Zaranj, the capital of Nimruz Province on the Afghanistan-Iran border. As Kunduz was collapsing on Sunday morning, the Taliban also seized Sar-i-Pul, the capital of a northern province of the same name, officials said.
“Taliban are walking in the streets of the city. Local residents are terrified,” said Sayed Asadullah Danish, a member of the Sar-i-Pul provincial council. Provincial officials had taken shelter in an army base on the outskirts of the city, where clashes were continuing, he added.
After sweeping through the country’s rural areas, the insurgents’ military campaign has shifted to brutal urban combat in recent weeks. They have pushed into cities like Kandahar and Lashkar Gah in the south and Herat in the west.
The strategy has exhausted the Afghan government’s forces and overwhelmed the local militia forces that the government has used to supplement its own troops, a move reminiscent of the chaotic and ethnically divided civil war of the 1990s.
“We are so tired, and the security forces are so tired,” said Mr. Hussaini, the police official in Kunduz. “At the same time we hadn’t received reinforcements and aircraft did not target the Taliban on time.”
The Taliban briefly seized Kunduz in 2015 and again in 2016, gaining control of a province for the first time since American forces invaded in 2001. Both times, Afghan forces pushed back the insurgents with help from American airstrikes. Kunduz is also where an American gunship mistakenly attacked a Doctors Without Borders hospital in 2015, killing 42 people.
On Sunday, after a night of heavy fighting, Taliban fighters flooded into the streets of Kunduz and raised their flag over its main square, a video recorded by a resident showed. Two of the city’s main markets, where shopkeepers sell fabrics and footwear, caught fire, sending dark plumes of smoke over the city.
Since the U.S. withdrawal began, the Taliban have captured more than half of Afghanistan’s 400-odd districts, according to some assessments. Their attacks on provincial capitals have violated the 2020 peace deal between the Taliban and the United States. Under that deal, which precipitated the American withdrawal from the country, the Taliban committed to not attacking provincial centers like Kunduz.
An escalation of American airstrikes against the Taliban in recent weeks was an attempt to ensure the group’s adherence to the deal. That effort appears to have failed, and the peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government have become all but an afterthought as the insurgents push for a military victory throughout Afghanistan.
— Christina Goldbaum, Najim Rahim, Sharif Hassan and Thomas Gibbons-Neff
The withdrawal of U.S. troops helped the Taliban seize territory and control.
With almost all U.S. forces out of Afghanistan, the Taliban mounted a summer-long military campaign that has forced widespread surrenders and retreats by Afghan government forces.
By late July, the Taliban had seized control of approximately half of the country’s roughly 400 districts. Government troops abandoned scores of outposts and bases, often leaving behind weapons and equipment. In many cases, they surrendered without a fight, sometimes after the intercession of village elders dispatched by the Taliban.
The Taliban military victories, especially in northern Afghanistan, where opposition to the militants has traditionally been strongest, provided a violent coda to the U.S. military mission in America’s longest war.
President Biden, declaring that the United States had long ago accomplished its mission of denying terrorists a safe haven in Afghanistan, said in April that all American troops would leave the country by Sept. 11. That date has since been moved up to Aug. 31, at which time the White House has said that all military operations against the Taliban will cease. Troops from NATO countries also have withdrawn.
Mr. Biden conceded that after nearly 20 years of war, America’s longest on foreign soil, it was clear that the U.S. military could not transform Afghanistan into a modern, stable democracy.
Mr. Biden’s decision to withdraw American troops followed a 2020 agreement signed between the Trump administration and the Taliban that called for all American forces to leave Afghanistan by May 1 of this year. In return, the Taliban pledged to cut ties with terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan, reduce violence and negotiate with the American-backed Afghan government.
The primary objectives of the 2020 deal were for Afghan leaders and the Taliban to negotiate a political road map for a new government and constitution, reduce violence and ultimately forge a lasting cease-fire.
But violence continued as the Taliban raced across Afghanistan, securing strategic victories and raising questions about the country’s short-lived experiment with democracy, gender equality and the rejection of extremism.
— David Zucchino
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/08/08 ... ve-updates
Re: I Fought in Afghanistan. I Still Wonder, Was It Worth It?
Marines Prepare for Possible Evacuation of Americans in Afghanistan
With the Taliban sweeping across the country, U.S. officials say Kabul could fall in 30 days.
By Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Helene Cooper, Lara Jakes and Eric Schmitt
Aug. 12, 2021, 1:58 p.m. ET
KABUL, Afghanistan — The Pentagon is moving thousands of Marines into position for a possible evacuation of the American Embassy and U.S. citizens in Kabul as the Biden administration braces for a possible collapse of the Afghan government within 30 days, administration and military officials said.
The sharply deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, as the Taliban rapidly advance across the north and Afghan security forces battle to defend ever shrinking territory in the south and west, has forced the Defense Department to accelerate plans to get Americans out of the country. Officials say any evacuation will involve a robust use of American military force to move people to Hamid Karzai International Airport to waiting military transport planes and to protect them en route.
American negotiators are also trying to extract assurances from the Taliban that they will not attack the embassy if they overrun the capital, two American officials said.
On Thursday, the embassy sent the latest in a series of alarming alerts, urging Americans to “leave Afghanistan immediately using available commercial flight options.”
The 30-day estimate is one scenario and administration and military officials insist that the fall of Kabul might still be prevented if Afghan security forces can muster the resolve to put up more resistance. But while Afghan commandos have managed to continue fighting in some areas, they have largely folded in a number of northern provincial capitals.
The Taliban seized the strategic city of Ghazni, about 90 miles south of Kabul, on Thursday, putting the group in a better position to attack Kabul after its recent string of victories in the north.
And as Ghazni fell, Taliban fighters broke through multiple front lines in Kandahar, pushing deep into the city. As Afghanistan’s second-largest city, Kandahar is historically and strategically important. The Taliban, led by Mullah Mohammad Omar, began their insurgency there in the 1990s.
Herat, a city in western Afghanistan near the Iranian border, was also in an increasingly dangerous position as Taliban fighters flooded in.
A senior official in the Biden administration said in an interview that the Taliban might soon take Mazar-i-Sharif, the capital of Balkh Province and the country’s economic engine, which is now effectively surrounded by the Taliban. The fall of Mazar-i-Sharif and Kandahar, which has all but collapsed, the official said, could lead to a surrender of the Afghan government by September.
Another senior U.S. official described the mood in the White House as a combination of alarm and resignation — at the rapid pace of the Taliban offensive and the collapse of Afghan national forces, and over how the situation could continue to worsen. There has been a constant stream of video teleconference calls every day this week, the official said.
Three contingents of Marines are preparing for the possible evacuation of the American Embassy, officials said. A Marine battalion of several hundred is already on the embassy grounds, responsible for evacuating the embassy, which has 4,000 employees, including 1,400 Americans, officials said.
In addition, the Pentagon is moving a Marine expeditionary unit, with more than 2,000 Marines, into position closer to the air route over western Pakistan, known as the “boulevard,” where it can dispatch its forces into Afghanistan as a rapid response team that would be able to begin an embassy evacuation within a day of orders, officials said. And as a contingency plan in case any embassy evacuation turns into a fight with the Taliban, Defense Department officials have tasked thousands of Marines to begin a training exercise that can, if necessary, quickly be turned into an evacuation deployment, the officials said. The Marines in the exercise have been told that they may need to be ready to deploy next week within 96 hours, officials said.
