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Easy Answers to Stupid Questions: Afghanistan Edition

 

Today's edition of Easy Answers to Stupid Questions. On this episode, Biden's Afghanistan evacuation was a disaster because . . .
We were suffering almost no casualties, so why didn't we just stay in Afghanistan? Because things were peaceful only due to the Taliban cease-fire. If we had stayed, the Taliban would have started fighting again and US casualties would have escalated.
Why were weapons left behind? Because those weapons had been given to the Afghan army as part of the turnover.
Why was Bagram air base closed? Because we only needed one airport and the military decided that Kabul was a more denfensible choice. But if you think this won't become the new Benghazi! you're crazy.
Why was there so much chaos? It's easy to see how it looked that way if you were caught in the middle of it, but there wasn't, really. There were thousands of Afghans who wanted to flee the country and they all surrounded the airport hoping for evacuation. There's nothing anyone could have done about that, and for the most part the crowds were handled well and processed as efficiently as anyone could have hoped for.
Why did it take so long to approve visas for Afghans who qualified for evacuation? It didn't. We approved visas for 100,000 Afghans in two weeks! And to the extent that this was slower than it could have been, it's because the Trump administration, in the guise of Stephen Miller, deliberately sabotaged the process before they left office as a means of keeping down the number of brown people in the country.
Why didn't we rescue everyone? As always, there are limits to American power. The Taliban controls Kabul, and rescuing literally everyone who wanted to get out was never remotely feasible. We evacuated 20,000 Americans, 99% of all the ones there, and 100,000 Afghans.
Why didn't we start evacuation earlier? Because we couldn't. As long as the Afghan government was in power, we had to support them. Starting a mass evacuation would have been an obvious signal that we thought they were doomed and the Taliban attack would have commenced immediately.
Why didn't we know that the Taliban would take over so quickly? That's a very good question, and it was certainly a failure on our part. On the other hand, literally everyone made the same mistake. There wasn't a single analyst or reporter on the ground who thought the Taliban would take control of Kabul in less than a month.
Nothing is perfect. Obviously there were security breakdowns on Monday the 16th. The suicide bombing on the 26th was an enormous tragedy. The future of Afghanistan under the Taliban is likely to be a violent and miserable one for a lot of people. There's no need for defenders of the evacuation to pretend that literally no mistakes were made.
That said, if you can look past partisanship; and neocon defensiveness; and individual stories of grief and hardship; and huge crowds on the ground that inevitably gave the impression of chaos—if you can look past all that to the bare facts on the ground, the evacuation of Kabul should go down as one of the shining moments of the US military. That hardly compensates for 20 years of bungling, but taken on its own it was a magnificent effort. No other country was as dedicated as we were to rescuing our Afghan allies, and probably no country in history has ever done anything similar under pressure like this. The final reckoning will be about 120,000 civilians rescued in two weeks with very few casualties. Anyone who refuses to see this as anything but an enormous accomplishment is just refusing to look.
As for Biden himself, there's no need to paint him as some kind of hero. However, I'm grateful that he kept his head while so many around him were panicking. Biden stuck to his guns and is finally getting us out of Afghanistan. Regardless of anything else, he has my thanks for that.

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