Afghan government collapse.

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

I mean the problem with making evacuation part of the withdrawal would have been that doing so would have been to, effectively, admit that the US fully expected the Afghan government to collapse very quickly (and probably would have speeded up the collapse). Wouldn’t have been great Optics^TM (and whilst it’s a fair comment to say ‘screw the Optics^TM’, Optics^TM unfortunately plays a massive role in these things).

As the article points out the main problem was a slow processing of visas. Per NyT they had a backlog of 17,000 applications on Jan 20th and has been processing 100 a week, that is it would take 3 years just to process the backlog, even assuming they wouldn't get any new during this time.

With that in mind, "making evacuation part of the withdrawal" probably refers to hugely speeding up the vetting process. And to keeping enough military, until the evacuation is done. It seems unlikely, it would contribute to collapsing, nor to bad Optics^TM.

Fairly clear imo, it has never been about Optics^TM, just bad judgement re:situation in Afghanistan. Plus that nor Biden, nor Trump are shy about that [the situation in] ME/Afghanistan is not anything they give a f**k.

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

https://www.ft.com/content/bfdb94a5-654b-4286-8da9-34c0ff3b88aa
The Afghanistan economy in charts: what has changed in two decades?




If it happens again, which is quite likely, it will be the single worst consequence of [full] withdrawal.


https://cgdev.org/blog/girls-education-casualty-disastrous-withdrawal-afghanistan

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

https://twitter.com/vmsalama/status/1430896691582955522


https://twitter.com/nabihbulos/status/1430896848399593472

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

Second blast

https://twitter.com/laraseligman/status/1430899688731922432

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

https://twitter.com/euamiri/status/1430908846944391169

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

https://twitter.com/euamiri/status/1430952270217293832

[Vaccinated Russian Bear]

If it's a choice between killing nine people as "collateral damage" in a drone strike and letting that vehicle kill possibly ninety people in a suicide bombing, then you would go for the former. Although of course, you wouldn't sleep very well at night afterwards.

I think there are few people are against such a trade-off. In theory.


The reasons why one might questions it:

• Quality of intelligence.
• Lack of transparency and accountability.
• Doubts, if US really tries hard enough to minimize a "collateral damage".

It's like (but many times worse than) mass-surveillance, exposed by Snowden. In theory only bad guys are truly effected, huh?


https://www.atomicheritage.org/key-documents/stimson-bomb

We estimated that if we should be forced to carry this plan to its conclusion, the major fighting would not end until the latter part of 1946, at the earliest. I was informed that such operations might be expected to cost over a million casualties, to American forces alone. Additional large losses might be expected among our allies, and, of course, if our campaign were successful and if we could judge by previous experience, enemy casualties would be much larger than our own.