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mac
Joined: 07 Mar 1999
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Location: Berkeley, California
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wsurfer
Joined: 17 Aug 2000
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boggsman1
Joined: 24 Jun 2002
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 Posted: Tue Aug 17, 2021 9:34 am Post subject: |
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"I planned to withdraw on May 1st, and we should keep as close to that schedule as possible," Trump said in a statement
I hope the righty Media keeps hammering away at Joe... Fact is, most Americans agree with Trump in 2020.... |
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mrgybe
Joined: 01 Jul 2008
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| Posted: Tue Aug 17, 2021 11:05 am Post subject: |
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| Boggsy, Few people will disagree that we needed to end our involvement in Afghanistan. But the utter chaos and disastrous lack of a coherent plan that accompanied our departure, is 100% in Joe's court. |
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mac
Joined: 07 Mar 1999
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| Posted: Tue Aug 17, 2021 11:08 am Post subject: |
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I just started reading "Exercise of Power", by Robert Gates. He's no fan of either Obama or Biden on international policy. But he has served under many different presidents, and his insights, if not his conclusions, are valuable. One of the themes that he emphasizes is the use of soft power, or diplomacy. He is particularly critical of Trump's abandonment of this tool, and his dismantling of the State Department. In his introduction he states:
| Quote: | | I argued as secretary of defense that the American government had become too reliant on the use of military power...and...[should] look afresh at the many forms of power available to America... |
This is not a new song for Gates, here from 2007:
| Quote: | By Thom Shanker
Nov. 27, 2007
WASHINGTON, Nov. 26 — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates called Monday for the United States government to commit more money and effort to “soft power” tools, including diplomacy, economic assistance and communications, because the military alone cannot defend America’s interests around the world.
In a speech at Kansas State University, the Pentagon chief forcefully advocated a larger budget for the State Department. Mr. Gates noted that military spending — even without war costs for Iraq and Afghanistan — totals nearly half a trillion dollars annually, compared with a State Department budget of $36 billion.
“We must focus our energies beyond the guns and steel of the military, beyond just our brave soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen,” he said. “We must also focus our energies on the other elements of national power that will be so crucial in the years to come.”
Mr. Gates, who took over the top Pentagon job last December, said that “based on my experience serving seven presidents, as a former director of C.I.A. and now as secretary of defense, I am here to make the case for strengthening our capacity to use ‘soft power’ and for better integrating it with ‘hard power.’ ” |
While I agree in general terms with his thesis, I don't think that Afghanistan proves the point. America invested vast sums in infrastructure and education, creating substantial wealth and increasing literacy in an effort to create a home grown economy. Not much of that will be sustained in the face of religious extremism.
So we need to keep in mind some of the cross currents that led to the debacles in Viet Nam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
--any foreigners will be seen as occupiers in a battle for hearts and minds over self-determination, however true that narrative may be
--cultural values, including but not limited to religion, will have disproportionate influence, and may at times outweigh material wealth
--corruption, or the perception of corruption, is extraordinarily corrosive. |
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boggsman1
Joined: 24 Jun 2002
Posts: 9120
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| Posted: Tue Aug 17, 2021 11:50 am Post subject: |
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| mrgybe wrote: | | Boggsy, Few people will disagree that we needed to end our involvement in Afghanistan. But the utter chaos and disastrous lack of a coherent plan that accompanied our departure, is 100% in Joe's court. |
Sure, that's fair to a degree, I get it. |
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swchandler
Joined: 08 Nov 1993
Posts: 10588
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| Posted: Tue Aug 17, 2021 11:52 am Post subject: |
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This Washington Post opinion from Fareed Zakaria presents things honestly and fairly well overall.
"As we watch the tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan, let us first dispense with the fantasy that the United States was maintaining the peace there with just a few thousand troops and that this situation could have been managed with this small commitment. For the past couple of years, it looked that way to Americans because Washington had made a deal with the Taliban and, as a result, the Taliban was deliberately not attacking U.S. and coalition forces.
