Category: Afghanistan

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I find myself increasingly irritated with the quality of reporting emanating from even the most prestigious news outlets like the BBC and the New York Times in regards to the evacuation of Kabul. It seems like everybody needs to get evacuated. Everybody.  I am not sure why and they aren’t particularly adept at telling me why.

A good example of this occurred several weeks back on the BBC that still nags at me.  Lyse Doucet, a BBC correspondent, interviewed an Afghan man who felt abandoned by the British because of visa issues which left him in Kabul after the Taliban took over. The man worked for the contract caterer who supplied meals for the British Embassy. He felt like he served the British well during his tenure and deserved evacuation without all of the visa application roadblocks the British government were putting in his way. Again, his only connection to the British government was serving meals to the embassy staff. He felt this work made his immigration during this time of chaos automatic and necessitates the British to ignore their application process for him and his family. He never really explained why other than he worked hard for the British. Doucet doesn’t pursue it. She does let the viewer know he feels abandoned and would like to very much for the British government’s help in bringing him there. 

I do not want to live in a Taliban controlled Afghanistan. I feel sorry for any Westerner or any Afghan ally who was left there.  I also want the Western governments to continue to help anyone who wants to leave.  I am sure that there are hundreds of thousands of people who want to leave Afghanistan. But, if the BBC was looking for a compelling story about someone trapped in Kabul and who is in immediate danger from the Taliban, the trusted news organization missed the mark by quite a lot with this particular story.

Evacuating a country, in the best of circumstances, is difficult operation. Afghanistan is far from a perfect situation. The country is in a civil war.  It was a dangerous place before the Taliban took over and it remains a dangerous place today now that the Taliban has taken control.  Both the Westerners who went to Afghanistan and the Afghan allies who worked with western governments knew this when taking their jobs. The British government was faced with a difficult job of evacuating their citizens and any Afghans allies. They had to prioritize based on the chaos around them, the resources available to them and the people who needed to leave immediately.

This is where the BBC breaks down. Just because the man felt he should be evacuated doesn’t mean that it was urgent for him to leave, or that it is important for him to jump the queue. Doucet doesn’t even try to make his case.   I kept thinking what exactly has he done that warrants the British government getting this man and his family to Britain. I am sympathetic to him wanting to leave, a lot of people do. But does he risk death or prison because he remains in Afghanistan. Did the Taliban threaten him?  Did the BBC have evidence of the Taliban threatening anyone and everyone who worked with the British embassy?  What were other Western governments doing for their catering staff?

Doucet milked this man’s uncompelling story for all that it was worth while spending precious little time determining if the man warrants any real concern. It is sad that he wasn’t on the list to evacuate immediately but if I were compiling that list, and given the facts I have, I would certainly have left his name off of it. Which leaves me pondering why the BBC chose to air this story. I am certain there are better examples out there that illustrates the point they were trying to make. Unfortunately, this man’s story fails miserably. It lacks both context and urgency. In the end I learned about an Afghan who doesn’t want to live under Taliban rule and who felt his very tenuous link with the British government entitled him to better treatment. The British government disagreed and he remains in Afghanistan with a lot of other Afghans who want to leave and who will have to struggle with British visa process to gain entrance.  It is a sad story and I am sure there will be more sad stories like it before the Taliban is through, but the man was not abandoned and he doesn’t warrant any special treatment.

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Thank you President Biden for getting us out of that hellhole of Afghanistan.  The cost was way too much. Over 2 thousand Americans dead and 20,000 wounded, 2 trillion dollars spent and 20 years of time. For what exactly?

 I understood the war when it started – we were punishing the Taliban for supporting Osama bin Laden who had attacked New York and Washington.  I supported that but once we accomplished that – sometime around 2003– what else could we do? Oh, yes, bring democracy to a country with little history of democratic institutions, shockingly high illiteracy rates and a widespread adherence to an extremely fundamental version of Islam. It will be a challenge but we might as well give it a go, right?    

Of course, everybody knew the Americans would fail. We have terrible intelligence. We don’t understand the issues on the ground. We always screw these things up.  I find this “I told you so but you didn’t listen to me” stance particularly irksome. If everyone knew this was going to happen, why do we now find ourselves in the position of evacuating all those trapped people at the Kabul Airport?  I don’t know about you but if I knew that the Taliban was going to rollover the Afghan forces in a little over a week, if it was truly that obvious, I would have gotten my ass out of Afghanistan. Well, everybody why did you stay?

But there are Americans caught in a war zone. Everything should be done to get them out. On the other hand, these aren’t thousands of tourists who got caught up in an unexpected civil war.  We are talking about government workers, contract soldiers, and aid workers who knowingly went into a war zone.  Even when American troops were present, their safety was at risk.  And, after all, wasn’t the Taliban victory inevitable. Everybody knew it, and still these people took the risk.

