Afghan government collapse.

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At least this cost only half as much (in today's dollars)

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Starting to wonder how wise Biden was to stay that it wasn’t going to end up like Saigon in ‘75.

Biden is absolutely correct but maybe not in the way he meant. The Vietnam war was cheaper and South Vietnam lasted a couple of years  after we pulled out.

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Has there been a good piece/comment on why the Afghan forces have fallen so quickly? I read that the Army tend to rout or give up a lot quicker than the police do, as the latter are locals and have more of a stake.

Other than e.g. issues with the government's weak to limited legitimacy and so on, one issue is that at a tactical level they have been entirely reliant on a) significant Western air support and b) the maintenance of much of the expensive Western kit they've been given by Western technical experts.

I can't understand exactly how no one prevented the latter from happening.  Surely someone in US/NATO leadership should have recognized this is a problem a long time ago and been working to fix it?

There was no incentive for the military industrial complex to have it set up so that things don't totally fall apart the moment they stop getting paid.

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It's a pretty discomforting suggestion to say that we should save the best and brightest as if there is a hierarchy of humanity worthy of being saved based on intelligence.

The emphasis on the financial costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for the US is in the same thread. Years of fighting is reduced to the costs and lives the superpower on the other side of the world incurred.

I mean we spent something around 10x their GDP to occupy them. Well, Bush said he was against nation-building.

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Strangely one way tickets from Kabul to Delhi are only $140. You'd think there'd be a premium right now.

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My dad told me a lot about how his dad fought for the Nationalists against the Communists during the Chinese Civil War, and how the Nationalist army was vastly superior in numbers, and were supplied with weapons and food from the US. The Nationalists then proved to be so cartoonishly corrupt that the US gave up on them, and then they fell within less than two years. Entire divisions simply surrendered to the Communists without a shot fired. To me, it's watching the exact same thing at 10X speed.

Both before and after the Qing empire, China had a lot of warlords with paper armies that is similar to this situation. Although the ultimate corrupt Chinese warlord seems to have been in the 1700s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heshen

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South Vietnam really put up more of a fight.

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Ghani's tweet suggests to me that he's going to set up some form of government in exile.

I struggle to see this having credibility given the manner of his defeat.

If anything, it might help the Taliban to have the hated old government to keep attacking.

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Where the refugees should go is an important thing that needs to be decided, but right now the issue seems to be logistically getting them out of the country. Kabul fell more suddenly than Saigon, and Saigon was on the coast, while the only way out seems to be through Kabul airport, which isn't the safest place right now.

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It's been overshadowed by the Covid pandemic, but there's been many geopolitical developments the past year including Armenia being pushed out of Nagorno-Karabakh by Azerbaijan, Ethiopia falling into civil war, and now this.

Although the Covid situation isn't over, this particular saga has the feeling of the first major post-Covid event.

Well, it's certainly something that will be remembered in decades.

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https://twitter.com/samhusseini/status/1427068129839042564
This.....is.....brutal.

It was indeed a matter of time, and duly happened, but it still took three years.

This time round......three weeks? And before all the troops had even gone!

And in those 3 years, the USSR and eastern Europe communist countries all fell first. Really a much more impressive run than Ghani's joke government.

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I'm hearing that Panjshir might actually resist the Taliban, but who knows.

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I also thought it interesting that the first (?) German civilian flight only went to Uzbekistan versus direct to Germany.

Was that just a temporary logistical thing to maintain "in theater" resources, or was it more, "let's just move refugees there while the political situation in Germany is sorted out regarding more permanent asylum?

The official reasoning is that there might be only a very short window of opportunity where you even can get people out, before the Taliban shut down the airport for good or have caught/killed all former Western employees. The flight time to Uzbekistan is much shorter than to Germany and it is the idea that the planes can get out as many people as possble in a short period of time, if they're just circling back and forth between Kabul and Tashkent.