Asked during a news conference on Wednesday whether the Pentagon was speeding up any evacuation of people from the embassy, a spokesman for the Defense Department, John F. Kirby, demurred.
“We’re focused on the security situation that we face now, which again we’ve acknowledged is deteriorating,” he said. “We are certainly mindful of the advances that the Taliban have made in terms of taking over yet an increased number of provincial capitals.”
In the Biden administration’s aspirational plan for Afghanistan, none of this was supposed to happen — at least not so quickly. President Biden announced in April that American troops would withdraw from the country by Sept. 11; he later moved that date up to Aug. 31, and most of the troops have left. The president insisted that the Afghan government and military, with financial support from the United States, would be responsible for defending the country’s urban areas from the Taliban.
But since the announcement, the Taliban have rolled across city after city, despite having only around 75,000 fighters compared with the American-trained Afghan security forces’ 300,000 troops. That dichotomy has caused frustration in the Pentagon and among American officials, who have repeatedly said that the Afghan troops, if their backs were to the wall, would rally to defeat the Taliban.
“They have a lot of advantages that the Taliban don’t have,” Mr. Kirby said, referring to Afghanistan’s national security forces. “Taliban doesn’t have an air force, Taliban doesn’t own airspace. They have a lot of advantages. Now, they have to use those advantages.”
But President Ashraf Ghani’s administration has failed to carry out any kind of strategy to defend what cities that remain or retake them despite saying he would do so. Pro-government militia forces, championed by Afghan officials and reminiscent of the bloody civil war of the 1990s, have consistently been unable to push the Taliban back.
Mr. Ghani on Wednesday replaced the country’s army chief and appointed a new commander of the military’s commando units, in what has amounted to one of his most public moves yet to contend with the Taliban offensive, which has taken more than half of Afghanistan’s roughly 400 districts.
The American military, for its part, is still supporting, to some degree, Afghanistan’s government forces with airstrikes. But those strikes have largely been limited to the southern part of the country, around Kandahar. That is because of logistics: Now that the United States has withdrawn from Bagram base in the north, and has hauled away its warplanes and their massive support systems, it is harder to reach the north. Such strikes could require aerial refueling and would have other logistical hurdles that make them harder to conduct.
Zalmay Khalilzad, the chief American envoy in talks with the Taliban, is leading the diplomatic effort for assurances from the Taliban that they won’t attack the embassy. Two officials confirmed his efforts, which have not been previously reported, on condition of anonymity to discuss the delicate negotiations.
Mr. Khalilzad is hoping to convince Taliban leaders that the embassy must remain open, and secure, if the group hopes to receive American financial aid and other assistance as part of a future Afghan government. The Taliban leadership has said it wants to be seen as a legitimate steward of the country, and is seeking relations with other global powers, including Russia and China, in part to receive economic support.
The State Department’s spokesman, Ned Price, declined to comment on Wednesday, but said funding would be conditioned on whether future Afghan governments would “have any semblance of durability.”
“Legitimacy bestows, and essentially is the ticket, to the levels of international assistance, humanitarian assistance for the Afghan people,” Mr. Price said.
Five current and former officials described the mood inside the embassy as increasingly tense and worried, and diplomats at the State Department’s headquarters in Washington noted a sense of tangible depression at the specter of closing it, nearly 20 years after U.S. Marines reclaimed the burned-out building in December 2001.
Several people gloomily revived a comparison that all want to avoid: the fall of Saigon in 1975, when Americans were evacuated from the embassy from a rooftop by helicopter.
“I don’t think people are yet at the point where they would say we need to get out the door, but they will be looking at the door a lot more often,” said Ronald E. Neumann, who was the American ambassador to Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007 and is now the president of the American Academy of Diplomacy in Washington.
Thomas Gibbons-Neff reported from Kabul, and Helene Cooper, Lara Jakes and Eric Schmitt from Washington.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/12/us/m ... 20Politics
With the Taliban sweeping across the country, U.S. officials say Kabul could fall in 30 days.
By Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Helene Cooper, Lara Jakes and Eric Schmitt
Aug. 12, 2021, 1:58 p.m. ET
KABUL, Afghanistan — The Pentagon is moving thousands of Marines into position for a possible evacuation of the American Embassy and U.S. citizens in Kabul as the Biden administration braces for a possible collapse of the Afghan government within 30 days, administration and military officials said.
The sharply deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, as the Taliban rapidly advance across the north and Afghan security forces battle to defend ever shrinking territory in the south and west, has forced the Defense Department to accelerate plans to get Americans out of the country. Officials say any evacuation will involve a robust use of American military force to move people to Hamid Karzai International Airport to waiting military transport planes and to protect them en route.
American negotiators are also trying to extract assurances from the Taliban that they will not attack the embassy if they overrun the capital, two American officials said.
On Thursday, the embassy sent the latest in a series of alarming alerts, urging Americans to “leave Afghanistan immediately using available commercial flight options.”
The 30-day estimate is one scenario and administration and military officials insist that the fall of Kabul might still be prevented if Afghan security forces can muster the resolve to put up more resistance. But while Afghan commandos have managed to continue fighting in some areas, they have largely folded in a number of northern provincial capitals.
The Taliban seized the strategic city of Ghazni, about 90 miles south of Kabul, on Thursday, putting the group in a better position to attack Kabul after its recent string of victories in the north.
And as Ghazni fell, Taliban fighters broke through multiple front lines in Kandahar, pushing deep into the city. As Afghanistan’s second-largest city, Kandahar is historically and strategically important. The Taliban, led by Mullah Mohammad Omar, began their insurgency there in the 1990s.
Herat, a city in western Afghanistan near the Iranian border, was also in an increasingly dangerous position as Taliban fighters flooded in.
A senior official in the Biden administration said in an interview that the Taliban might soon take Mazar-i-Sharif, the capital of Balkh Province and the country’s economic engine, which is now effectively surrounded by the Taliban. The fall of Mazar-i-Sharif and Kandahar, which has all but collapsed, the official said, could lead to a surrender of the Afghan government by September.
Another senior U.S. official described the mood in the White House as a combination of alarm and resignation — at the rapid pace of the Taliban offensive and the collapse of Afghan national forces, and over how the situation could continue to worsen. There has been a constant stream of video teleconference calls every day this week, the official said.
Three contingents of Marines are preparing for the possible evacuation of the American Embassy, officials said. A Marine battalion of several hundred is already on the embassy grounds, responsible for evacuating the embassy, which has 4,000 employees, including 1,400 Americans, officials said.
In addition, the Pentagon is moving a Marine expeditionary unit, with more than 2,000 Marines, into position closer to the air route over western Pakistan, known as the “boulevard,” where it can dispatch its forces into Afghanistan as a rapid response team that would be able to begin an embassy evacuation within a day of orders, officials said. And as a contingency plan in case any embassy evacuation turns into a fight with the Taliban, Defense Department officials have tasked thousands of Marines to begin a training exercise that can, if necessary, quickly be turned into an evacuation deployment, the officials said. The Marines in the exercise have been told that they may need to be ready to deploy next week within 96 hours, officials said.
Asked during a news conference on Wednesday whether the Pentagon was speeding up any evacuation of people from the embassy, a spokesman for the Defense Department, John F. Kirby, demurred.
“We’re focused on the security situation that we face now, which again we’ve acknowledged is deteriorating,” he said. “We are certainly mindful of the advances that the Taliban have made in terms of taking over yet an increased number of provincial capitals.”
