Waging war on jihadis from a distance is not nearly as effective as supporting a friendly government that wages war on jihadis.
The government keeps telling us that we can fight terrorist jihadis in Afghanistan without being in Afghanistan. They're fooling themselves to tell us that:
The defense and counterterrorism strategy relies on a Drone-First approach. What’s referred to as an ‘over-the-horizon’ plan depends on an ever-harder to sustain intelligence presence sufficient to detect and disrupt terrorist attack planning. To execute that strategy, we fly from bases in the Middle East through the only place to admit us overflight rights so far, Pakistan, a country we suspect tipped off allied militants and terrorists in past strikes.
I warned about the same issue.
But the intelligence agencies, you say! They'll identify our enemies now that we are gone!
Sadly, our intelligence agencies screwed the pooch when we were there!
Not only did the Central Intelligence Agency and other US intelligence agencies wildly underestimate the speed of the Taliban advance, but they also appear to have been blind to the extent of political dealings the Taliban had made as the withdrawal loomed and the military prepositioning the Taliban achieved to begin a near-simultaneous assault on provincial capitals. They appear to have missed the fact that Taliban shadow governors were already in place, alongside their staff, to take over provincial functions.
What help will they be outside Afghanistan?
Still, I hear rumors they have a rock solid pee tape of one of the top Taliban leaders. That's bound to pay off, eh?
But because the Biden administration effed this withdrawal up, it will not get the decent interval between withdrawal and Taliban victory that it counted on to last past the mid-term Congressional elections next year.
The United States. showed no sign Monday of stepping up airstrikes in Afghanistan despite accelerating Taliban gains there. A Pentagon spokesman emphasized that Americans now see the fight as one for Afghan political and military leaders to win or lose.
Thank God that FDR didn't tell the world in 1940 after the Nazis defeated France that the fight in Europe is now one for British political and military leaders to win or lose, so no American help was forthcoming.
Heck, we probably should have let Europeans sort out their differences without our "destabilizing" assistance, eh?
Have a super sparkly day.
UPDATE: Related:
I have to say we must work the problem. But the problem got so much bigger that I don't know where to begin.