Well, then, everybody says we have to bail out those Afghans that worked for us. They are facing death. Again, I am all for trying, but this is not our war and it isn’t our country. The Americans were trying to help Afghans bring democracy to their country. The mission was theirs not ours. If Afghanistan was in any way salvageable as a democracy would all of these people be trying to escape instead of heading for the hills of Afghanistan to fight another day. It speaks volumes about what they think is going to happen.  They think the Taliban is going to stay in power.  But, of course, everybody knew that beforehand.

Still, everybody says these people risked their lives to help us, we owe it to them. The Afghans helping us were also the ones supplying us with information about how the project was going. Did they ever tell us that it was hopeless and the Taliban was going to take over when we left? It appears the everybody else knew, why didn’t our Afghan allies tell American intelligence?  Now I am just guessing here but maybe our Afghan allies weren’t giving us accurate information because they wanted us to stay. They were stuck in wishful thinking that the Americans would never leave and they would be protected forever. Or they were just plain corrupt – taking the money as long as the Americans were giving it out. Whatever they were doing, they weren’t telling us this was a hopeless cause.  Do we really owe evacuation to people who fed us 20 years of bad intelligence? Can anybody tell me why?

 It is a horrible situation, but there are millions of horrible situations on this earth – why do we have to spend any more blood, treasure and time on this one. The Afghan people supported the Taliban instead of our Afghan allies.  If we empty the country of all of the Taliban’s political opponents, we really are giving up on Afghanistan democracy. Is that what we want? Wouldn’t it be better for the Afghan opposition to stay and fight?  Again, that they want to leave instead of stay, gives you the ugly truth – it, at least for the foreseeable future, is hopeless.  And, again, why were we there?

Well, then, everybody is saying that the Americans triggered the pullout, the Taliban leaped at a chance to take over and when we decided to leave, and the Afghan government was left in the lurch. The Afghans armed services had about 300,000 people with the best equipment and technology in the world facing a smaller force of 80,000 Taliban fighters with older weapons much of which has been captured during the course of the war. The Afghans troops didn’t get run over by a superior force, our Afghan allies left the fight before it happened. So even though everybody knew our departure date, and everybody knew the Taliban was on the march, and the Afghan army had ample time to prepare for the fight – it appears that our Afghan allies decided to head for Kabul airport instead.  

Everybody says we should have started the evacuation earlier so it could be more orderly withdrawal.  This is the most galling criticism of all.  How exactly was that supposed to work?  On one hand, we announce that the American troops are withdrawing but we are leaving you in the good hands of the Afghan army. Then, on the other hand, with a sly wink wink we say you better get out of Afghanistan because these guys couldn’t fight their way out of a paper bag. Don’t worry though we support the Afghan government 100 percent and we think they are going to do a swell job. We couldn’t evacuate anybody until the Afghan army got routed because to do so would have brought screams about how our evacuations were undermining confidence in our allies. And they would be right. Everybody would have had a fit if we had done that.

All those American lives, don’t we owe it to those soldiers to win this battle.  If we give up the battle, those lives were lost in vain. How long do you want to sacrifice soldiers’ lives to a losing cause?  Do we give it another 20 years? We already have 2,248 dead Americans. If we can’t win, why do we want to lose another 2,000 people? Can anyone say that additional soldiers lives would change the present outcome?  At one point do you give up on, what everybody admits to being, a hopeless cause?

And the money.  I can’t even wrap my head around two trillion dollars.  I had to write it down on a piece of paper and actually see it  — $2,000,000,000,000. If we were going to spend  2 trillion on Afghanistan, it would have been better spent giving every Afghan $50,000. Instead of fighting a vicious 20-year civil war, the Afghan people could have been sunning themselves on the French Riviera. Everyone would have been happier too.  More importantly, we wouldn’t have to worry about evacuating them now, they would already be gone.

It really takes a lot courage for President Biden to end a failing project. It’s not pretty and it is painful. I also appreciate that President Trump, a person who I rarely have a good word for, took the initial steps to leave Afghanistan. President Biden deserves kudos for keeping to the schedule despite intense pressure from the power elite to change his mind.  But, honestly, can anyone tell me what more can we do? And, if all you got is keeping American forces in Afghanistan indefinitely then you are admitting you don’t have an answer.  There is no way this enterprise would ever be successful. 

As a side note: this citizen is done with nation building. Everybody says we are bad at it and, for all I care, everybody else is free to take on any future endeavors of this sort since they know so much more about the subject.