In the Biden administration’s aspirational plan for Afghanistan, none of this was supposed to happen — at least not so quickly. President Biden announced in April that American troops would withdraw from the country by Sept. 11; he later moved that date up to Aug. 31, and most of the troops have left. The president insisted that the Afghan government and military, with financial support from the United States, would be responsible for defending the country’s urban areas from the Taliban.
But since the announcement, the Taliban have rolled across city after city, despite having only around 75,000 fighters compared with the American-trained Afghan security forces’ 300,000 troops. That dichotomy has caused frustration in the Pentagon and among American officials, who have repeatedly said that the Afghan troops, if their backs were to the wall, would rally to defeat the Taliban.
“They have a lot of advantages that the Taliban don’t have,” Mr. Kirby said, referring to Afghanistan’s national security forces. “Taliban doesn’t have an air force, Taliban doesn’t own airspace. They have a lot of advantages. Now, they have to use those advantages.”
But President Ashraf Ghani’s administration has failed to carry out any kind of strategy to defend what cities that remain or retake them despite saying he would do so. Pro-government militia forces, championed by Afghan officials and reminiscent of the bloody civil war of the 1990s, have consistently been unable to push the Taliban back.
Mr. Ghani on Wednesday replaced the country’s army chief and appointed a new commander of the military’s commando units, in what has amounted to one of his most public moves yet to contend with the Taliban offensive, which has taken more than half of Afghanistan’s roughly 400 districts.
The American military, for its part, is still supporting, to some degree, Afghanistan’s government forces with airstrikes. But those strikes have largely been limited to the southern part of the country, around Kandahar. That is because of logistics: Now that the United States has withdrawn from Bagram base in the north, and has hauled away its warplanes and their massive support systems, it is harder to reach the north. Such strikes could require aerial refueling and would have other logistical hurdles that make them harder to conduct.
Zalmay Khalilzad, the chief American envoy in talks with the Taliban, is leading the diplomatic effort for assurances from the Taliban that they won’t attack the embassy. Two officials confirmed his efforts, which have not been previously reported, on condition of anonymity to discuss the delicate negotiations.
Mr. Khalilzad is hoping to convince Taliban leaders that the embassy must remain open, and secure, if the group hopes to receive American financial aid and other assistance as part of a future Afghan government. The Taliban leadership has said it wants to be seen as a legitimate steward of the country, and is seeking relations with other global powers, including Russia and China, in part to receive economic support.
The State Department’s spokesman, Ned Price, declined to comment on Wednesday, but said funding would be conditioned on whether future Afghan governments would “have any semblance of durability.”
“Legitimacy bestows, and essentially is the ticket, to the levels of international assistance, humanitarian assistance for the Afghan people,” Mr. Price said.
Five current and former officials described the mood inside the embassy as increasingly tense and worried, and diplomats at the State Department’s headquarters in Washington noted a sense of tangible depression at the specter of closing it, nearly 20 years after U.S. Marines reclaimed the burned-out building in December 2001.
Several people gloomily revived a comparison that all want to avoid: the fall of Saigon in 1975, when Americans were evacuated from the embassy from a rooftop by helicopter.
“I don’t think people are yet at the point where they would say we need to get out the door, but they will be looking at the door a lot more often,” said Ronald E. Neumann, who was the American ambassador to Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007 and is now the president of the American Academy of Diplomacy in Washington.
Thomas Gibbons-Neff reported from Kabul, and Helene Cooper, Lara Jakes and Eric Schmitt from Washington.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/12/us/m ... 20Politics
-
jserraglio
- Posts: 11954
- Joined: Sun May 29, 2005 7:06 am
- Location: Cleveland, Ohio
Re: I Fought in Afghanistan. I Still Wonder, Was It Worth It?
30 ?! How about an actual collapse today.maestrob wrote: ↑Thu Aug 12, 2021 1:26 pm
KABUL, Afghanistan — The Pentagon is moving thousands of Marines into position for a possible evacuation of the American Embassy and U.S. citizens in Kabul as the Biden administration braces for a possible collapse of the Afghan government within 30 days, administration and military officials said.
AxiosAM Sunday,Aug.15:
Rarely has an American president's predictions been so wrong, so fast, so convincingly as President Biden on Afghanistan.
Usually military operations and diplomacy are long; the outcomes, foggy. Not here.
Just five weeks ago, President Biden assured Americans: "[T]he likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely."
In April, Biden said: "We will not conduct a hasty rush to the exit. We'll do it responsibly, deliberately, and safely."
This morning, the Taliban is entering the Afghanistan capital, Kabul, "from all sides," a senior Afghan official told Reuters. Jalalabad, the last major city besides the capital not held by the Taliban, fell earlier today.
Afghan forces today surrendered Bagram Air Base, the Grand Central of America's longest war, to the Taliban.
CNN showed video of choppers over Kabul — believed to be ferrying U.S. diplomats to the airport.
The U.S. is completely pulling out of the embassy over the next 72 hours, and Taliban representatives are at the Kabul presidential palace, CNN reports.
The top of the Sunday New York Times: "Free Fall in Afghanistan."
The big picture: It's a stunning failure for the West, and embarrassment for Biden. And it's a traumatic turn for U.S. veterans who sacrificed in Afghanistan over the past 20 years, the 20,000+ wounded in action, and survivors of the more than 2,300 U.S. military personnel who were killed.
Ryan Crocker, a U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan under President Obama, said last weekend on ABC's "This Week": "I think it is already an indelible stain on his presidency."
Richard Fontaine, head of the Center for a New American Security and former foreign policy adviser to Sen. John McCain, told Axios: "It's striking that, with 20 years to think it over, the United States withdrew its forces without a plan for the aftermath.
"As the bulk of American troops departed," Fontaine added, "there was no plan for securing regional base access, for the contractors that maintain the Afghan military, for training that military after the U.S. departure, for evacuating interpreters and helpers."
At Camp David yesterday, President Biden held a video conference on Afghanistan with his national security team.
Between the lines: Critics of the Biden approach tell me it's not the drawdown per se that they object to. It's that the U.S. was run out of town, rather than planning a measured and managed departure.
Doug Lute, a retired Army general who directed Afghan strategy at the NSC for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, told The New York Times that the puzzle for him "is the absence of contingency planning: If everyone knew we were headed for the exits, why did we not have a plan over the past two years for making this work?"
A top U.S. government official gave me a window into Biden's thinking, which boils down to three points:
Any other alternative would have been worse.
The collapse proves that if the U.S. stayed, it would have been Americans in a shooting war with the Taliban, with an unknown number of casualties, and no end in sight.
Americans support bringing troops home.
"If people think our August withdrawal is too fast, what would a May withdrawal have looked like?" the official said, referring to President Trump's deadline of May 1.
"And if people think we should stay — whose kids are they sending to fight the Taliban when the Afghan army won’t?"
Re: I Fought in Afghanistan. I Still Wonder, Was It Worth It?
A history of U.S. miscalculation is compounded by the lack of an exit plan.
COMMENT: Whatever happened to "Hope for the best, but plan for the worst?"
If there is a consistent theme over two decades of war in Afghanistan, it is the overestimation of the results of the $83 billion the United States has spent since 2001 training and equipping the Afghan security forces and an underestimation of the brutal, wily strategy of the Taliban.
The Pentagon had issued dire warnings to President Biden even before he took office about the potential for the Taliban to overrun the Afghan Army. But intelligence estimates indicated that it might happen in 18 months, not within weeks.
