Afghan government collapse.

[StateBoiler]

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.

At one point in time the State Department were considering buying used Russian helicopters to give to the Afghans due to their military had more historical knowledge working on Soviet equipment. Not long after I heard this rumor, the dozen or so Russian spies operating on U.S. soil were arrested and that probably helped put the kibosh on that occurring.

[StateBoiler]

MARGARET BRENNAN: I was rereading your memoir before we sat down to talk and you said in your memoir, Joe Biden is impossible not to like.

Quote: "He's a man of integrity, incapable of hiding what he really thinks, and one of those rare people you know you could turn to for help in a personal crisis. Still, I think he's been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades."

Would he be an effective commander-in-chief?

ROBERT GATES: I-- I don't know. I don't know. I-- I think I stand by that statement. He and I agreed on some key issues in the Obama administration. We disagreed significantly on Afghanistan and some other issues. I think that the vice president had some issues with the military. So how he would get along with the senior military, and what that relationship would be, I just-- I think, it-- it would depend on the personalities at the time.

"Duty" was written while Obama was still president and all pre-Joe Biden looking he would seriously become a president one day, but Gates in the book was none too kind to Biden's geopolitical instincts.

Back in the 2008 primaries, Biden's idea for Iraq was to split it into a federation of 3 states based on ethnicity, which would've never happened (Saudis, Iranians, Turks would've all been against for starters) but is also quite Sykes-Picotish. I think it's polite to say that would not have turned out well. Probably turned into a Vietnam/Korea deal of one of the federal states once created seek full independence or turn on one of the other two.

Tom Ricks who has written about defense issues in Washington forever while lambasting Ben Rhodes in a famous news article that come out in 2016 (Rhodes was Obama's foreign policy guy) said this of Biden. (This was again written mid-2016, when it did not look like Joe Biden would ever become president.)

https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/05/06/a-stunning-profile-of-ben-rhodes-the-asshole-who-is-the-presidents-foreign-policy-guru/

Rhodes and others around Obama keep on talking about doing all this novel thinking, playing from a new playbook, bucking the establishment thinking. But if that is the case, why have they given so much foreign policy power to two career hacks who never have had an original thought? I mean, of course, Joe Biden and John Kerry. I guess the answer can only be that those two are puppets, and (as in Biden’s case) are given losing propositions like Iraq to handle.