For the Afghans themselves, the war was intensifying. In the summer of 2019, the Afghan Army and police force suffered their worst casualties in the two decades of fighting. It was also the worst period for Afghan civilian casualties in a decade. In 2018, when the United States had four times as many troops as this year, the fighting was so brutal that 282,000 Afghan civilians were displaced from their homes in the countryside. Frustration with the Afghan government and its U.S. patrons was rising. A U.S. government survey done that year showed that Afghan support for U.S. troops was at 55 percent, down from 90 percent a decade earlier.
You have heard people suggest that the withdrawal should have been a year or two later. Consider this news report in the Guardian in 2016: “Afghan Forces Lose Ground to Taliban Despite Delayed US Troop Withdrawal.” The story pointed out that the U.S. military had persuaded Barack Obama to delay the troop withdrawals he had already delayed a year earlier, but despite having robust U.S. forces and significant air power, the central government’s control dropped to only about 65 percent of the country’s districts.
Some of the data I have cited comes from a powerful new book, “The American War in Afghanistan,” by Carter Malkasian, who served as a civilian officer in Helmand province and rose to become senior advisor to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Drawing his conclusions from the book in a Politico essay, he begins by noting, “there can be little doubt that we lost the war.” The United States spent 20 years, $2 trillion, commanded at their peak 130,000 coalition troops, built up an Afghan security force of 300,000 (at least on paper), and used the world’s most sophisticated and lethal air power. Still, it was unable to defeat an ill-equipped Taliban force of perhaps 75,000. Why?
Malkasian tries to answer the question, which he admits has puzzled him for the 12 years since he became engaged with Afghanistan and watched “in battle after battle, numerically superior and better-supplied soldiers … being defeated by poorly resourced and unexceptionally led Taliban.” In the past few weeks, the most extraordinary sight has been to see how little the Afghan army and police have fought back, often melting away at the sight of the invading Taliban force. Malkasian’s basic answer comes from a Taliban scholar he met in Kandahar in 2019. “The Taliban fight for belief, for janat (heaven) and ghazi (killing infidels). … The army and police fight for money.”
To be sure, Afghan soldiers were also unable or unwilling to turn back the Taliban advance because they were not getting the supplies and backup they needed from their leaders. That’s not surprising given the many problems with the Afghan government. While democratically elected, it lacked broad support. In the 2019 election, just over 1.8 million people voted in a country with a population of 39 million. Corruption was endemic and billions of dollars of U.S. aid, sloshed around carelessly, made it much worse. The government never truly incorporated the rural Pashtun community, from which the Taliban draws its greatest strength.
But above all, that government’s legitimacy was crippled because it survived only thanks to the support of a foreign power. Afghan identity is closely tied to resistance against foreign invasion, particularly the invasion of infidels. (Afghan history glorifies the century-long struggle against the British and the jihad against the godless Soviet Union.) It is easy to use these tropes to mobilize nationalism and religious devotion, which powerfully fuel the will to fight and die. The Ashraf Ghani government had no countervailing narrative of equal intensity to inspire its troops.
The United States had been watching the Taliban gain ground in Afghanistan for years now. It is rich and powerful enough to have been able to mask that reality through a steady stream of counter-attacks and air, missile and drone strikes. But none of that changed the fact that, despite all its efforts, it had not been able to achieve victory — it could not defeat the Taliban. Could it have withdrawn better, more slowly, in a different season, after more negotiations? Certainly. This withdrawal has been poorly planned and executed. But the naked truth is this: There is no elegant way to lose a war."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/16/we-lost-war-afghanistan-long-ago/ |
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mac
Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17748
Location: Berkeley, California
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| Posted: Tue Aug 17, 2021 3:05 pm Post subject: |
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Can anyone here remind me of mrgybe's comments on Trump's withdrawal from Syria? I'll wait. Meanwhile, what it meant:
| Quote: | U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Timothy R. Koster
Trump Administration Decision to Withdraw from Syria Another Sign U.S. Influence is Waning
Posted By Andrew Holland on Dec 19, 2018
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The Trump Administration has abruptly announced that it will pull all American forces out of Syria. This is only the most recent example of how American actions are making the power of the United States smaller. In light of this short-sighted and capricious decision by President Trump, it is tempting to throw all the blame for the diminishing of American influence in the Middle East his way, but the Bush and Obama Administrations also must share their own part of the blame for America’s growing irrelevance in this region. While the Bush Administration overreached and the Obama Administration suffered from a lack of ambition, it now appears that the Trump Administration will show that American commitments mean nothing.