Commanders did know that the afflictions of the Afghan forces had never been cured: the deep corruption, the failure by the government to pay many Afghan soldiers and police officers for months, the defections, the soldiers sent to the front without adequate food and water, let alone arms.
Mr. Biden’s aides say that the persistence of those problems reinforced his belief that the United States could not prop up the Afghan government and its military in perpetuity. In Oval Office meetings this spring, he told aides that staying another year, or even five, would not make a substantial difference and was not worth the risks.
In the end, an Afghan force that did not believe in itself and a U.S. effort that Mr. Biden, and most Americans, no longer believed would alter events combined to bring an ignoble close to America’s longest war. The United States kept forces in Afghanistan far longer than the British did in the 19th century, and twice as long as the Soviets — with roughly the same results.
For Mr. Biden, the last of four American presidents to face painful choices in Afghanistan but the first to get out, the debate about a final withdrawal and the miscalculations over how to execute it began the moment he took office.
“Under Trump, we were one tweet away from complete, precipitous withdrawal,” said Douglas E. Lute, a retired general who directed Afghan strategy at the National Security Council for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
“Under Biden, it was clear to everyone who knew him, who saw him pressing for a vastly reduced force more than a decade ago, that he was determined to end U.S. military involvement,” Mr. Lute added, “but the Pentagon believed its own narrative that we would stay forever.”
He continued, “The puzzle for me is the absence of contingency planning: If everyone knew we were headed for the exits, why did we not have a plan over the past two years for making this work?”
— David E. Sanger and Helene Cooper
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/08/15 ... istan-news
COMMENT: Whatever happened to "Hope for the best, but plan for the worst?"
If there is a consistent theme over two decades of war in Afghanistan, it is the overestimation of the results of the $83 billion the United States has spent since 2001 training and equipping the Afghan security forces and an underestimation of the brutal, wily strategy of the Taliban.
The Pentagon had issued dire warnings to President Biden even before he took office about the potential for the Taliban to overrun the Afghan Army. But intelligence estimates indicated that it might happen in 18 months, not within weeks.
Commanders did know that the afflictions of the Afghan forces had never been cured: the deep corruption, the failure by the government to pay many Afghan soldiers and police officers for months, the defections, the soldiers sent to the front without adequate food and water, let alone arms.
Mr. Biden’s aides say that the persistence of those problems reinforced his belief that the United States could not prop up the Afghan government and its military in perpetuity. In Oval Office meetings this spring, he told aides that staying another year, or even five, would not make a substantial difference and was not worth the risks.
In the end, an Afghan force that did not believe in itself and a U.S. effort that Mr. Biden, and most Americans, no longer believed would alter events combined to bring an ignoble close to America’s longest war. The United States kept forces in Afghanistan far longer than the British did in the 19th century, and twice as long as the Soviets — with roughly the same results.
For Mr. Biden, the last of four American presidents to face painful choices in Afghanistan but the first to get out, the debate about a final withdrawal and the miscalculations over how to execute it began the moment he took office.
“Under Trump, we were one tweet away from complete, precipitous withdrawal,” said Douglas E. Lute, a retired general who directed Afghan strategy at the National Security Council for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
“Under Biden, it was clear to everyone who knew him, who saw him pressing for a vastly reduced force more than a decade ago, that he was determined to end U.S. military involvement,” Mr. Lute added, “but the Pentagon believed its own narrative that we would stay forever.”
He continued, “The puzzle for me is the absence of contingency planning: If everyone knew we were headed for the exits, why did we not have a plan over the past two years for making this work?”
— David E. Sanger and Helene Cooper
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/08/15 ... istan-news
-
jserraglio
- Posts: 11954
- Joined: Sun May 29, 2005 7:06 am
- Location: Cleveland, Ohio
Re: I Fought in Afghanistan. I Still Wonder, Was It Worth It?
Why would anyone be surprised that Kabul fell in a week when the U.S. Capitol came within a whisker of falling in a day?
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Afghan President Leaves Kabul Amid Taliban Advance
Insurgents say they won’t take the city by force as they prepare to assume power
KABUL—Taliban fighters on Sunday took over the Afghan capital as President Ashraf Ghani fled abroad, triggering a massive effort to airlift Western diplomats, civilians and Afghans likely to be targeted by the country’s new rulers.
Demoralized Afghan security forces offered no resistance as the insurgents, who seized most of the country in just over a week, appeared Sunday morning on Kabul’s outskirts. While the Taliban initially said they wouldn’t enter the city while a transitional government is being formed, they reversed their stance by nightfall, saying that someone needed to maintain public order after Afghan police deserted their posts.
“To prevent chaos and looting, the Islamic Emirate has ordered the mujahedeen to get control of the abandoned areas,” a Taliban statement said. The Taliban fighters, it added, won’t bother any civilian or military officials of the former regime.
By evening, the main road to the Kabul airport—packed with Afghans desperately trying to escape and with thousands of American troops protecting the evacuation effort—presented a bizarre scene of Taliban fighters mingling with uniformed Afghan troops.
Mr. Ghani, who fled the presidential palace and spent Sunday morning at the U.S. Embassy, left the Afghan capital in the afternoon. “God will hold him accountable and the people of Afghanistan will make their judgment,” Kabul’s chief peace negotiator said in a video message. A senior security official confirmed Mr. Ghani’s departure.
On Sunday morning, the administration of Mr. Ghani told all employees to go home. Soon after, sporadic gunfire erupted and some checkpoints were abandoned as panicked residents clogged the streets. By early afternoon, the Taliban took over Kabul’s main Pul-e-Charkhi prison, freeing thousands of inmates, videos on social media showed.
At the U.S. Embassy on Sunday afternoon, helicopters ferried American and Western diplomats and civilians to the military side of Kabul airport. One after another, Chinooks and Black Hawks took off from the landing zone, spraying dust.
Below them was a city of traffic jams and roundabouts choked by cars—many of them filled with Afghans trying to reach the airport’s relative safety. Dark smoke, presumably from burning documents, rose from the presidential palace.
In the airport, large crowds gathered at the military gate, trying to get through the checkpoint. There was an exchange of gunfire, with a warning of a ground attack sounding in the terminal.
Dozens of gray U.S. Air Force and British transport planes awaited their passengers, the landing strip secured by newly arrived American troops.
Some of the evacuating Westerners waited on cardboard boxes marked with the words “non-Pork MRE,” or meal-ready-to-eat. Others—including Afghan dual citizens—nervously waited their turn for the shuttle bus that would take them to their planes, away from the city they would be unlikely to see again soon.
In Kabul, long lines formed outside banks and at the city’s few functioning ATMs as residents rushed to withdraw their cash before the Taliban takeover.
The stunning meltdown of the Afghan state left the city in shock. The Taliban, who controlled none of Afghanistan’s 34 provincial capitals just over a week ago, have seized the bulk of the country and are now readying to assume power, either directly or by controlling a new transitional administration.
In a message to followers Sunday, the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, urged his fighters to treat conquered cities with a benevolent hand.
“The victories are coming, do not be arrogant and conceited, do not betray the spoils of war, and treat well those who surrender to you,” he said. “Do your best to avoid civilian casualties.”
The U.S. has rushed 5,000 troops to Kabul to secure the airport and help evacuate American diplomatic personnel. On Sunday, the Green Zone that contained much of the foreign presence emptied out as embassies closed or relocated to the military base in the airport. The U.S., which is in constant contact with the Taliban’s political leadership in Doha, Qatar, has urged the insurgents to hold off on taking Kabul until after the evacuation is complete and all Americans have left the city, according to people familiar with the talks.
