“Any post-mortem on ‘what went wrong in Afghanistan’ that does not include a root cause of dysfunction within the United States government is missing the cause of the disaster that the Global War on Terror has become. Afghanistan is a political failure, it is a policy failure, it is a military failure, and it is a human failure. A United States that cannot conduct conflict resolution within its own government can neither project nor maintain a coherent foreign policy to the rest of the world.”
—Andrew Donaldson, “The rootcause of the Afghanistan crisis? U.S. domestic politics,” Diplomatic Courier,
Aug 21, 2021
*
“There is a more important question that keeps coming up,
whether it’s [Afghanistan], the Boeing 737 Max, opioids, Covid mismanagement,
or anything else of social importance. Do we have the competence to govern
ourselves anymore? Will this loss spur genuine reform of our McKinsey-ified
elites who failed so spectacularly? None of these tens of thousands of Ivy League-encrusted,
PR-savvy, highly credentialed prestigious people actually know how to do
anything useful. They can write books on leadership, or do PowerPoints, or leak
stories. But the hard logistics of actually using resources to achieve
something important are foreign to them. The people who are in charge of the
governing institutions in our society are simply divorced from the underlying
logistics of what makes them work.”
—Matt Stoller, “The war in Afghanistan is what happens whenMcKinsey types run everything,” BIG, Aug 27, 2021
*
“Receiving less attention than
this disaster, but also revealing an utter lack of senior leader
accountability, is our surrendering a modern weapons arsenal to the Taliban. To
date, the senior officials responsible for handing our enemy millions of
dollars of weaponry have faced less adverse consequence than my soldiers and I
received for losing an inert piece of plastic worth less than $100. In fact, if
the past is precedent, many of the architects of this catastrophic failure will
soon enjoy corporate board perches from which to make small fortunes while also
making frequent guest appearances on cable news. In this breathtaking lack of
accountability, our Afghanistan mission mirrors the society from which it
emerged. There is a yawning disconnect between the accountability that we
enforce on those occupying the lower rungs of society while our ruling class
continues to show a remarkable ability to ‘fail up.’”
—Will Bardenwerper, “The breathtakinglack of official accountability in Afghanistan,” Responsible Statecraft,”
Aug 25, 2021
*
“The Taliban have seized U.S. military biometrics devices that
could aid in the identification of Afghans who assisted coalition forces. Handheld
Interagency Identity Detection Equipment (HIIDE) devices contain iris scans and
fingerprints as well as biographical information and are used to access large
centralized databases.”
—Ken Klippenstein & Sara Sirota, “The Taliban have seizedU.S. military biometrics devices,” The Intercept, Aug 17 2021
*
“On a visit to Moscow in 2018, a
high officer of the Duma told me that Russia’s post-Soviet recovery began with
the decision in 1992 to cut military spending by 75%, clearing the way for
eventual domestic reconstruction, and even for the creation of a military force
that actually meets Russia’s contemporary security needs. A similar moment has
arrived in the US. Given the current American mood and the truths now emerging,
to accept the world as it is might also prove to be, of all things, politically
astute. This is the moment to acknowledge that the country’s vast and expensive
military power no longer serves any purpose that can justify its cost.”
—James K. Galbraith, “Afghanistanwas always about American politics,” Project Syndicate, Aug 20, 2021
*
“Afghans did not reject us. They
looked to us as exemplars of democracy and the rule of law. They thought that’s
what we stood for. And what did we stand for? Cronyism, rampant corruption, a
Ponzi scheme disguised as a banking system, a government system where
billionaires get to write the rules. In 2011 an interagency process reached the
decision that the U.S. would not address corruption in Afghanistan. It was now
explicit policy to ignore one of the two factors that would determine the fate
of all our efforts.”
—former NPR reporter who then stayed
in Afghanistan for 10 years Sarah Cheyes, interviewed on PBS, “The U.S. ignoredcorruption within the Afghan government. Did that lead to its fall?” PBS
News Hour, Aug 20, 2021
*
“That extremists were able to
gain an early foothold in rural regions is also due in part to the massive
corruption in the capital and the numerous military operations carried out by
NATO and its Afghan allies. Drone attacks and brutal nightly raids regularly
caused numerous civilian casualties in Afghan villages. Many survivors shifted
their support to the Taliban as result.”
