Afghanistan & Egypt in the time of the plague

[trailhound]

Afghanistan was lost the moment that he first troops arrived 20 years ago. We learned nothing from Vietnam, nothing. The Taliban didn't conquer the place. They bought it off. Afghan soldiers hadn't been paid in months and were short food and ammo. When the Taliban offered money to split, they took the cash. Under the circumstances, so would I. Now, I despise Trump, but he got one thing right. "No more stupid foreign wars."

[netllama]

Thanks for sharing your trip report, such a unique place to visit.  The photo of the girl waiting to go so school hits particularly hard today.

Indeed, that one guts me more than any other.  So much potential, and she will likely end up the same (or worse off) as her mother.  And that girl was still one of the lucky minority who actually had the opportunity to go to school.  Even with the relative improvements that the country experienced over the past two decades, the percentage of girls & women who were able to get an education & work outside their homes was relatively small.

Afghanistan was a literally dirt poor country under the very best of circumstances, and is now plunging back into far darker times.

There are so many people that I met during that short trip that I now wonder the trajectory of their lives moving forward.

[netllama]

Afghanistan was lost the moment that he first troops arrived 20 years ago. We learned nothing from Vietnam, nothing. The Taliban didn't conquer the place. They bought it off. Afghan soldiers hadn't been paid in months and were short food and ammo. When the Taliban offered money to split, they took the cash. Under the circumstances, so would I. Now, I despise Trump, but he got one thing right. "No more stupid foreign wars."

Even if we learned nothing from Vietnam (and I don't dispute that most of the lessons have not been learned), we learned nothing from the Soviet occupation of the very same country.  I recently read an interesting thought piece about why the Afghan military collapsed so spectacularly.  Much of it is exactly as you wrote here, lack of funding, but its also bigger and more fundamental than just that. 

There was literally no Afghan military prior to the NATO (and American) involvement in the country in 2001/2002.  We attempted (and failed) to build a military from nothing, and the model that we used was our own.  This was a fundamental failure of hubris.  Americans like to believe that we have the best military the world has ever known.  That is quite likely true (or at least was true for some portion of the last few decades).  However, it seems that few, if any, understood what actually made the American military so effective.  Sure, the training is critically important, but as numerous leaders & dictators have learned over the centuries, "an army marches on its stomach".  Keeping a military well supplied, with working supplies, arms and equipment is a non-trivial effort (much more so in modern times).  It requires not just money, but also competent logistics and other personnel.  We could have given the Afghans every gun, tank & plane in the world, but without the ability to maintain all of those weapons, long term, it was useless.  At one point in the past year, the Afghan Air Force had just one working fighter jet in the entire country.  They lacked the supplies, parts and skilled labor to keep up with required maintenance & repairs.  In a country with incredibly corrupt leaders, much of the funds ended up lining pockets, or getting diverted to who knows what.

Even more critical was the lack of foresight that trying to build another American military in a country that didn't have the the supply chain & maintenance prowess that the US military relies upon was doomed to failure from the start.  The Taliban doesn't have a global network of maintenance & logistics contractors ensuring that they have everything they need to function.  We should have built an Afghan military that was agile, nimble & self reliant enough to match the Taliban's tactics.  I'm not saying it would have ensured a different outcome, but it definitely could not have ended any worse than what we have today.

[DVexile]

I'm not saying it would have ensured a different outcome, but it definitely could not have ended any worse than what we have today.

Not trying to derail into a political discussion as I hope the following observation is apolitical, but when considering alternate realities it actually is quite possible that it could have ended up worse and we already saw it in the 1990’s - protracted civil war pounding civilians in Kabul for years on end only to have the Taliban eventually take over anyway.  Same end state just tens of thousands more dead getting to that point.  Counterintuitively if the Taliban was going to eventually prevail this was probably the best way. And clearly soldiers, village elders and religious leaders in the country reached that conclusion themselves in the past few months. 

For difficult to discern reasons that rational and semi-obvious decision never was considered in our intelligence estimates.  Like the flawed structure of the army we tried to build for them based on an American perspective our analysts failed to make the small leap into the decision making framework of a nation ravaged by four decades of war which is actually governed locally by actors who have been selected over the years by survival through adroitly knowing when to avoid battle or switch sides.  Combine that with a weak and largely illegitimate central government and it’s hard to imagine an outcome other than rapid capitulation.  Either you are in a position to win overwhelmingly or you fold immediately - there likely wasn’t going to be an intermediate outcome - and yet intermediate outcomes were the prevailing forecast.

