Decisions in America demonstrate that we have little hope that the Afghan forces can hold for long.
I didn't think it was possible even for Biden to eff things up in Afghanistan so badly so quickly. But the embassy is to be evacuated soon. That signal of no-confidence should be it for Afghan morale.
Resistance to the Taliban will once again arise, but from regional warlords and insurgents rather than from a government. What amazingly stupid foreign policy we have these days. Right now I'll be surprised if the Taliban don't capture Kabul soon.
All week
I've been looking for signs that the government and its allies can
regroup and drive back some of the Taliban advances. If the northern capitals could be retaken, I thought, that was a signal that the Afghan anti-Taliban forces could hang together. Do that and the
Taliban could be denied quick victory and forced to fight against
superior government firepower. The Taliban would then be driven back from their high water mark and a longer war of attrition would set in.
But I'm not seeing that evidence of rebound.
Still, the outcomes of wars often rest on a knife's edge. If the government fights even belatedly, it is possible that the Taliban will get close to victory but fail, and have to retreat to avoid getting hammered. I'm not without hope. But I'm seeing nothing to justify that hope.
In the space of a week I went from hope that the next 5-6 months would be key to fear that Biden effed things up so badly that we probably won't make it long enough for Biden to celebrate that 20-year anniversary he seems to cherish.
Yet don't think that the rapid collapse of the Afghan government as we leave means the Taliban were "destined" to win. That's an excuse to avoid responsibility for this onrushing apparent debacle.
Remember, the Taliban collapsed just as quickly when we pushed with special forces, cash, bombers, and local allies after 9/11. Did that mean the Taliban were "destined" to lose, too?
We've made a really bad decision to leave early when
only 2,500 American troops made it possible for allies and contractors
to keep the Afghan military machine killing Taliban and preventing al
Qaeda and other international jihadis from regaining a sanctuary in
Afghanistan to kill us at home. We effed this up. There was no "destiny"
involved. This was not inevitable.
Effing morons.
UPDATE: Recall that the Iraqi military under crappy leaders who let training and standards lapse collapsed in northern and western Iraq in mid-2014 extremely rapidly. But I expected the Iraqi government to hold in its core Shia areas despite speculation that ISIL will advance to Baghdad. And the Iraqis did hold on in their core area until we could help rebuild military power and help the long counter-offensive to break ISIL's hold.
So it isn't out of bounds to think something like this could happen in Afghanistan whether or not Kabul falls.
UPDATE: A thousand American troops will go to Kabul. It looks like the lead battalion, reinforced, of the brigade being stationed in Kuwait for emergencies. The emergencies are starting fast.
UPDATE: Well, that's all she wrote:
Afghanistan’s embattled president left the country Sunday, joining his fellow citizens and foreigners in a stampede fleeing the advancing Taliban and signaling the end of a 20-year Western experiment aimed at remaking Afghanistan.
Now the real killing can begin in Taliban controlled territory.
Will the non-Pushtuns in the north rally to prevent that in their regions?
It's pretty sad. This started as a shorter paragraph in the evening data dump. But this morning things seemed to have deteriorated too much already to make an evening post too late.
UPDATE: Don't say we weren't warned:
Biden can try to blame Trump. But Biden owns this. And it has only been 7 months of him.
UPDATE: Exactly (via Instapundit):
All Joe Biden had to do was nothing. Had Joe Biden done nothing, Afghanistan would not have fallen to the Taliban today. Had he just let the status quo continue, the status quo would have continued. Afghanistan would have plodded along and we would have kept the Taliban from power with a small force of American military personnel among whose ranks there had not been a single fatality since March 2020—17 months without a death. Keep that in mind as you listen to and watch people try to analyze away the horror that has befallen the Afghan people. The idea being retailed by the increasingly defeatist left and the increasingly isolationist right is that what has happened was inevitable. It was the opposite of inevitable. It wouldn’t have happened if Biden hadn’t acted.
The Fuck-Up Fairy is apparently a cabinet level position in the Biden White House.