On December 15 and 16, I attended the Doha Forum, an annual gathering of world leaders, policymakers, media, and commentators held in the capitol of Qatar. After a weekend of intense speechmaking, panel discussions, and meetings, I was convinced that the Middle East is slowly adapting to a new reality – one in which America is far less relevant.
Even though Americans were probably the greatest number of participants (not including the host Qataris), the United States was hardly mentioned during panels not including an American. Panel discussions about the Gulf Crisis and the Blockade of Qatar focused on regional dynamics. Speeches about humanitarian crises focused on local solutions, while discussions about energy exports looked at growing Asian demand. I am convinced that the security order in the Middle East is moving on without America.
Notably, however, there were two notable exceptions: the war against ISIS and Iran. Two areas where American military power is necessary and decisive. Brett McGurk, the Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, spoke about how ISIS was down to the last 1% of its fighters, and the importance of finishing the job against them. Underlining the surprise nature of Trump’s announcement, at no time did McGurk even hint that the U.S. would be leaving Syria. His remarks there were similar to ones he made at a State Department briefing last week:
And if we’ve learned one thing over the years, enduring defeat of a group like this means you can’t just defeat their physical space and then leave; you have to make sure the internal security forces are in place to ensure that those gains, security gains, are enduring. So the enduring defeat of ISIS means not just the physical defeat, but make sure that we are training local security forces. So that will take some time.
Javad Zarif and Robin Wright
Secondly, the issue of Iran’s role in the region remains central, because of American efforts to isolate and contain Tehran. At the Forum, Foreign Minister Javad Zarif was interviewed by Robin Wright of the New Yorker, saying that Trump keeps sending requests to Iran to talk – but that his country won’t engaged in discussions with a country that demands adherence to 12 conditions before the talks even begin. Overall, the theme of his talk was explicitly about presenting Iran as the alternative to American power in the Middle East. He did say that sanctions were hurting Iran, but also that his country is used to sanctions – and the economy was harmed far more by the sanctions of the 1980s. By the tone of the response in the audience, it was clear that Iran is convincing others that the U.S. campaign against it is both unjust and unnecessary.
As President Trump announces his withdrawal of troops from Syria, I worry that the U.S. will lose its last remaining shred of credibility in the only area of America is still relevant: military force. Even if the U.S. was politically, diplomatically, and culturally ignored, every nation still respected the American ability to shape events with the use or threat of force. By pulling out of Syria, the Trump Administration is signaling an unwillingness to use force. Moreover, this decision may further undermine the policies attempting to contain Iran because National Security Advisor Bolton had specifically linked American troops in Syria to the presence of Iranian troops.
The truth is, American military power has not changed: the U.S. is still the only external force in the Middle East capable of both deterring aggressive action and shaping events with violence. However, this decision further will confirm the perception that the U.S. is not a reliable partner and is not interested in the region. In a region as volatile as this, we should worry that this will lead to more violence. |
And:
| Quote: | Less than a week after President Donald Trump formally ordered the U.S. military to withdraw the majority of its forces from Syria, the Pentagon carried out an unusual mission in the northeastern part of the country. A pair of F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jets delivered a precision airstrike, not to protect a joint U.S.-Turkish patrol on the border or bomb an ISIS haven back to the Stone Age, but to destroy a major U.S. ammo cache housed in a former cement factory that had been converted into a U.S. special operations base and Kurdish training camp. The stated reason: to “reduce the facility’s military usefulness.”
