If we were actually fixing the country I could have easily gotten behind staying. Instead 90% of the money we sent was taken by corruption.

I was listening to a summary of the state of affairs, and some Afghani batallions were surviving on bags of rotten potatoes because everything including the food rations for the military were getting stolen.

That's the level of corruption we allowed to happen, and that's why the army fell so quickly. What did we really do there? Basically nothing.

This post was edited by NetflixAdaptationWidow on Sep 1 2021 09:37am

even if Biden had done nothing else beyond continuing an existing policy, it would still be noteworthy of a U.S. president not to bow down to the interests of defense contractors, right? (he fails in this metric in other contexts I think) Or do people not feel like there was intense pressure to stay (regardless of popular opinion). Seems like there are basic things that could have been done to make the withdrawal smoother, but it's obviously tricky when there is significant interest in perpetually extending time tables

This post was edited by ZdP on Sep 1 2021 09:54am

But that's par for the course in third world shitholes. They are all corrupt as hell and a lot of the foreign investment in places like this trickles away into dark channels and the pockets of the ruling class.

This goes back to our disagreement from a couple of weeks ago, with me arguing that Afghanistan's fundamental problem is that it is an artificial entity, a collection of distinct and often times hostile tribes. There just aren't enough Afghans who are actually supportive and loyal to the idea of an Afghan state. Fixing corruption and building up self-sustaining state structures is impossible under these circumstances.


Was the much diminished troop presence in Afghanistan really all that lucrative for the defense industry?

Too lazy to do the research myself - does someone know how the US spending on the war in Afghanistan evolved over the years, particularly after the withdrawal of most troops at the end of 2014?

Which is why we would have had to build those structures ourselves and teach them how to run it in a way that survives our withdrawal. We really didn't do shit to build up the country, both from a political level and a material level.

We would have had to hold their leadership accountable on corruption, and we fundamentally weren't interested in doing that.

This post was edited by NetflixAdaptationWidow on Sep 1 2021 10:01am

Doing that is fundamentally impossible if the local population doesn't support and contribute. You cannot impose a sense of national unity onto tribes who don't care about each other, and you cannot turn people into democrats whose heart is not in it. Establishing democracy in a country where 40+++% of the population support Taliban- or ISIS-style stone age islamism is a complete and total pipe dream.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Sep 1 2021 10:06am

That's a good point/question. Another thing: was the CIA telling Biden that the Afghan government was self-sufficient this entire time (up until a few weeks ago)? Or is most of your criticism focusing on steps that could have been taken once it was clear everything had gone to shit (I saw your list of alternative actions during withdrawal that seemed plausible/better). It's a bit different if Biden is parroting lies he receives from intelligence agencies vs. contradicting his own intelligence reports.

This post was edited by ZdP on Sep 1 2021 10:15am

Biden has been in politics long enough to know that the intelligence community is full of shit. No matter what they told him, he should never have listened to them.
That's why I see Biden having a relatively large political responsibility for the messy withdrawal, even if it's the generals and intelligence operatives who misjudged the situation on the ground.

biden doesn't have intelligence

When you give the population great improvements in their lives by rooting out corruption and providing infrastructure they will stop supporting the Taliban.

That's the kicker, you have to actually do it. Not half-ass it. People like material improvements to their circumstances.

That's an interesting standard to hold him to. I don't know if many people who voted for him had similar expectations, I certainly didn't.