Post by demos on Aug 19, 2021 16:20:36 GMT
Vets see many US failures in Kabul. Military intelligence is just one.
While the fall of Kabul to Taliban forces this week produced image after image of heartbreak as Afghans clung to cargo planes and women tried to lift babies over airport barriers in an effort to save them, it was also a baffling theater of the absurd: How could a bunch of guys in flip-flops, with no body armor and nary a fighter jet in sight, have defeated an Afghan army that the United States gave billions upon billions of dollars and thousands of lives to help build?
If the war’s end was a choice between throwing good money after bad and risking more lives lost, or staying longer before the inevitable happened – as the Biden administration and many before it have argued – the speed with which the collapse came seemed, even so, to take everyone’s breath away.
The Pentagon has said that the next two weeks will be focused on evacuating the 10,000 to 15,000 Americans still in the country as well as former Afghan comrades in arms and their families. But honestly assessing what was going on in the field over the past 20 years is crucial to future military efforts, as well as U.S. global leadership. Amid the finger-pointing and blame-dodging for the shocking final week of the war, the initial temptation has been to heap fault on allies left behind. That, some analysts say, ignores U.S. failures of training, lack of understanding about the nation it was trying to build, and wasted resources that ultimately encouraged corruption, to say nothing of the tens of thousands of Afghan lives lost fighting the Taliban...
While the fall of Kabul to Taliban forces this week produced image after image of heartbreak as Afghans clung to cargo planes and women tried to lift babies over airport barriers in an effort to save them, it was also a baffling theater of the absurd: How could a bunch of guys in flip-flops, with no body armor and nary a fighter jet in sight, have defeated an Afghan army that the United States gave billions upon billions of dollars and thousands of lives to help build?
If the war’s end was a choice between throwing good money after bad and risking more lives lost, or staying longer before the inevitable happened – as the Biden administration and many before it have argued – the speed with which the collapse came seemed, even so, to take everyone’s breath away.
The Pentagon has said that the next two weeks will be focused on evacuating the 10,000 to 15,000 Americans still in the country as well as former Afghan comrades in arms and their families. But honestly assessing what was going on in the field over the past 20 years is crucial to future military efforts, as well as U.S. global leadership. Amid the finger-pointing and blame-dodging for the shocking final week of the war, the initial temptation has been to heap fault on allies left behind. That, some analysts say, ignores U.S. failures of training, lack of understanding about the nation it was trying to build, and wasted resources that ultimately encouraged corruption, to say nothing of the tens of thousands of Afghan lives lost fighting the Taliban...