So anyway, I think the perspective you summarize is spot on but is also just one of many examples in which the US failed to make much of an effort to actually understand Afghanistan’s people, history and realpolitik.

Sigh…

[MojaveGeek]

The pix of the Afghans sitting on top of the plane at a gate at Kabul airport reminded me of buses and trucks with people and goats on top... very sad. One thing that travel does for you, as netlama knows well, is that you get exposed to real people in places that become real to you, too (of course that depends on how long you stay and how close to local life you travel). As a result, you feel their pain when disaster strikes. I spent three months and traveled all over wild places in Afghanistan in the early 70s. I loved the country and the people, despite the huge gulf in our cultures and standards of living. There has been so much pain since, in so many of the locations I was fortunate enough to have visited while the country was still free and independent.

[netllama]

The pix of the Afghans sitting on top of the plane at a gate at Kabul airport reminded me of buses and trucks with people and goats on top... very sad. One thing that travel does for you, as netlama knows well, is that you get exposed to real people in places that become real to you, too (of course that depends on how long you stay and how close to local life you travel). As a result, you feel their pain when disaster strikes. I spent three months and traveled all over wild places in Afghanistan in the early 70s. I loved the country and the people, despite the huge gulf in our cultures and standards of living. There has been so much pain since, in so many of the locations I was fortunate enough to have visited while the country was still free and independent.

Indeed. The worst part (for me) is that all the recent photos in the news of the airport (the tarmac, inside the terminal, on the streets nearby) are all too familiar for me, as I was there 6 months ago. That airport was easily the most intense, bonkers airport I'd ever been through, both in terms of security, but also procedures and layout. Unlike literally just about every other commercial airport on the planet, there is no driving up to the terminal, or parking. Everyone has to get out of the car, with all their luggage, and haul it across the airport grounds, to the terminal. And that's only after they've cleared two layers of security to ensure that they haven't brought weapons/explosives with them. Once in the terminal, there are 3 more rounds of security, where they repeatedly do ID checks, and x-rays, and pat downs. Then just before actually boarding the plane, there's yet another person verifying that the name on the boarding pass matches the passport, and that the passport photo matches the human holding it.

Last week, when seeing those photos, I kept thinking, the situation has clearly gone down the toilet if all those people are able to get out onto the tarmac like that. I had to clear so many layers of security to get out to the tarmac to board my flights (i flew twice out of that airport, once domestic, and then international when leaving the country), and still there were guys with huge guns around ready to shoot if I decided to wander somewhere that I didn't belong. I also clearly remember the massive concrete blast walls around the airport perimeter which are were so noticeable in a few photos and that horrifying recent video where someone was passing their infant up to the US military person on the other side of the wall.

All of it is horrifying and feels so real. If anyone has the means, please donate to one of the numerous reputable groups that are collecting funds to get people out of the country. The clock is definitely ticking before everyone's attention drifts away to the next disaster, and Afghanistan falls off the news.

[MojaveGeek]

You were lucky to visit in that brief window when it was safe to do so. Thanks for sharing the memories of the airport. I always entered/left by land (Khyber pass on the east side) and never saw the airport, but of course it was just a sleepy small country airport back then, before all the wars.

[netllama]

You were lucky to visit in that brief window when it was safe to do so. Thanks for sharing the memories of the airport. I always entered/left by land (Khyber pass on the east side) and never saw the airport, but of course it was just a sleepy small country airport back then, before all the wars.

It sorta was a sleepy airport 6 months ago too. Less than a dozen flights/day. The past week is quite possibly the most flights that airport has ever experienced.

[netllama]

At the risk of beating this topic to death, I wanted to recommend two books written by journalists who spent years in Afghanistan over the past two decades.

The first is Dexter Filkins' "The Forever War":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Foreve...kins_book)

The second is Christina Lamb's "Farewall Kabul":
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/books...-lamb.html

Neither was released all that recently (2008 & 2016, respectively), yet they are both rivetting, well written coverage of a country & war that few understood.

[netllama]

As this year draws to a close, I find myself thinking once again about Afghanistan.  Its still hard to believe that I spent time there back in February, yet things are now so very different (and so grim).

For anyone still interested in hearing more about the fall of the country, there this story from earlier this month about the fall of Kabul.  It starts off a bit slow, but is gripping reading of what happened on the ground in the final 24 hours. 

Here's hoping for better things in 2022.  For everyone, everywhere.