On Sunday, there was no sign of the U.S. military in the city itself. Residents rushed to put their affairs in order and people from areas that have fallen to the insurgents sought refuge in the capital.
“We have no idea what will happen from one moment to the next in this situation,” said Mohammad Nasim, a worker at a nongovernment organization. “But what can we do? There is nowhere for us to go. There is no chance to leave the city anymore.”
Afghans also mobbed Kabul’s passport offices, seeking to secure valuable travel documents while an internationally recognized Afghan government still exists—and while the airport continues operations. Not many were lucky.
Milad Anwari, a 38-year-old businessman at the passport line, said he had already managed to move part of his family to Turkey, but several others were stuck in Kabul.
“I never expected that Taliban will come again. Now everything is going to collapse,” he said. “In the presence of Taliban I don’t have any hope for the future of my country.”
Shortly thereafter, an announcement rang out that the passport office was closing because the Taliban had entered Kabul.
In the line that snaked past blast barriers outside Afghanistan’s central bank, opinions were divided over who was to blame. Poet Samdel Banwa, originally from the eastern Kunar province, said President Biden’s April decision to withdraw all American forces was the reason for the country’s unfolding tragedy.
A Kabul schoolteacher who stood in the same line, Mirwais, vented his anger at the infighting and incompetence within the Afghan government. “The government has betrayed the people,” he said. “This is why I am standing here today.”
For the U.S., the priority now is to persuade the Taliban to hold off until the evacuation of Americans and other foreigners from Kabul is complete. Mr. Biden on Saturday said the U.S. has told Taliban representatives in Doha that any action on the ground in Afghanistan against U.S. personnel “will be met with a swift and strong U.S. military response.”
The Afghan military began to unravel soon after Mr. Biden’s decision to pull out U.S. troops, taking away the logistical and air support on which Afghan soldiers depended. Mr. Biden said that the withdrawal, which was required under the February 2020 Doha agreement between the Taliban and the Trump administration, was the right decision.
“One more year, or five more years, of U.S. military presence would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country,” he said.
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Afghan President Leaves Kabul Amid Taliban Advance
Insurgents say they won’t take the city by force as they prepare to assume power
KABUL—Taliban fighters on Sunday took over the Afghan capital as President Ashraf Ghani fled abroad, triggering a massive effort to airlift Western diplomats, civilians and Afghans likely to be targeted by the country’s new rulers.
Demoralized Afghan security forces offered no resistance as the insurgents, who seized most of the country in just over a week, appeared Sunday morning on Kabul’s outskirts. While the Taliban initially said they wouldn’t enter the city while a transitional government is being formed, they reversed their stance by nightfall, saying that someone needed to maintain public order after Afghan police deserted their posts.
“To prevent chaos and looting, the Islamic Emirate has ordered the mujahedeen to get control of the abandoned areas,” a Taliban statement said. The Taliban fighters, it added, won’t bother any civilian or military officials of the former regime.
By evening, the main road to the Kabul airport—packed with Afghans desperately trying to escape and with thousands of American troops protecting the evacuation effort—presented a bizarre scene of Taliban fighters mingling with uniformed Afghan troops.
Mr. Ghani, who fled the presidential palace and spent Sunday morning at the U.S. Embassy, left the Afghan capital in the afternoon. “God will hold him accountable and the people of Afghanistan will make their judgment,” Kabul’s chief peace negotiator said in a video message. A senior security official confirmed Mr. Ghani’s departure.
On Sunday morning, the administration of Mr. Ghani told all employees to go home. Soon after, sporadic gunfire erupted and some checkpoints were abandoned as panicked residents clogged the streets. By early afternoon, the Taliban took over Kabul’s main Pul-e-Charkhi prison, freeing thousands of inmates, videos on social media showed.
At the U.S. Embassy on Sunday afternoon, helicopters ferried American and Western diplomats and civilians to the military side of Kabul airport. One after another, Chinooks and Black Hawks took off from the landing zone, spraying dust.
Below them was a city of traffic jams and roundabouts choked by cars—many of them filled with Afghans trying to reach the airport’s relative safety. Dark smoke, presumably from burning documents, rose from the presidential palace.
In the airport, large crowds gathered at the military gate, trying to get through the checkpoint. There was an exchange of gunfire, with a warning of a ground attack sounding in the terminal.
Dozens of gray U.S. Air Force and British transport planes awaited their passengers, the landing strip secured by newly arrived American troops.
Some of the evacuating Westerners waited on cardboard boxes marked with the words “non-Pork MRE,” or meal-ready-to-eat. Others—including Afghan dual citizens—nervously waited their turn for the shuttle bus that would take them to their planes, away from the city they would be unlikely to see again soon.
In Kabul, long lines formed outside banks and at the city’s few functioning ATMs as residents rushed to withdraw their cash before the Taliban takeover.
The stunning meltdown of the Afghan state left the city in shock. The Taliban, who controlled none of Afghanistan’s 34 provincial capitals just over a week ago, have seized the bulk of the country and are now readying to assume power, either directly or by controlling a new transitional administration.
In a message to followers Sunday, the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, urged his fighters to treat conquered cities with a benevolent hand.
“The victories are coming, do not be arrogant and conceited, do not betray the spoils of war, and treat well those who surrender to you,” he said. “Do your best to avoid civilian casualties.”
The U.S. has rushed 5,000 troops to Kabul to secure the airport and help evacuate American diplomatic personnel. On Sunday, the Green Zone that contained much of the foreign presence emptied out as embassies closed or relocated to the military base in the airport. The U.S., which is in constant contact with the Taliban’s political leadership in Doha, Qatar, has urged the insurgents to hold off on taking Kabul until after the evacuation is complete and all Americans have left the city, according to people familiar with the talks.
On Sunday, there was no sign of the U.S. military in the city itself. Residents rushed to put their affairs in order and people from areas that have fallen to the insurgents sought refuge in the capital.
“We have no idea what will happen from one moment to the next in this situation,” said Mohammad Nasim, a worker at a nongovernment organization. “But what can we do? There is nowhere for us to go. There is no chance to leave the city anymore.”
Afghans also mobbed Kabul’s passport offices, seeking to secure valuable travel documents while an internationally recognized Afghan government still exists—and while the airport continues operations. Not many were lucky.
Milad Anwari, a 38-year-old businessman at the passport line, said he had already managed to move part of his family to Turkey, but several others were stuck in Kabul.
“I never expected that Taliban will come again. Now everything is going to collapse,” he said. “In the presence of Taliban I don’t have any hope for the future of my country.”
Shortly thereafter, an announcement rang out that the passport office was closing because the Taliban had entered Kabul.
In the line that snaked past blast barriers outside Afghanistan’s central bank, opinions were divided over who was to blame. Poet Samdel Banwa, originally from the eastern Kunar province, said President Biden’s April decision to withdraw all American forces was the reason for the country’s unfolding tragedy.
A Kabul schoolteacher who stood in the same line, Mirwais, vented his anger at the infighting and incompetence within the Afghan government. “The government has betrayed the people,” he said. “This is why I am standing here today.”
For the U.S., the priority now is to persuade the Taliban to hold off until the evacuation of Americans and other foreigners from Kabul is complete. Mr. Biden on Saturday said the U.S. has told Taliban representatives in Doha that any action on the ground in Afghanistan against U.S. personnel “will be met with a swift and strong U.S. military response.”
