America could have won the Afghanistan War. We certainly didn't have to lose it in 2021.
From the "Well, Duh" files:
A government watchdog says decisions by Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden to pull all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan were the key factors in the collapse of that nation's military. ...
“Outcomes in a war like this, an outcome that is a strategic failure — the enemy is in charge in Kabul, there’s no way else to describe that — that is a cumulative effect of 20 years,” Milley said, adding that lessons need to be learned, including whether the U.S. military made the Afghans overly dependent on American technology in a mistaken effort to make the Afghan army look like the American army.
I was against Trump's approach. Although my understanding is that Biden made Trump's plan even worse:
The original American withdrawal plan was for a thousand or more U.S. and NATO troops to remain to advise and train the IRA security forces and monitor the corruption. The IRA wanted to survive but to do that they had to keep receiving billions a year from foreign donors, mainly the United States. Refusal to cooperate meant termination of aid and nearly all the foreigners would leave. The Americans got a new government in early 2021 and that led to fatal changes to the withdrawal plan. Everyone was ordered out, but was given three additional months to do it. That gave Pakistan and the Taliban time to increase their pressure on the IRA, which now believed the Americans were going to abandon them.
America screwed up well before Trump or Biden:
America must not fool ourselves that the Taliban victory was the Afghan government's fault. You go to war with the ally you have and not the ally you wished to have. We knew what we had and we stopped doing what we needed to do to compensate for our ally's weaknesses.
We screwed up critically either 6 or 12 years ago, depending on how you define it.* And then we screwed up a lot in the last several months when we trusted the Taliban "peace process" and abandoned the Afghanistan government while loudly speculating on the speed of their inevitable defeat.
But making Afghanistan's military a mirror image of America's was not one of them:
Let's look at a chart of what the Afghan military had and abandoned to the Taliban that made the rounds recently[.] ...
Basically, Afghanistan had a light infantry and paramilitary force. This is not in any way a military built "in our image".
Nor did it operate like the American military.
Much of the discussion about failures in building an Afghan military are correct. I was in favor of a regional emphasis on Afghan governance and forces rather than trying to make the territory of fractured Afghanistan an actual nation-state. But that mistake ignores that we didn't have to build a great military. It had to be better than the Taliban, who had their own weaknesses and divisions. Don't make the failure to make a good Afghan military an excuse for our loss. We had an adequate Afghanistan military.
And we blew it. Biden's grave error of completely bugging out was the final nail in the coffin that undermined the Afghanistan military's chance of making it through the danger zone after we pulled our combat capabilities out.
It was a repeat of the Obama administration's disastrous decision to bug out of Iraq in 2011. Without our military presence we were unable to prevent--or even comprehend--the hollowing out of the Iraqi military by a fearful Iraqi government unsure of what Iran could do to it after America abandoned them.
And our failure to see the rise of ISIL in Iraq prior to the collapse was another result of leaving Iraq.
The result was that the Iraqi rulers valued officer loyalty over military competence. Which led to its collapse in the north when ISIL launched a sudden and broad offensive in mid-2014.
Obama at least initiated Iraq War 2.0 to restore the earlier victory. Biden responded to defeat in Afghanistan by claiming glorious victory and moving on.
I suppose I'll be grateful if Biden doesn't fail to defend Iraq--this time from Iran--again. Although the Democratic Party's strange love of mullah-run Iran could guarantee another disaster.
UPDATE: Oops. I mistakenly added an entry for weekend data dump at the end of this post.
NOTE: War updates continue at this post.
