Afghanistan Falls to the Taliban

The Taliban has effectively toppled the official government in Afghanistan. It now controls dozens of provincial capitals as well as the capital city, Kabul. Government leaders have fled the country.

The resurgence of the Taliban is not a huge surprise as it has been building for months ahead of a planned U.S. military withdrawal. What has been a surprise is how fast the government and its military force crumpled. No one believed it would collapse in a space of two weeks. ...Well maybe not no one. More on that later.

Classic photo of Americans evacuating from Saigon by helicopter on a rooftop in 1975

On July 8 President Biden insisted, "There's going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy"— contrasting the situation in Afghanistan to the US's ignominious exit from Vietnam in 1975.

Just days ago, though, there were helicopters evacuating American staff from the embassy. There was no climbing-the-rooftop scene captured on camera... though that was largely because the helicopters came a few days before Kabul fell. The US moved its embassy personnel to the airport. At the airport, however....

Recent photos of people chasing and clinging to planes at Kabul Airport in Afghanistan

At Kabul's airport in the past few days pictures and video show people on the tarmac, chasing aircraft trying to get aboard, and clinging to the fuselages, doors, wings, and landing gear.

The 1975 rooftop photo has, for better or worse, become the enduring collective memory of the US war in Vietnam. Likely images such as these will be how American remember our 20 year involvement in Afghanistan decades from now.

The Afghanistan Papers Warned Us...

The government of Afghanistan has crumbled and its collapsed fled the country as the Taliban took over once city after another in just a few weeks. (See my previous blog from earlier today.) A military force that, on paper, had every advantage over the Taliban— vastly superior numbers, better training, air power— folded up like a paper tiger.

A common narrative across news coverage is that people are utterly shocked not only that this happened but that it happened so fast. But we shouldn't be. The memo about this came out two years ago.

The memo, in this case, is The Afghanistan Papers. It's a set of assessments of the US effort in Afghanistan prepared by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction and published by the Washington Post in late 2019 after a 3 year effort to declassify them via the Freedom of Information Act. Example sources: "The Afghanistan Papers", Wikipedia article; "A Secret History Of The War", Washington Post article 9 Dec 2019.

What the Afghanistan Papers tell us is that all those years of military leaders and presidents telling us how well nation-building in Afghanistan was going were all lies. The metrics they offered to quantify success were all fudged. When they couldn't keep fudging them anymore because people could tell they were fudged, they classified them. The leaders even knew that the official objectives were ridiculous and that the country of Afghanistan was too riddled with tribal loyalty and corruption to be built into something resembling a modern Western state.

Why weren't we all more aware of this? Well, for one, this came out during the Trump administration, when articles about how our political leaders are deliberately lying to us were weekly events. It was quickly forgotten under Trump's "The media is the enemy, and the way to beat them is to flood the zone with shit" strategy of distraction.

While maybe for some of us the significance of The Afghanistan Papers got lost in the noise, one person who shouldn't have been so surprised is President Biden. He was in the White House for 8 years as VP, so he should be more aware than most of us what utter BS the Afghanistan success story was. But instead he promised us a month ago that "There's going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy"— recalling the US's ignominious exit from Vietnam in 1975— only for similar scenes to play out this week in Afghanistan.

I'm not saying that Biden shouldn't have completed the troop withdrawal— a withdrawal that was committed to by President Trump, I must point out— just that he should have been a bit more careful in setting expectations. Under-promise and over-deliver, not vice versa!