The Afghan military began to unravel soon after Mr. Biden’s decision to pull out U.S. troops, taking away the logistical and air support on which Afghan soldiers depended. Mr. Biden said that the withdrawal, which was required under the February 2020 Doha agreement between the Taliban and the Trump administration, was the right decision.
“One more year, or five more years, of U.S. military presence would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country,” he said.
Re: I Fought in Afghanistan. I Still Wonder, Was It Worth It?
Disaster in Afghanistan Will Follow Us Home
Aug. 15, 2021
By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
What on earth was Joe Biden thinking — if, that is, he was thinking?
On July 8, the president defended his decision to withdraw all remaining U.S. forces from Afghanistan. After assuring Americans that “the drawdown is proceeding in a secure and orderly way” and that “U.S. support for the people of Afghanistan will endure,” he took some questions. Here are excerpts from the White House transcript.
Q: Is a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan now inevitable?
The president: No, it is not.
Q: Why?
The president: Because you — the Afghan troops have 300,000 well-equipped — as well equipped as any army in the world — and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban. It is not inevitable. …
Q: Do you see any parallels between this withdrawal and what happened in Vietnam, with some people feeling ——
The president: None whatsoever. Zero … The Taliban is not the South — the North Vietnamese Army. They’re not — they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy. …
Q: Mr. President, how serious was the corruption among the Afghanistan government to this mission failing there?
The president: Well, first of all, the mission hasn’t failed, yet. There is in Afghanistan — in all parties, there’s been corruption. The question is, can there be an agreement on unity of purpose? … That — the jury is still out. But the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.
Biden’s heedlessness, on the cusp of a sweeping Taliban blitzkrieg that on Sunday saw them enter Kabul, will define his administration’s first great fiasco. It won’t matter that he is carrying through on the shambolic withdrawal agreement negotiated last year by the Trump administration, with the eager support of Trump’s isolationist base, and through the diplomatic efforts of Trump’s lickspittle secretary of state, Mike Pompeo.
This is happening on Biden’s watch, at Biden’s insistence, against the advice of his senior military advisers and with Biden’s firm assurance to the American people that what has just come to pass wouldn’t come to pass. Past presidents might have had a senior adviser resign in the wake of such a debacle, as Les Aspin, then the secretary of defense, did after the 1993 Black Hawk Down episode in Somalia.
This time, Biden owns the moment. He also owns the consequences. We should begin to anticipate them now.
The killing won’t stop. Watch — if you have the stomach — videos of the aftermath of an attack in May on Afghan schoolgirls, which left 90 dead, or the massacre of 22 Afghan commandos in June, gunned down as they were surrendering, or Taliban fighters taunting an Afghan police officer, shortly before they kill him for the crime of making comic videos.
One Taliban official declared that their jihad was directed not against ordinary Afghans but only “against the occupiers and those who defend the occupiers.” Yet the list of Afghans who fill that bill reaches into the thousands, if not higher.
Women will become chattel. There are roughly 18 million women and girls in Afghanistan. They will now be subject to laws from the seventh century. They will not be able to walk about with uncovered faces or be seen in public without a male relative. They will not be able to hold the kinds of jobs they’ve fought so hard to get over the last 20 years: journalists, teachers, parliamentarians, entrepreneurs. Their daughters will not be allowed to go to school or play sports or consent to the choice of a husband.
Afghanistan will become a magnet to jihadists everywhere. Sirajuddin Haqqani, the Taliban’s deputy leader, is one of the F.B.I.’s most wanted terrorists. Don’t expect him to change his spots, even if he claimed otherwise last year in a Times guest essay.
“The relationship between the Taliban and Al Qaeda will get stronger,” Saad Mohseni, the head of the Afghan news and media company Moby, told me on Saturday. “Why should the Taliban fear the Americans anymore? What’s the worst that could happen? Another invasion?
“These guys are going to be the most belligerent, arrogant Islamist movement on the planet,” Mohseni added. “They are going to be the Mecca for any young radical of Islamic heritage or convert. It’s going to inspire people. It’s a godsend for any radical, violent group.”
What happens in Afghanistan won’t stay there. The country most immediately at risk from an ascendant Taliban is neighboring Pakistan. After years of Islamabad giving sanctuary and support for the Afghan Taliban (as long as they attacked coalition forces), Pakistan must now fear that the next regime in Kabul will give sanctuary and support for the Pakistani Taliban. There may be poetic justice in this, but the prospect of fundamentalist forces destabilizing a regime with an estimated 160 nuclear warheads is an unparalleled global nightmare.
Short of this, the calamity in Afghanistan is a recipe for another wave of migrants, one that will wash over Europe’s shores and provoke a populist backlash. “We’re going to see 20 Viktor Orbans emerge,” warned Mohseni, referring to the Hungarian strongman and Tucker Carlson B.F.F.
America’s geopolitical position will be gravely damaged. What kind of ally is the United States? In the last several years, the United States has maintained a relatively small force in Afghanistan, largely devoted to providing surveillance, logistics and air cover for Afghan forces while taking minimal casualties. Any American president could have maintained this position almost indefinitely — with no prospect of defeating the Taliban but none of being routed by them, either.
In other words, we had achieved a good-enough solution for a nation we could afford to neither save nor lose. We squandered it anyway. Now, in the aftermath of Saigon redux, every enemy will draw the lesson that the United States is a feckless power, with no lasting appetite for defending the Pax Americana that is still the basis for world order. And every ally — Taiwan, Ukraine, the Baltic states, Israel, Japan — will draw the lesson that it is on its own in the face of its enemies. The Biden Doctrine means the burial of the Truman Doctrine.
But didn’t we have to leave Afghanistan sometime? So goes a counterargument. Yes, though we’ve been in Korea for 71 years, at far higher cost, and the world is better off for it.
But wasn’t the Afghan government corrupt and inept? Yes, but at least that government wasn’t massacring its own citizens or raising the banner of jihad.
But aren’t American casualties unacceptable? They are surely tragic. But so is squandering the sacrifice of so many Americans who fought the Taliban bravely and nobly — and, as it turns out, for nothing.
But is there any reason we should care more about the fate of Afghans than we do of desperate people elsewhere? Yes, because our inability to help everyone, everywhere doesn’t relieve us of the obligation to help someone, somewhere — and because America’s power and reputation in the world is also a function of being a beacon of confidence and hope.
Now these arguments belong to the past. The war in Afghanistan isn’t just over. It’s lost. A few Americans may cheer this humiliation, and many more will shrug at it. But the consequences of defeat are rarely benign for nations, no matter how powerful they otherwise appear to be. America’s enemies, great and small, will draw conclusions from our needless surrender, just as they will about the frighteningly oblivious president who brought it about.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/15/opin ... biden.html
Aug. 15, 2021
By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
What on earth was Joe Biden thinking — if, that is, he was thinking?
On July 8, the president defended his decision to withdraw all remaining U.S. forces from Afghanistan. After assuring Americans that “the drawdown is proceeding in a secure and orderly way” and that “U.S. support for the people of Afghanistan will endure,” he took some questions. Here are excerpts from the White House transcript.
Q: Is a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan now inevitable?
The president: No, it is not.
Q: Why?
The president: Because you — the Afghan troops have 300,000 well-equipped — as well equipped as any army in the world — and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban. It is not inevitable. …
Q: Do you see any parallels between this withdrawal and what happened in Vietnam, with some people feeling ——
The president: None whatsoever. Zero … The Taliban is not the South — the North Vietnamese Army. They’re not — they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy. …
Q: Mr. President, how serious was the corruption among the Afghanistan government to this mission failing there?