That being said, the first flight out of Kabul must be considered a failure in that regard, since it contained only seven (!) German staffers from the embassy in Kabul. This was apparently a result of the plane only having been granted a slot of 30 minutes at the airport after it had been very uncertain whether it could land at all throughout the day. It is the hope that this can be improved with the next flight(s), with the Defence Ministry also arguing that it had been the main objective of the first flight to deploy the paratroopers as the airport.

Are these civilians who worked for the German effort in Afghanistan including NGOs, regardless of German Nationals or Afghan employees, etc Huh

Do we know more about the background of these Flüchtlinge?

No, I don't really much of a clue how this is prioritized... and maybe neither does the German government, given the circumstances.

Yesterday I read a report about the plight of the Afghan employees of the local branch of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (the think tank of the SPD), implying those are also among the ones waiting to be evacuated.

Yeah, obviously you want the closest safe airport to dump them at. I guess the US military is using their base in Qatar. India had some flights.

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I don't think there's any reason yet to take Saleh and lil' Massoud (what are we going to call the son of the Lion of Panjshir? The Cub of Panjshir?) all that seriously, let alone as a new Northern Alliance.

Let's see if they survive a few weeks first before we announce that the Northern Alliance has risen from its grave once again.

Well, I guess we'll see which of these happen

1. They fold like everyone else
2. They are brutally crushed
3. They are sieged and blockaided
4. They are ignored
5. Something else

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https://twitter.com/aahmady/status/1427883011207467009

The new regime will struggle to access money and assets.

Kind of hilarious that the Taliban expected to find an Afghan version of Fort Knox somewhere in Kabul.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9905093/Former-Afghan-President-Ashraf-Ghani-fled-169MILLION-cash-stuffed-helicopter.html

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https://twitter.com/Oriana0214/status/1428445114762997765

Look, we just need a couple of billion people to pay that and the Afghanistan war will have paid for itself.

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So, will there be a new Northern Alliance?

should restore the monarchy

I doubt the Afghans want someone who has lived in the DC area for the last 48 years.

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ISIS would probably love nothing more than to have an attack on the airport that the Taliban gets blamed for.

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ISIS would probably love nothing more than to have an attack on the airport that the Taliban gets blamed for.

I guess too much subtlety for ISIS to try to pin the blame on someone else.

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Meanwhile, alleged political conflicts between Iran and Pakistan following the Taliban Cabinet Position announcements.

This follows only a few days after the IRI "condemned" Pakistan for assaulting "Panjshir".

Wouldn't be hard for Iran to "turn up the heat" a notch to pressure the new TB GVMT, and although likely much of this posing, reality is that the new TB GVMT is heavily dependent upon Iranian Oil flowing through to keep the Power Plants running, especially with only so much in the way of Hydro-resources.

Thing is with the Taliban 2.0, they are trying to create a sort of "interfaith" religious scholar council, but gonna be pretty hard to do that if the whole Sunni-Shiite rivalries start creating not only serious issues within Afghanistan, but also potentially even spreading into Pakistan.

More reason why we should have signed a new deal with Iran mere days into Biden’s presidency.

Believe I have been consistent in my perspective that the Bush Jr Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan only enhanced the reactionary forces within Iran.

The deliberate destruction of the Baathist Regime in Iraq, created a massive destabilization of the entire region, not to mention significant shifts within the more extremist wings of the armed military-political formations of various actors, which fundamentally was "blowback" from the dayz of Ronald Reagan and the entire US National Security Establishment that supported, funded, and sub-contracted international terrorism as part of a proxy war against the Soviet Union.

It is amazing the paucity of knowledge and history that the average Atlas Poster has, when it actually comes to fundamental global transformative events.

Not talking about you man--- just blowing off a bit of steam ---

Region complex and South Asia is obviously a bit different than the traditional def of the Middle East, but at least here I believe that people will likely understand a bit more, vs having to "dumb it down in the workplace".   

Like the direction you are exploring and do not pretend to be an expert in any way shape or form, plus forgot so much of my college studies from many years back in the dayz....

It's obvious that the wars did nothing to make us more safe and were just to funnel trillions of dollars to the military industrial complex. The one worthwhile thing we did post 9/11 was lock the cockpit doors. Everything else was garbage.