—Emran Feroz, "Why the West failed to understand Afghanistan," DW (Deutsche
World), Aug 23, 2021
*
“An American F-16 aircraft had
come out of a clear blue sky and dropped a Mk82 500-pound bomb on Orifa’s mud,
stone and straw house. Orifa was away at the time. When she returned, she
gathered the body parts. Months later, a group of Americans came from Kabul and
gave her an envelope with fifteen notes: a total of 15 dollars. ‘Two dollars
for each of my family killed,’ she said.”
—John Pilger, “The story of US-led collusion in razingAfghanistan to the ground,” InDepthNews, Aug 25, 2021
*
“The U.S. government has now spent 20 years and $145
billion trying to rebuild Afghanistan, its security forces, civilian government
institutions, economy, and civil society. The Department of Defense (DOD) has
also spent $837 billion on warfighting. The extraordinary costs were meant to
serve a purpose—though the definition of that purpose kept changing
evolved over time. While there have been several areas of improvement—most
notably in the areas of health care, maternal health, and education—progress
has been elusive and the prospects for sustaining this progress are dubious.”
— Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), “What we need to learn: Lessons from twenty yearsof Afghanistan reconstruction,” Aug, 2021
*
“On the weekend of August 14, German diplomats routinely driving
through Kabul’s diplomatic quarter noted an oddity. US soldiers who usually keep
guard had abandoned the compound. The Germans also noticed that the road to the
international airport, normally secured by American troops, was also
undefended. They called around to Western colleagues and learned that the US
had withdrawn the forces to their own embassy. Only the next day did US
diplomats inform their allies that they, too, should leave the so-called Green
Zone and head to the airport, as the Americans were already doing.”
—Daniel Williams, “Biden’s US-first approach leaves NATO in thelurch,” Asia Times, Aug 23, 2021
*
“The UK knowingly entered a subordinate military arrangement
with the US in Afghanistan such that the final decision to withdraw wasn’t even
contingent on any ‘consultation’ with UK officials. Oddly, the basic
powerlessness of a scenario where the US President can make an operational
decision in Afghanistan and the UK has no choice but to follow suit never seems
to have bothered [former PM Theresa] May or her like-minded colleagues at any
point in the 20 years prior to August 2021. Conspicuously missing from these
Parliamentary outcries is any awareness that choosing to become an inert,
emasculated appendage of the US is the thing that really appears to have doomed
‘Global Britain.’
“It’s also unclear whether [critics are] familiar with the US government’s
own top auditor reporting that widows of dead Afghan National Army soldiers had
to give sexual favors to God-knows-who in order to receive their dead husbands’
pensions. Oddly, this never roused the passions of these sudden defenders of
Afghan women, back when the US was an active combatant in the war with the UK
as its obedient understudy.”
—Michael Tracey, “British melodrama over Afghanistan withdrawalmasks their own impotence and irrelevance,” MT [blog], Aug 25, 2021
*
Christina Zhao, “Chinese state medias mock U.S. over Afghanistan:‘Smoother than presidential transition,’” Newsweek, Aug 15, 2021
*
“Sens. Jack Reed (Armed
Services), Mark Warner (Intelligence), and Robert Menendez (Foreign Affairs)
are piling on the frenzy in Washington. These same senators’ reactions to the
Washington Post’s investigation in December 2019—dubbed the ‘Afghanistan Papers’—which
found that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in
Afghanistan? Reed, Warner, and Menendez said very little about the Post’s
findings.”
