Afghan government collapse.

[Alcibiades]

Is Ghani going to attempt to negotiate some sort of deal/surrender to spare Kabul, or will the government resist until the end? If they do so, it seems pretty likely that the fighting will be far fiercer than anything we have seen so far, as there is actually some will to try and defend the capital.

Regardless of what you think about the original intervention, it is clear that there is now a huge humanitarian crisis, which is only going to get worse if and when things turn nasty in Kabul, that the West is totally and shamefully unprepared for. We owe it to those Afghans who fear the Taliban and want to escape to give them a place of refuge. It’s absolutely the least we can do.

[Alcibiades]

It seems that Kabul will fall mostly bloodlessly. While it is hard to say that this is a relief, things could have been worse.

A realistic best short-to-medium term scenario is that Afghanistan ends up as a “moderate” Islamic theocracy (i.e. still a full range of horrible policies towards women and those who don’t conform, but not quit the cartoonish levels of brutality of the original Taliban, and with some modest attempts at actually governing), which is mostly indifferent to the United States and the West.

This is taking rather an optimistic view, and while possible, the main pitfalls in Afghanistan that could reasonably happen are:
1) After an initial attempt to avoid bad PR, the Taliban gradually ramps up the harshness of its rule as Western media attention recedes.
2) The Taliban is in fact woefully incompetent and totally unable to govern even if it tries to.
3) Continued civil war/insurgency/warlordism - although quite frankly, if there are Afghans willing to resist the Taliban, more power to them.
4) The nightmare scenario from a selfish US point of view, that the Taliban once again effectively harbours al-Qaeda and/or other terror groups which wish the US harm.

This isn’t quite like Iraq when the US mostly withdrew from there in the early 2010s, in that there is actually a clear and dominant group in power in Afghanistan now, but it is not inconceivable that the US may have to eventually send in troops to support various non-Pashtun groups resisting the Taliban, much like it did with the Kurds in Iraq and Syria, if indeed a threat to the United States re-emerges in Afghanistan that is comparable to ISIS.

[Alcibiades]

Having held off until now, the Taliban are now finally entering Kabul, claiming that they are doing so to restore law and order and stop looting as the police have mostly fled.

[Alcibiades]

https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1326306141056364544?s=19
Scrambling to escape from a band of cave dwelling troglodytes wasn't my idea of "being back in the game."

It's funny to see pro Trump "populists" talking like this as if Biden wasnt seeing Trumps policy to completion. As much as the neocons suck, they have been consistent in their fantasies of a permanent US military presence in Afghanistan in defiance of the popular will.

Yeah, as inexcusably badly as Biden has handled the withdrawal, Trump really left him in an impossible position with his ridiculously naïve deals with the Taliban which only served to embolden them.

[Alcibiades]

What a disaster.

https://twitter.com/bsarwary/status/1427002551858311173

There had to have been some way to stall the Taliban’s advance long enough to get these people out, even with a fixed withdrawal date. Failure to do that has got to be one of the single biggest US strategic blunders in decades.

Honestly, I don't think there's a single national American politician in either party who was brave enough to call for mass resettlement of tens/hundred of thousands of Afghans (or Iraqis, earlier) in the US due to domestic political concerns. I certainly remember this exact same argument about the people helping us in Iraq and Afghanistan being accepted as refugees into the US dating back to the George W Bush years, continuing through Obama and Trump, and now into Biden. None of those four presidents actually wanted the political issues of resettling six digits worth of Afghans in the United States.

This is obviously a black mark on Biden's career, but if we'd been steadily taking ten thousand Afghans a year since 2007 or so, we wouldn't need to be in this situation now.

Vietnamese Americans have long held a grudge against Biden because he famously was one of the most strident voices against taking in South Vietnamese collaborators with the U.S. government in 1975, famously saying 'The United States has no obligation to evacuate one, or 100,001 South Vietnamese. Gerald Ford decided that that was immoral and chose to evacuate up to 200,000 refugees. I probably wouldn't be an American today if Biden had had his way in 1975. It also means that I am not surprised by how much this administration has botched this evacuation, particularly of Afghan collaborators at risk of being killed due to their connection to the U.S. The simple explanation, consistent with Biden's track record is that he doesn't care.

As I recently wrote, Biden has a relevant personal history. In April 1975, as a first-term senator, he was an outspoken opponent of using American money and risking Americans’ safety to rescue the tens of thousands of South Vietnamese who had bet their lives on American promises. “The United States has no obligation to evacuate one, or 100,001, South Vietnamese,” he said in a Senate speech. President Gerald Ford tried to sway Biden by reminding him of the American tradition of welcoming refugees from war and oppression, but Biden was unmoved. Vietnam was a lost cause, and Americans wanted to forget.

As South Vietnam fell, 135,000 endangered Vietnamese were evacuated through the heroic efforts of American officials, military veterans, and private citizens. Ford later said, “To do anything less would, in my opinion, only add moral shame to military humiliation.”

Now I understand the political context in 2021 is different from 1975, and that an influx of Afghan refugees nowadays may be considerably less sympathetic than Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian refugees in 1975. But I do think under a different president than Biden (certainly not under Trump, but under other possible presidents of either party) there may have been a bigger priority placed on making sure there was a better process in place for Afghan resettlement & refugees compared to what is taking place right now, which is basically nothing at all.

Wow, I wasn’t aware of this, but this is really illuminating and explains a lot. I’m disgusted with Biden over his refugee policy; easily the lowest point of his presidency so far, just a total and disgraceful lack of basic empathy and a sense of obligation.

[Alcibiades]

Per BBC News, the actual size of the ANA was a mere 50,000 men, not the 300,000 widely reported by Biden and others. When asked whether Biden was aware of this from US intelligence, a White House spokesperson declined to comment.