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sundin13 on 25 August 2021
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Bandorr said:
sundin13 said:
Bandorr said:

How do you plan for the taliban to be able to easily pay off the guards because they weren't getting paid?

How do you plan for the president of afghanistan to flee the country leaving no bargaining chip on the table?

Real questions.

It's been a disaster in the making for 20 years. With plenty of it spread across many presidents.

In my opinion, the issue isn't really that the Taliban took over Afghanistan. That was largely expected. The expectation was largely that it would take a bit longer, but unfortunately that didn't happen, so we have to deal with the worst case scenario on that front.

However, that isn't to say that everything that occurred over the last month was inevitable. First of all, there were steps that we could have taken to give the Afghan government a better chance. The Trump deal made that hard by putting us on a clock for withdrawal, but you'll hear a lot of talk about how we could have better supported the government. Personally, I don't see a ton of value in fighting more to prop up a government doomed to fall.

That leads us to the worse outcome: The humanitarian crisis. I think a lot those who are criticizing the administration, especially from the left, aren't necessarily saying that we shouldn't have left, they are saying that we need to ensure our promises to the people of Afghanistan are upheld. The fact that we are rushing to evacuate people by the thousands, six days before we are planning to leave should tell you that this hasn't gone smoothly. Again, there was a lot of politics and bureaucracy making things difficult for the Biden Administration, but that doesn't excuse their failures. To say "You supported the withdrawal so this blood is on your hands" is over-simplifying the issue. The Administration could have and should have done better at working on these evacuations for the last six months, and if they did it is likely we wouldn't be seeing so many scenes of chaos across Kabul.

However, I will say that over the past week, I applaud the administration for its work getting people out, and I do think that certain other coalition countries deserve some criticism. There has been a lot of talk from other countries imploring the US not to leave at the end of the month to give more time, yet at the same time, these countries are making commitments to cease evacuations as soon as tomorrow. They relied on America to be the world police and now that we are stepping back, they would rather complain about us than step up. 

The problem is expectation and perspective.

Everything was suppose to take X amount of time.  In which we get rid of Y amount of people.  The intelligence we had suggestion this would work.

Then the afhgan guards got bribed. Then the president ran out.  There was a deal on the table for 2 weeks of nothing happening if the President resigned. Instead he ran away and Taliban got what they wanted - without having to wait two weeks.

So that X amount of time to get Y people out? It got crushed.  And it getting crushed caused further problems. instead of having to get Y amount of people out - because of the talibans massive surge we not have to deal with Z. These are the people that would have gone later after things were more settles. After Y was already out etc.

Because the Taliban attacked so quickly people got spooked.  These people wanted out - and they wanted out now.  They are the Z people.  So what was two weeks to get Y people out became almost instantly get out Y and Z amount of people.  We had to get out way more people way faster than anyone anticipated.

So when I see stuff like " when this is what the US planned for a year" I call out it as BS. Because as far as I can tell no plan would have mattered because we didn't have all the information.

This never would have been less of a disaster than now.

From what I've read, it seems that the more pessimistic range of expected outcomes from the CIA was pretty close to what actually happened. It shouldn't really have caught the United States off guard if we planned for that worst case scenario. 

Biden seems to both want to argue that they planned for every scenario, while also kind of saying that this happened a lot quicker than intelligence said it would. Neither of these things seem to be completely true. They didn't seem to be fully prepared for the fall of the Afghanistan government, and this outcome was not altogether unexpected from our intelligence agencies. 

If there was even a sliver of a possibility of this happening, why haven't we been fast tracking SIVs for the past six months? I understand that to some degree, blame for that rests on Congress, but the Biden Administration could have and should have pressured them to act sooner. Instead, we had very few evacuations before August 14th which led to the crush we are facing now. This very much could have been mitigated. 

I agree that it would not have been possible to completely avoid the chaos that we have seen, but to state that it was impossible to do this better seems unfounded to me.