Today In Biden Land

[Kirkland Laing]

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-58191638

The Taliban are moving pretty quick, I'll go with less than 100 days from now they will have Kabul.

I have been checking around with the risk management chaps and in between them offering me detailed reports from their boots on the ground people for tens of thousands of dollars a month they told me a couple of government ministers have already resigned and fled the country and the US have given up on the Afghan government/army and are already negotiating with some northern warlords to supply them with weapons and money to fight the Taliban and at least keep them busy after they take control of almost all of the country. One city in the north, I forget the name, which didn't fall to the Taliban back pre 9/11 when the Taliban controlled ninety percent of the country has already fallen to them.

The US, UK and others are sending thousands of troops to help evacuate the thousands of people we still have there. So they think it could go totally to shit at any minute. Sixteen days after we leave might be optimistic.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/afg...rces-1.6139450

I saw Canada where sending guys in to evacuate the embassy too :S....

The Taliban appear to be right gits but is there anything that could have been done to avoid this other than staying forever?..

I'm obviously not a millitary expert btw.

Everybody in Afghanistan is a right git. The Taliban are far nicer now than when Reagan was backing them but they're still all bad. They've been greeted as liberators in some parts of the country where the US backed Afghan security forces were even bigger gits than the Taliban were pre 9/11.

Looks bad for the US that any possible opposition to the Taliban seems to have been either captured by them or fled abroad. One of the main opposition warlords has been captured by them, this one buggered off to Uzbekistan:

https://twitter.com/rezahakbari/stat...53792269094920



This does not make America look good:

https://twitter.com/EsteveGirbes01/s...75392853778435



This is an excellent explanation of how we got here:

https://jabberwocking.com/in-hindsig...rmy-collapsed/



This is from ten years ago:

For almost two decades, U.S. military commanders have assured the public they are making progress on the cornerstone of their war strategy: to build a strong Afghan army and police force that can defend the country on their own.


“We’re on the right track now,” Marine Gen. Jim Mattis told Congress in 2010.



“The Afghan forces are better than we thought they were,” Marine Gen. John Allen told Congress in 2012. “The Afghan national security forces are winning,” Army Lt. Gen. Joseph Anderson told reporters in 2014.

But in a trove of confidential government interviews obtained by The Washington Post, U.S., NATO and Afghan officials described their efforts to create an Afghan proxy force as a long-running calamity. With most speaking on the assumption that their remarks would remain private, they depicted the Afghan security forces as incompetent, unmotivated, poorly trained, corrupt and riddled with deserters and infiltrators.



In one interview, Thomas Johnson, a Navy official who served as a counterinsurgency adviser in Kandahar province, said Afghans viewed the police as predatory bandits, calling them “the most hated institution” in Afghanistan. An unnamed Norwegian official told interviewers that he estimated 30 percent of Afghan police recruits deserted with their government-issued weapons so they could “set up their own private checkpoints” and extort payments from travelers.




Ryan Crocker, a former U.S. ambassador to Kabul, told government interviewers that the Afghan police were ineffective “not because they’re out-gunned or out-manned. It’s because they are useless as a security force and they’re useless as a security force because they are corrupt down to the patrol level.”
Victor Glaviano, who worked with the Afghan army as a U.S. combat adviser from 2007 to 2008, called the soldiers “stealing fools” who habitually looted equipment supplied by the Pentagon. He complained to government interviewers that Afghan troops had “beautiful rifles, but didn’t know how to use them,” and were undisciplined fighters, wasting ammunition because they “wanted to fire constantly.”

Since 2002, the United States has allocated more than $83 billion in security assistance to Afghanistan, a sum that dwarfs the defense budgets of other developing nations. In 2011, at the peak of the war, Afghanistan received $11 billion in security aid from Washington — $3 billion more than what neighboring Pakistan, which has a stockpile of nuclear weapons and a far bigger army, spent that year on its military.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graph...l-topic-chain1



That's eleven billion in a country with an eighteen billion GDP and most of that is American money. There's no way on earth that Afghanistan could sustain that army even if it actually functioned correctly.


The GOP are going to spend years investigating this even though this was Trump's plan and he would have done this even faster. This is going to be Benghazi on steroids when they get control of the committees and subpoena power.