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Blame Bush and Obama for the Afghan Disaster
By Scott Horton - August 17, 2021
By Scott Horton - August 17, 2021
Former President Trump, President Biden and their partisans are rushing to blame each other for the debacle unfolding now in Afghanistan. The “National Unity Government” and its military and police forces have completely evaporated in the face of the Taliban’s rapid takeover of the entire country in the last few weeks. This culminated in President Ashraf Ghani’s fleeing the capital of Kabul on Sunday as the Taliban walked right in and Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar seemed to have assumed power.
But Trump and Biden shouldn’t blame one another. It was George W. Bush who refused to negotiate al Qaeda’s extradition. Bush then let Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri escape to Pakistan while he chose instead to focus on regime change in Kabul and later Baghdad. It was Bush who decided on the strategy of building and training up an Afghan National Army to secure the new regime in power and take the fight to its rivals. American officers, with no one to fight, found and made enemies where there were none before. By 2004, the Taliban, whose surrender Bush had refused to accept, returned to insurgency against the occupation. Of course, the more the U.S. built up a new government and army, the more the people hated and resisted it. As they say about their enemies, the Americans only understand one thing, force, and when confronted with this resistance they only escalated again and again, killing more innocents and combatants alike, and driving even more people into the insurgency.
The CIA, military and their proxies tortured people by the thousands for years.
They routinely slaughtered civilians and wrote it off as “collateral damage.”
They essentially built a government and army of the northern Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara tribes against the plurality population of the country, the Pashtuns. Where Pashtuns did have power in the government, it in no way enhanced the representation of the people. It just meant the people had to deal with the same old corrupt drug dealer, child rapist, murderer warlords, like Pacha Khan Zardari (“PKZ”), President Hamid Karzai’s half-brother Wali Karzai, and Abdul Razik, only now empowered by the corrupt central government in Kabul and U.S. military and intelligence forces. This was never a sustainable project. Even the Great American Fraud, Gen. David Petraeus, admitted that the Taliban’s process for civil and criminal disputes among the people was far preferable to the local population compared to the corrupt court and police systems the Americans had set up to replace them.
Early in the occupation, Bush spurned repeated offers of surrender from former CIA favorite Jalaluddin Haqqani and former Taliban leader Mullah Omar, only to send American GIs off to get blown up by their men for years afterwards.
Our allies the Pakistanis, with Saudi money, have backed the Afghan Taliban since at least 2005, giving them safe-haven and helping to pay their way. This has been to further Pakistan’s goal of limiting Indian influence in Afghanistan. The Americans’ solution? Ask the Indians to intervene even more in support of anti-Taliban efforts there. This of course has only motivated increased Pakistani support for the Afghan Taliban in turn.
When Obama ran for president in 2007 and 2008, he called Afghanistan the “right” war in contrast to the massive error of Iraq War II. But he really only promised a small escalation of a couple brigades. The military, however, had other plans. His Bush-holdover secretary of defense, Robert Gates, and Central Command Chief, Gen. Petraeus, demanded that Obama send the general in charge of the Afghan war, Gen. David McKiernan home and replace him with the supposed strategic genius and push-up and jogging super-hero Gen. Stanley McChrystal. The trio then spent the better part of 2009 teaming up with hawkish senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, the think tanks, especially the Democrats’ new Center for a New American Security, and the news media to pressure Obama into sending a total of 70,000 reinforcements in a so-called “surge.” The added troops were to implement Petraeus and marine General James Mattis’s rewritten counterinsurgency doctrine (COIN) which they sold as a magic potion that would guarantee “success” at winning over the hearts and minds of the good people of the southern Helmand and Kandahar provinces.
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Gen. Petraeus swore he would have the Taliban bleeding from the nose and ready to sign whatever he demanded of them by July 2011. That never happened. McChrystal abandoned COIN after its very first test case in the town of Marjah in the Helmand Province. After the heroic independent journalist Michael Hastings’ journalism got McChrystal removed, Obama insisted that the man himself, Gen. Supposed Bigshot, David Petraeus take command of the war himself. They would lose the war together. And they did. But not before getting more than another thousand Americans killed, tens of thousands of Afghans with them, and sending over all those trucks, rifles and helicopters to the Afghan National Security and Defense Forces that the Taliban have seized in the last few weeks.
As predicted, Obama’s Afghan “surge” only drove more people into supporting and joining the insurgency. McChrystal’s “insurgent math” explained why: for everyone they killed, they were recruiting 10 more into the ranks of the enemy.
By the time Petraeus got there, he’d forgotten all about his own counterinsurgency doctrine and simply escalated special operations night raids and air strikes instead. As the great Gareth Porter proved, they were mostly killing and imprisoning innocent people. The Drone Papers leaked by Daniel Hale further confirmed Porter’s reporting.
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The ANA was mostly a bunch of “ghost soldiers,” who existed only on paper for the financial gain of the officers in charge. The actual men who showed up were mostly looking for a pair of boots, a rifle and a decent meal. At no time did the largely Tajik and Uzbek army have the Taliban’s sense of morale in fighting for their country. They were fighting at the behest of a foreign power to try to subjugate the population of part of their country, not really in self-defense at all.
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Obama pretended to end the war in 2014, but he actually did no such thing. He left office with about 8,000 troops still there, mostly fighting Afghan ISIS, so-called ISIS-K for “Khorasan Province,” at its core a group of Pakistani Taliban refugees from America’s war there in the early Obama years.
According to Gen. Mattis, Trump’s first Secretary of Defense, President Donald Trump ordered the troops out of Afghanistan in March of 2017. But then he apparently just forgot about it. Subjected to a season-long pressure campaign by his generals, Trump eventually gave in, just as Obama had done before him, though to a lesser extent, ordering another 5,000 troops to the country and a massive escalation of the air war there. “My original instinct was to pull out, and historically I like to follow my instincts. I heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk of the Oval Office,” he explained.
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Trump also continued to allow the Pentagon to send military equipment to the ANA, most of which is falling into the hands of the Taliban now. Really, the Taliban have been buying American weapons from the ANA all along with American cash paid directly to them in the form of protection fees, or taxes, for allowing U.S. convoys through their territory and “reconstruction” money given to them by the duffle bag full. So it makes little difference.
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The ease of the Taliban’s victory over America’s installed puppet government in Afghanistan proves that the whole war was a fool’s errand all along. That regime never had the support of the population, and it never was going to. If all the hawks who already lost this war had their way, and the U.S. stayed another 20 years, that withdrawal would look much the same.
It’s 20 years late and not a moment too soon. Goodbye Afghanistan, sorry and good luck.
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Much more: https://original.antiwar.com/scott/2021/08/16/blame-bush-and-obama-for-the-afghan-disaster/