This unusual mission underscores the logistical nightmares wrought by a hasty U.S. military withdrawal from the country. Military sources have told reporters that the sortie, which cost roughly $23,000 per hour per aircraft, was ordered “because the cargo trucks required to safely remove the ammo are needed elsewhere to support the withdrawal.” Army Colonel Myles Caggins, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition in Syria and Iraq, tried to play the incident off as routine, saying that “blowing the ammo was part of the plan,” but Brett McGurk, a former U.S. envoy to the multinational alliance, tweeted that the mission constituted an “emergency ‘break glass’ evacuation procedure reserved for an extreme worst-case scenario.”
McGurk isn’t wrong. “Trying to destroy munitions from the sky like this does not work as well as air planners think,” John Ismay, a New York Times reporter and former Navy explosive ordnance disposal officer, tweeted. “Some of the weapons you hit will detonate sympathetically, sure. For the rest, you’ve blown open secure storage and made it available to anyone with a pickup truck.”
It’s that latter prospect that should be concerning. In 2017, Trump shuttered a CIA program to arm and equip Syrian rebels, and the weapons and ammo left behind may have helped spur what one researcher on the ground has called an “industrial revolution in terrorism”—and in the midst of Trump’s hasty about-face in northern Syria, even more powerful U.S. munitions stand poised to fall into enemy hands.
That U.S. arms end up in enemy hands is no surprise. A 2017 report from arms control group Conflict Armament Research found that ISIS had captured “significant quantities” of NATO weaponry after looting Iraqi weapons depots in 2014. The lion’s share of “found” ISIS weapons were Warsaw Pact-era firearms and ammo caches that likely originated in Russia and China, but many more foreign-pattern arms “were purchased by the United States and Saudi Arabia” from E.U. nations to equip Syrian opposition forces “without authorisation”—that is, without getting permission from the supplying government to redistribute the weapons. “Supplies of materiel into the Syrian conflict from foreign parties—notably the United States and Saudi Arabia—have indirectly allowed IS to obtain substantial quantities of anti-armor ammunition,” according to the CAR report. “These systems continue to pose a significant threat to the coalition of troops arrayed against IS forces.” |
Oops. |
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mrgybe
Joined: 01 Jul 2008
Posts: 5180
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| Posted: Tue Aug 17, 2021 11:21 pm Post subject: |
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| boggsman1 wrote: | | Sure, that's fair to a degree, I get it. |
This is the worst foreign policy debacle in decades. Yet Joe's handlers kept him out of harms way at Camp David for days while the whole chaotic cluster was unfolding. Finally couldn't avoid bringing him into DC for an hour to explain himself, but wouldn't allow questions (so why not just give the speech from Camp David?), then wheeled him back out to his Maryland hiding place minutes after the speech. They are clearly terrified of exposing him to the possibility of any unscripted commentary. It was subsequently revealed that he has yet to speak with any other foreign leader. The occupant of the most powerful job on earth is a frail old man in hiding. |
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wsurfer
Joined: 17 Aug 2000
Posts: 1635
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| Posted: Tue Aug 17, 2021 11:29 pm Post subject: |
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| mrgybe wrote: | | boggsman1 wrote: | | Sure, that's fair to a degree, I get it. |
This is the worst foreign policy debacle in decades. Yet Joe's handlers kept him out of harms way at Camp David for days while the whole chaotic cluster was unfolding. Finally couldn't avoid bringing him into DC for an hour to explain himself, but wouldn't allow questions (so why not just give the speech from Camp David?), then wheeled him back out to his Maryland hiding place minutes after the speech. They are clearly terrified of exposing him to the possibility of any unscripted commentary. It was subsequently revealed that he has yet to speak with any other foreign leader. The occupant of the most powerful job on earth is a frail old man in hiding. |
Look here brother, who you jiving with that cosmic debris? |
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