The president: Well, first of all, the mission hasn’t failed, yet. There is in Afghanistan — in all parties, there’s been corruption. The question is, can there be an agreement on unity of purpose? … That — the jury is still out. But the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.
Biden’s heedlessness, on the cusp of a sweeping Taliban blitzkrieg that on Sunday saw them enter Kabul, will define his administration’s first great fiasco. It won’t matter that he is carrying through on the shambolic withdrawal agreement negotiated last year by the Trump administration, with the eager support of Trump’s isolationist base, and through the diplomatic efforts of Trump’s lickspittle secretary of state, Mike Pompeo.
This is happening on Biden’s watch, at Biden’s insistence, against the advice of his senior military advisers and with Biden’s firm assurance to the American people that what has just come to pass wouldn’t come to pass. Past presidents might have had a senior adviser resign in the wake of such a debacle, as Les Aspin, then the secretary of defense, did after the 1993 Black Hawk Down episode in Somalia.
This time, Biden owns the moment. He also owns the consequences. We should begin to anticipate them now.
The killing won’t stop. Watch — if you have the stomach — videos of the aftermath of an attack in May on Afghan schoolgirls, which left 90 dead, or the massacre of 22 Afghan commandos in June, gunned down as they were surrendering, or Taliban fighters taunting an Afghan police officer, shortly before they kill him for the crime of making comic videos.
One Taliban official declared that their jihad was directed not against ordinary Afghans but only “against the occupiers and those who defend the occupiers.” Yet the list of Afghans who fill that bill reaches into the thousands, if not higher.
Women will become chattel. There are roughly 18 million women and girls in Afghanistan. They will now be subject to laws from the seventh century. They will not be able to walk about with uncovered faces or be seen in public without a male relative. They will not be able to hold the kinds of jobs they’ve fought so hard to get over the last 20 years: journalists, teachers, parliamentarians, entrepreneurs. Their daughters will not be allowed to go to school or play sports or consent to the choice of a husband.
Afghanistan will become a magnet to jihadists everywhere. Sirajuddin Haqqani, the Taliban’s deputy leader, is one of the F.B.I.’s most wanted terrorists. Don’t expect him to change his spots, even if he claimed otherwise last year in a Times guest essay.
“The relationship between the Taliban and Al Qaeda will get stronger,” Saad Mohseni, the head of the Afghan news and media company Moby, told me on Saturday. “Why should the Taliban fear the Americans anymore? What’s the worst that could happen? Another invasion?
“These guys are going to be the most belligerent, arrogant Islamist movement on the planet,” Mohseni added. “They are going to be the Mecca for any young radical of Islamic heritage or convert. It’s going to inspire people. It’s a godsend for any radical, violent group.”
What happens in Afghanistan won’t stay there. The country most immediately at risk from an ascendant Taliban is neighboring Pakistan. After years of Islamabad giving sanctuary and support for the Afghan Taliban (as long as they attacked coalition forces), Pakistan must now fear that the next regime in Kabul will give sanctuary and support for the Pakistani Taliban. There may be poetic justice in this, but the prospect of fundamentalist forces destabilizing a regime with an estimated 160 nuclear warheads is an unparalleled global nightmare.
Short of this, the calamity in Afghanistan is a recipe for another wave of migrants, one that will wash over Europe’s shores and provoke a populist backlash. “We’re going to see 20 Viktor Orbans emerge,” warned Mohseni, referring to the Hungarian strongman and Tucker Carlson B.F.F.
America’s geopolitical position will be gravely damaged. What kind of ally is the United States? In the last several years, the United States has maintained a relatively small force in Afghanistan, largely devoted to providing surveillance, logistics and air cover for Afghan forces while taking minimal casualties. Any American president could have maintained this position almost indefinitely — with no prospect of defeating the Taliban but none of being routed by them, either.
In other words, we had achieved a good-enough solution for a nation we could afford to neither save nor lose. We squandered it anyway. Now, in the aftermath of Saigon redux, every enemy will draw the lesson that the United States is a feckless power, with no lasting appetite for defending the Pax Americana that is still the basis for world order. And every ally — Taiwan, Ukraine, the Baltic states, Israel, Japan — will draw the lesson that it is on its own in the face of its enemies. The Biden Doctrine means the burial of the Truman Doctrine.
But didn’t we have to leave Afghanistan sometime? So goes a counterargument. Yes, though we’ve been in Korea for 71 years, at far higher cost, and the world is better off for it.
But wasn’t the Afghan government corrupt and inept? Yes, but at least that government wasn’t massacring its own citizens or raising the banner of jihad.
But aren’t American casualties unacceptable? They are surely tragic. But so is squandering the sacrifice of so many Americans who fought the Taliban bravely and nobly — and, as it turns out, for nothing.
But is there any reason we should care more about the fate of Afghans than we do of desperate people elsewhere? Yes, because our inability to help everyone, everywhere doesn’t relieve us of the obligation to help someone, somewhere — and because America’s power and reputation in the world is also a function of being a beacon of confidence and hope.
Now these arguments belong to the past. The war in Afghanistan isn’t just over. It’s lost. A few Americans may cheer this humiliation, and many more will shrug at it. But the consequences of defeat are rarely benign for nations, no matter how powerful they otherwise appear to be. America’s enemies, great and small, will draw conclusions from our needless surrender, just as they will about the frighteningly oblivious president who brought it about.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/15/opin ... biden.html
Re: I Fought in Afghanistan. I Still Wonder, Was It Worth It?
The Tragedy of Afghanistan
Aug. 15, 2021
By The Editorial Board
The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.
The rapid reconquest of the capital, Kabul, by the Taliban after two decades of a staggeringly expensive, bloody effort to establish a secular government with functioning security forces in Afghanistan is, above all, unutterably tragic.
Tragic because the American dream of being the “indispensable nation” in shaping a world where the values of civil rights, women’s empowerment and religious tolerance rule proved to be just that: a dream.
This longest of American wars was code-named first Operation Enduring Freedom and then Operation Freedom’s Sentinel. Yet after more than $2 trillion and at least 2,448 American service members’ lives lost in Afghanistan, it is difficult to see what of lasting significance has been achieved.
It is all the more tragic because of the certainty that many of the Afghans who worked with the American forces and bought into the dream — and especially the girls and women who had embraced a measure of equality — have been left to the mercy of a ruthless enemy.
The Biden administration was right to bring the war to a close. Yet there was no need for it to end in such chaos, with so little forethought for all those who sacrificed so much in the hopes of a better Afghanistan.
Numberless Afghans who had worked for years alongside American troops, civil society groups, aid organizations and journalists, including the many who had worked with The New York Times, abruptly found themselves in mortal danger on Sunday as the Taliban swept into Kabul as leaders of the Afghan government, including President Ashraf Ghani, headed for the airport.
It was tragic, too, because with the bitter political divide of today’s America, efforts to draw critical lessons from this calamitous setback have already been enmeshed in angry recriminations over who lost Afghanistan, ugly schadenfreude and lies. Within hours of the fall of Kabul, the knives were already out.
While the speed of the collapse of the Afghan government was shocking, the result should not have come as a surprise. This calamity cannot be laid alone at President Biden’s feet, but it is incumbent on the current administration to make right what has gone wrong with the withdrawal plans. The U.S. military is, if nothing else, a logistical superpower, and it should move heaven and earth and anything in between to rescue those people who have risked everything for a better future. Red tape shouldn’t stand between allies and salvation.
