Illustrative Image: U.S. Army soldiers return home from a 9-month deployment to Afghanistan on December 10, 2020 at Fort Drum, New York.
Written by Dr. Binoy Kampmark
Succeeding administrations have a chronic habit of blaming their predecessors. The Biden administration has been most particular on the issue, taking every chance to attack former President Donald Trump for the ills of his tenure. But the effort to almost exclusively lay blame at Trump’s door for the US fiasco in Afghanistan was a rich one indeed, given the failings of the George W. Bush and Obama administrations in that historically doomed theatre of conflict.
Revolutions, Leon Trotsky remarked, are always verbose. But so are failed wars, military campaigns and invasions. The greater the failure, the weightier the verbosity from the apologists. National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications, John Kirby, as befitting his title, is just the man for the task.
In announcing the findings of the Biden administration into the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan in August 2021, Kirby proved infuriatingly bureaucratic, his address addled by management speak. “As you all know,” he told a White House press conference, “over these many months, departments and agencies key to the withdrawal conducted thorough, internal after-action reviews, each of them examining their decision-making processes, as well as how those decisions were executed.”
The briefing began as all praise for his own administration’s virtues (naturally). The President had made the right decision to leave Afghanistan (no mention that the paving had already been laid by Trump). “The United States had long ago accomplished its mission to remove from the battlefield the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 and to degrade the terrorist threat to the United States from Afghanistan.”
Leaving Afghanistan placed the US “on a stronger strategic footing, more capable to support Ukraine and to meet our security commitments around the world, as well as the competition with China, because it is not fighting a ground war in Afghanistan.” We can all be assured that this half-sighted colossus, unshackled in Afghanistan, can pursue its mischief making elsewhere.
The finger-pointing duly follows. First, Trump is blamed for not having more troops in Afghanistan that needed to be withdrawn in the first place. There should have been more than the official number of 2,500 present, “the lowest since 2001.” Biden also “inherited a Special Immigrant Visa program that had been starved of resources.” The Trump administration-Taliban deal calling for the complete removal of troops by May 2021, lest the Taliban would resume its attacks on US soldiers, also comes in for a serve.
Then comes the issue of transitions, because they “matter”. Trump and his officials had asked about what plans for a security transition in Afghanistan would look like, or those to increase numbers in the Special Immigrant Visa program. “None were forthcoming.”
Kirby spends much time explaining how the events that unfolded in the dying days of the US garrison were unforeseeable. “No agency predicted a Taliban takeover in nine days.” Nor did they predict the fleeing of President Ashraf Ghani, that greatly reliable figure of US interests, “who had indicated to us his intent to remain in Afghanistan up until he departed on the 15th of August. And no agency predicted that more than – that the more than 300,000 trained and equipped Afghan National Security and Defense Forces would fail to fight for their country, especially after 20 years of American support.”
All these points are staggering from a historical viewpoint. They betray, not merely the delusion of Empire, but the stupidity and myopic nature of its emissaries. The lessons of Vietnam, and the Vietnamisation program pursued by the US towards its South Vietnamese allies in the latter stages of the Indochina War, were clearly of no consequence. All that mattered was belief and faith, terrible substitutes for solid evidence and field work.
The report, with the simple title U.S Withdrawal from Afghanistan, is an exercise in bleating and blame. “When President Trump took office in 2017, there were more than 10,000 troops in Afghanistan. Eighteen months later, after introducing more than 3,000 additional troops just to maintain the stalemate, President Trump ordered direct talks with the Taliban without consulting our allies and partners or allowing the Afghan government at the negotiating table.”
Involving the puppet Afghan government in any meaningful power-sharing arrangement with the Taliban was doomed from the start, a point that Trump, whether through insight or accident, stumbled upon. The Biden administration, on the other hand, persists with the chimerical notion that those the strained Pax Americana blesses are supposedly able and capable of maintaining peace in the face of a determined guerrilla fighting force.
As a corollary of that delusion, the report reiterates the fallacy of assuming that training, equipment and numerical superiority somehow overcome a lack of will, sound morale and determination. “The ANDSF had significant advantages. Compared to the Taliban, they had vastly superior numbers and equipment: 300,000 troops compared to 80,000 Taliban fighters.”
Trump was also to be blamed for “four years of neglect” that left “crucial systems” in a perilous state of “disrepair.” Refugee support services and the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program choked with 18,000 applications.
Biden emerges from the report a sage misled. “From the beginning, President Biden directed that preparations for a potential US withdrawal include planning for all contingencies – including a rapid deterioration of the security situation – even though intelligence at the time deemed this situation unlikely.” Instructions were given to all close advisers to draw up plans for the withdrawal; the National Security Council “hosted dozens of high-level planning meetings, formal rehearsals of the withdrawal, and table top exercises” examining various scenarios.
These evidently did not help. The collapse of the government in Kabul “unfolded,” as Avril Haines, Director of National Intelligence stated on August 18, 2021 “more quickly than [the Intelligence Community] anticipated.” But wait, there is more: “the collapse was more rapid than either the Taliban or the Afghan government expected.”
The evacuation effort itself was plagued with problems, though the report attempts to minimise Biden’s hand. He, after all, had been advised that “risks”, including keeping such access routes as the Abbey Gate open at Kabul Airport, were “manageable”. In the chaos that ensued, a suicide bomber killed 13 US personnel and 170 Afghans. A pre-emptive drone strike by the US military launched a few days later intended to neutralise another potential attack ended up killing 10 civilians.