—Ben Armbruster, “Senators nowinvestigating Biden’s withdrawal were mum on ‘Afghanistan Papers,’” Responsible
Statecraft, Aug 20, 2021
*
“More than a generation ago,
Afghanistan won its freedom, which the United States, Britain and their allies
destroyed. ‘Every girl could go to high school and university. We could go
where we wanted and wear what we liked. We used to go to cafes and the cinema
to see the latest Indian films on a Friday. It all started to go wrong when the
mujahedin started winning; these were the people the West supported.’ In the
1980s, I made contact with the Revolutionary Association of the Women of
Afghanistan, known as RAWA, which had tried to alert the world to the suffering
of Afghan women. During the Taliban time they concealed cameras beneath their
burqas to film evidence of atrocities and did the same to expose the brutality
of the Western-backed mujahedin. ‘Marina’ of RAWA told me, ‘We took the
videotape to all the main media groups, but they didn’t want to know.’ Now,
they do.”
—John Pilger, “The great game of smashing countries," ARENA, Aug 25, 2021
*
“It is really something to watch
this town attempt to absolve itself from two decades of jingoism, profiteering,
barely existent oversight, and zero accountability by suddenly demanding
answers about Afghanistan.”
—Matt Duss, foreign policy advisor
to Bernie Sanders
*
“No doubt if Trump had followed through on his stated
desire to finally end the war, the chaotic scenes emerging out of Kabul would
have been portrayed as somehow part-and-parcel of his secret desire to upend
the American-led world order at the behest of Vladimir Putin. The media outrage
would have been even more apocalyptic and frothingly conspiratorial. Although
the media’s affinities are largely against Trump and largely for Biden, both
still attract hyper-animosity when they seek to end wars.”
—Michael
Tracey, “Ignore the fake ‘experts’—The real ‘catastrophe’ in Afghanistan was alwaysthe war itself,” MT [blog], Aug 17, 2021
*
“From the outset, America and
its allies embraced—and never reconsidered—a top-down state-building strategy
that was always destined to fail. The assumption is that if you can establish
overwhelming military dominance over a territory and subdue all other sources
of power, you can then impose your will. Yet in most places, this theory is
only half right, at best; in Afghanistan, it was dead wrong. Most states have
been constructed not by force but by compromise and cooperation. In this model,
the state is not imposed on a society against its wishes; rather, state
institutions build legitimacy by securing a modicum of popular support.”
—Daron Acemoglu, “Why nation-building failed in Afghanistan,” Project Syndicate, Aug 20, 2021
*
“Some will say, they didn't fight! They get what they deserve!
To which I say, ‘And what do we deserve?’” A fractious country comprised of
warring tribes, unable to form an inclusive whole; unable to wade beyond
shallow differences in sect and identity in order to provide for the common
defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to themselves
and their posterity, and so they perish—in the span of a breath—without ever
reaching the promised shore.” [He’s not talking about Afghanistan.]
— Edward Snowden, “A hell ofour own making,” Continuing Ed, Aug 17, 2021
*
“The global wealth and influence of the United States was so great that it could simply afford a 20-year campaign with no practical value.”
—Andrey
Shusentsov, “How much is experience worth? Twenty years of US experiments in theMiddle East,” Valdai Discussion Club, Aug 18, 2021
*
“They were careless people. They smashed up things and
creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness,
letting others clean up the mess they had made.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The
Great Gatsby
*
[written before the Afghanistan collapse]
“Potential adversaries have spent 30 years watching and learning from U.S.
operations. Any reasonably intelligent counterparty would pay attention to what
the U.S. has been doing and then figure out what to expect and how to deal with
it. Come the next real war, U.S. forces won’t own space or the skies. Won’t run
the electromagnetic spectrum. Won’t have unfettered communications. Won’t
control logistics. Won’t have good targeting data. Won’t have air supremacy,
let alone sea supremacy or undersea dominance. And many of the expensive weapon
systems simply won’t work in the degraded environment. It took an internal
wargame in the Department of Defense to illustrate the problem such that no
less than one of the most senior generals in the military came out of the
closet to admit that America’s super-expensive military complex can’t win the
next big war.”
—Byron W. King, “‘It failed miserably’—What if the US losta war and nobody noticed?” Whiskey & Gunpowder, Jul 29, 2021 https://bit.ly/3zprrsI