The war in Afghanistan began in response by the United States and its NATO allies to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as an operation to deny Al Qaeda sanctuary in a country run by the Taliban. How it evolved into a two-decade nation-building project in which as many as 140,000 troops under American command were deployed at one time is a story of mission creep and hubris but also of the enduring American faith in the values of freedom and democracy.
The Afghanistan papers published in The Washington Post, including a confidential effort on “Lessons Learned” conducted by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, an agency created by Congress, painted a devastating picture of corruption, incompetence, lack of motivation and other flaws among the Afghan forces the United States and its allies were trying to mold into a serious military.
One Navy official said Afghans viewed their police as “the most hated institution” in Afghanistan. Other officials described systematic looting by soldiers and officers, as well as Afghan casualties so huge — 60,000 killed since 2001, by one estimate — that the government kept them a secret. The corruption was so rampant that many Afghans began to question whether their government or the Taliban was the greater evil.
The Pentagon and the U.S. Congress deserve a share of the blame for the debacle, and certainly for the rosy progress reports that so often emerged. But what the United States or its allies could or should have done differently — and whether that hoary cliché about Afghanistan as the graveyard of empires has been validated once again — is a debate that should consume politicians, pundits and historians for years to come.
The responsibility lies with both parties. President George W. Bush launched the war only to shift focus to Iraq before any stability had been achieved. President Barack Obama was seeking to withdraw American troops but surged their levels instead. President Donald Trump signed a peace deal with the Taliban in 2020 for a complete withdrawal by last May.
When Mr. Biden came to office, some Defense Department and other officials urged him to keep a small counterterrorism force in Afghanistan for several more years. But Mr. Biden, old enough to remember Vietnam and a veteran of foreign relations from his years in the Senate, became convinced that a few thousand troops remaining for a few more years in Afghanistan would not prevent an eventual Taliban victory. On April 6 he told his staff that he wanted all the troops out by Sept. 11. “I was the fourth president to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan — two Republicans, two Democrats,” he said later. “I would not, and will not, pass this war on to a fifth.”
It was a decision that took courage and wisdom. The president knew full well what his critics would make of it — what they are already making of it. There will always be the what-if, that if only American troops had stayed longer, the outcome would have been different. Mr. Biden himself has been somewhat disingenuous in blaming Mr. Trump for his deal with the Taliban, which the president said “left the Taliban in the strongest position militarily since 2001.”
It has long been clear that an American withdrawal, however or whenever conducted, would leave the Taliban poised to seize control of Afghanistan once again. The war needed to end. But the Biden administration could and should have taken more care to protect those who risked everything in pursuit of a different future, however illusory those dreams proved to be.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/15/opin ... liban.html
Aug. 15, 2021
By The Editorial Board
The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.
The rapid reconquest of the capital, Kabul, by the Taliban after two decades of a staggeringly expensive, bloody effort to establish a secular government with functioning security forces in Afghanistan is, above all, unutterably tragic.
Tragic because the American dream of being the “indispensable nation” in shaping a world where the values of civil rights, women’s empowerment and religious tolerance rule proved to be just that: a dream.
This longest of American wars was code-named first Operation Enduring Freedom and then Operation Freedom’s Sentinel. Yet after more than $2 trillion and at least 2,448 American service members’ lives lost in Afghanistan, it is difficult to see what of lasting significance has been achieved.
It is all the more tragic because of the certainty that many of the Afghans who worked with the American forces and bought into the dream — and especially the girls and women who had embraced a measure of equality — have been left to the mercy of a ruthless enemy.
The Biden administration was right to bring the war to a close. Yet there was no need for it to end in such chaos, with so little forethought for all those who sacrificed so much in the hopes of a better Afghanistan.
Numberless Afghans who had worked for years alongside American troops, civil society groups, aid organizations and journalists, including the many who had worked with The New York Times, abruptly found themselves in mortal danger on Sunday as the Taliban swept into Kabul as leaders of the Afghan government, including President Ashraf Ghani, headed for the airport.
It was tragic, too, because with the bitter political divide of today’s America, efforts to draw critical lessons from this calamitous setback have already been enmeshed in angry recriminations over who lost Afghanistan, ugly schadenfreude and lies. Within hours of the fall of Kabul, the knives were already out.
While the speed of the collapse of the Afghan government was shocking, the result should not have come as a surprise. This calamity cannot be laid alone at President Biden’s feet, but it is incumbent on the current administration to make right what has gone wrong with the withdrawal plans. The U.S. military is, if nothing else, a logistical superpower, and it should move heaven and earth and anything in between to rescue those people who have risked everything for a better future. Red tape shouldn’t stand between allies and salvation.
The war in Afghanistan began in response by the United States and its NATO allies to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as an operation to deny Al Qaeda sanctuary in a country run by the Taliban. How it evolved into a two-decade nation-building project in which as many as 140,000 troops under American command were deployed at one time is a story of mission creep and hubris but also of the enduring American faith in the values of freedom and democracy.
The Afghanistan papers published in The Washington Post, including a confidential effort on “Lessons Learned” conducted by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, an agency created by Congress, painted a devastating picture of corruption, incompetence, lack of motivation and other flaws among the Afghan forces the United States and its allies were trying to mold into a serious military.
One Navy official said Afghans viewed their police as “the most hated institution” in Afghanistan. Other officials described systematic looting by soldiers and officers, as well as Afghan casualties so huge — 60,000 killed since 2001, by one estimate — that the government kept them a secret. The corruption was so rampant that many Afghans began to question whether their government or the Taliban was the greater evil.
The Pentagon and the U.S. Congress deserve a share of the blame for the debacle, and certainly for the rosy progress reports that so often emerged. But what the United States or its allies could or should have done differently — and whether that hoary cliché about Afghanistan as the graveyard of empires has been validated once again — is a debate that should consume politicians, pundits and historians for years to come.
The responsibility lies with both parties. President George W. Bush launched the war only to shift focus to Iraq before any stability had been achieved. President Barack Obama was seeking to withdraw American troops but surged their levels instead. President Donald Trump signed a peace deal with the Taliban in 2020 for a complete withdrawal by last May.
When Mr. Biden came to office, some Defense Department and other officials urged him to keep a small counterterrorism force in Afghanistan for several more years. But Mr. Biden, old enough to remember Vietnam and a veteran of foreign relations from his years in the Senate, became convinced that a few thousand troops remaining for a few more years in Afghanistan would not prevent an eventual Taliban victory. On April 6 he told his staff that he wanted all the troops out by Sept. 11. “I was the fourth president to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan — two Republicans, two Democrats,” he said later. “I would not, and will not, pass this war on to a fifth.”
It was a decision that took courage and wisdom. The president knew full well what his critics would make of it — what they are already making of it. There will always be the what-if, that if only American troops had stayed longer, the outcome would have been different. Mr. Biden himself has been somewhat disingenuous in blaming Mr. Trump for his deal with the Taliban, which the president said “left the Taliban in the strongest position militarily since 2001.”
It has long been clear that an American withdrawal, however or whenever conducted, would leave the Taliban poised to seize control of Afghanistan once again. The war needed to end. But the Biden administration could and should have taken more care to protect those who risked everything in pursuit of a different future, however illusory those dreams proved to be.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/15/opin ... liban.html
Who is online
Users browsing this forum: Baidu [Spider] and 18 guests