The entire calamity was an example of an imperial, ruinous escapade left in a shambles. And the inability on the part of US departments and agencies to understand the durability of the Taliban and the conspicuous weakness of the regime in Kabul, showed yet again a monumental inability to identify the obvious.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
In other words Opium was replaced by Fentanyl.
Gotta love this author. Yeah, Biden is a POS. Who doesn’t get that? But he has this tendency to elevate Trump to Godhood. Has he EVER found Trump wanting? Has he EVER mentioned the Israeli ass-kissing he was so good at? Does he EVER mention Trump’s KM connections? Who financed his election? While we’re at it, he does mention the CIA and how they got it all wrong. Great. But does he mention who the CIA is compromised by? No. Has he EVER? Does he EVER mention who owns Trump? No. Would an assassination and continual attacks on Iran mean a thing? Apparently not. How about sending all those Stingers and Javelins to Ukraine, the bitching about the state of NATO and how Russia was going to subvert the EU because they had a hold on their energy supply, which echo’s Biden’s BS? Macgregor keeps saying that TRump wouldn’t be doing the same as Biden. How does he know that? Who sold KSA more weapons to attack Yemen with because he likes money (great morality there, huh)? The truth is Israel decided that. Who massively attacked Syria over BS lies twice in the first 4 months of his presidency, at the same time crying about endless war? When he talked about getting out of Syria, that meant cementing US positions in the eastern Syrian so they could be starved of food and energy. Has he mentioned Trump actually licensed the stealing of Syrian oil so it could be ‘legally’ marketed? Are Trump’s statements about Ukraine today the exact same thing this author credits to Biden/Afghanistan? Did Trump ever say he had issues with arming Ukraine to the teeth? Had issues with Nazis? Had issues with those labs in Ukraine? Made sure those Minsk agreements were implemented? When did he ever go after Obama and Nuland for the Ukrainian coup? In his 4 years he never did a thing to stop the coming Ukraine mess, he helped perpetuate it. F’ing get real, there are no good guys, period. He thinks the Afghanistan thing was incompetence. No, it was engineered. One look at the pix out of Afghanistan, including the phonies, shown on US TV and it’s obvious. Seems that articles like this are designed to exacerbate the divisions plaguing the US, not to highlight the continuing and consolidated efforts in that regard. They’re all on the same team and have been for the last 43 years at least, kicked off by the October Surprise, Reagan’s take on Nixxon’s treasonous Vietnam ploy. That leads to Cohn, Trump’s BFF and mentor, who Nancy credited for Ronnie’s election. It’s been downhill from there. Just exactly what is the actual aim of this article? State the obvious ala previous/successive admins?
You are right, the author forgets that trum is like the others and that the deepstate is the real decision-maker
What the author forgets, or deliberately omits, is that the RNC foisted Trump on us through Interstate Crosscheck and lots of help from their DNC and MSM partners in crime.
Three of the most recent US presidential elections – 2000, 2004, 2016 – were rigged. The deep state is no longer content with allowing voters to elect the lesser evil, they now decide whether the sock puppet in chief will be red or blue. False claims of voter fraud in 2020 have only served to convince the majority of voters that there is nothing wrong with our elections.
The DNC and RNC are partners in crime; two sides of the same counterfeit coin.
Be highly suspicious of anyone who paints one as good and the antidote to the other which is evil.
They are both evil. The RNC basically tells you they want to screw you – for example, privatizing Medicare – while the DNC claims they want to help but the RNC won’t let them. And shills like Chomsky say you mustn’t waste your vote on a third party candidate, you must vote for the lesser evil.
Really STUPID ASS rant. Seriously. Are you too dumb to understand WHERE the Deep State attacked Trump from? Ukraine!! The bogus impeachments???? IDIOT! God I hate people like you.
Môžu si vypisovať teraz už čo len chcú. Ale aj tak ničím neprekryjú fakt, že darebácky štát USA dostal do od obyčajných pastierov kôz poriadnu do zubov!!! Utekali z Afganistanu tak, že sa sami pri tom kopali do riti!!! Hanba na 100 rokov!!! Deti a vnuci Afganských bojovníkov si budú o tom spievať piesne a rozprávať povesti.
Did Kirby explain how “the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11” managed to get WTC 7 to collapse through itself at free fall – something unusual even for admitted controlled demolitions?
Or perhaps he finally explained how gravity caused the towers to explode themselves apart hurling at least one multi ton chunk of structural steal into a building 600 ft away?
No? What a surprise.
Can you say, false flag, boys and girls?
All they do is lie. Biden was ALWAYS a stupid, corrupt grifter as the “Senator from MSBC”. Back slapping phony and dumbass. As a 45 year old. One of the most arrogant, legit STUPID phonies in the US Senate.
Now? He’s a danger to humanity. A senile old clown surrounded by Rice, Sullivan, Nuland, Blinken, Austin, Garland and all the old Obama “Tribe” hacks looking to start WW3 and kill us all?
We’re in BIG trouble people. Americans. In every way. If this doesn’t end in Nuke annihilation, it’s the economic devastation.
The Jews are always following Satan’s plan. They don’t believe in the Salvation of Christ. They hate the Koran. They are blowing up the World. To … what end? Greed and Control of we plebs. It’s THEM against us, people of the World.