Airlines rerouted planes to avoid Afghan airspace, while others nixed flights as chaos gripped Kabul international airport Monday.
“Due to the dynamic nature of the situation we have begun routing around Afghanistan airspace,” United said, explaining a decision that affected daily flights to Mumbai. Flydubai and Emirates suspended flights to Kabul. “Customers holding tickets with final destination to Kabul will not be accepted,” Emirates said. Would-be passengers were told to contact the carrier or their travel agents.
Speaking of would-be passengers, there were a lot of them at Kabul international. So many, in fact, that the US military fired warning shots to deter thousands of terrified citizens from flooding the tarmac. At least five people were killed, possibly in a stampede. All commercial flights were suspended. A statement implored people to “avoid crowds.”
Crowd control efforts included clearing runways with a cargo plane, firetrucks and low-flying helicopters. The Taliban, which took control of Kabul Sunday cementing a return to power two decades (or three days, depending on how you want to look at it) in the making, controls every major border crossing. The airport is the only way out. Apparently, many Afghans aren’t excited about their prospects in the new “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,” as the nation will soon be called.
“Videos circulating on social media showed hundreds of people running across the tarmac as US soldiers fired warning shots in the air,” the AP wrote, recounting the scene as follows,
One showed a crowd pushing and shoving its way up a staircase, trying to board a plane, with some people hanging off the railings. In another video, hundreds of people could be seen running alongside a US Air Force transport plane as it moved down a runway. Some climbed onto the side of the jet just before takeoff. That raised questions about how much longer aircraft would be able to safely take off and land. Massouma Tajik, a 22-year-old data analyst, described scenes of panic at the airport, where she was hoping to board an evacuation flight. After waiting six hours, she heard shots from outside, where a crowd of men and women were trying to climb aboard a plane. She said US troops sprayed gas and fired into the air to disperse the crowds after people scaled the walls and swarmed onto the tarmac. Gunfire could be heard in the voice messages she sent to The Associated Press.
The Taliban, meanwhile, pledged to run an “open, inclusive Islamic government.” This is the furthest thing from funny, but surely you’ll be permitted one wry chuckle.
“There will probably be attempts to talk of a ‘New Taliban,’ brushing over the fact that the ‘New’ is versus 7th century fundamentalism,” Rabobank’s Michael Every wrote Monday. “Indeed, the Taliban seem to now realize which Western memes make it look more palatable, and are promising to be ‘inclusive,'” he went on to say, before joking that “They may only need to throw in ‘diverse,’ ‘equity,’ ‘green,’ and ‘sustainability’ for Wall Street to perk up and ask ‘Are you in favor of free trade?'”
Mitch McConnell took the opportunity to be melodramatic, although I’m sure if you heard it directly from Mitch, his famous monotone would accidentally undermine the intended effect. (You wouldn’t choose McConnell to be the voiceover for the trailer to your Hollywood action film.) “A proud superpower has been reduced to hoping the Taliban will not interfere with our efforts to flee Afghanistan,” he said, in a statement. “God knows what fate awaits vulnerable Afghans who cannot make it to Kabul to board one of the final flights out. Terrorists and major competitors like China are watching the embarrassment of a superpower laid low.”
Never mind that it was Donald Trump who set the timeline for the US withdrawal. And who was it that campaigned ceaselessly, to rousing applause, about ending “forever wars”? And we’ll just forget about that time Trump invited the Taliban to Camp David for what he described as a “secret meeting” just days before the anniversary of 9/11.
McConnell was gracious enough to admit that “America’s two-decade involvement in Afghanistan has had many authors. So have the strategic missteps made along the way.”
Sometimes (ok, a lot), I wonder if anyone actually thinks about all the “regular” troops who, from now on, won’t need to worry about being maimed or killed fighting a war that started before they were old enough to read. Bin Laden died a decade ago. Mullah Omar in 2013 (or thereabouts). It’s been obvious for years (years) that America’s vision of a strong, democratic Afghanistan was a pipe dream.
It’s a tragedy for Afghans, yes. Especially women. But, past a certain point, is it not incumbent upon a US president to confront reality? Trump clearly believed the answer to that was “yes.” Biden does too. And while Trump will surely chastise Biden’s haphazard withdrawal, this was, in fact, a joint effort of sorts. Trump put it in motion. Biden finished it. From now on, any US soldiers in Afghanistan will be there because they want to be, where that’s just an allusion to DEVGRU, Delta Force and other folks who happily “do this for a livin’,” so to speak.
As for the “major competitors” McConnell mentioned, China’s Hua Chunying (the Foreign Ministry’s somewhat irascible spokeswoman) told reporters Monday that Beijing “respect[s] the Afghan people’s will and choice.” I’m not sure “will” and “choice” are the right words, and neither are thousands of people trying to force their way onto planes at Hamid Karzai International. Hua said China’s embassy in the country is “operating normally.” China evacuated most of its nationals. Anyone still there is “safe,” she said.
For their part, Russia is set to meet with Taliban representatives on Tuesday. These would be official meetings, one supposes, not the backchannel variety that may or may not have involved bounties. The Kremlin “will not rush” to recognize the Taliban, Moscow said. I’m sure the Russians spent the last 24 hours having a good, hearty laugh at America’s expense. Something like: “Yeah, it’s not so easy in there, is it?”
As for the Taliban itself, deputy leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar said simply: “We never expected to reach such a victory — we should show humbleness in front of Allah.” God, he said, will now “test” the Taliban’s capacity to “serve and secure our people, and ensure their good life and future.”
I spent 23 years on active duty in the U.S. military: three as an enlisted Army paratrooper, 20 as a Navy SEAL officer. I am not in the least bit a bleeding heart anti-war sort of guy. I would also add that for decades in my mid-life, Central Asian history was a hobby of mine, and I have a particular fondness of Afghanistan and its people. Within that context, though, I say that as tragic as this ending is, an ending is way past overdue.
We probably had a chance to do something meaningful and beneficial at one point—despite the history of foreign invaders in Afghanistan—but we took our eye off the ball when we invaded Iraq. Let’s be done with it and hope like hell that we shift the balance of foreign engagement a little more to diplomacy and soft power, and stop thinking the U.S. military can solve all overseas problems.
Also, I do sure hope that the U.S. steps up to the plate now in helping take care of Afghan refugees.
I agree. The US had a chance to do something meaningful and beneficial – very early on. Capturing OBL before he slithered away over the mountains and Pakistan border was an objective all in the world could understand in 2001/2002.
The meaningful and beneficial event I’d like to see now is for every Afghan refugee to find a new home.
Your graphic is spot on. Billion of $ up in smoke.
Of course, what’s really amusing is when you put it in perspective. We “spend” (a misnomer) $120 billion every 30 days buying bonds from ourselves. So, the Fed creates one whole US-financed Afghan military every three weeks. I mean, your sentiment is obviously correct, but money is an illusion. People are touting that $83 billion we spent arming and training Afghans like it’s this huge sum. The Fed conjures that amount every 21 days.
It’s impossible for me not to see parallels from this unceremonious exit to the Vietnam exit. Sure, we’re not helicoptering people out as our embassy as it is being invaded, but it’s damn close. The mission of any military service member is to protect the United States from enemies foreign and domestic. Somehow, our government has been able to twist that mission into nation building over the past 60 years. Nation building has never been the military’s purpose or mission and the entire notion of it is impossible. You can not militarily inspire a nation of people to believe in a cause of government. They have to believe it first and then you can leverage your military power to enable their cause. That is what France did for us when we decided to become free of Britain. Had the French showed up and sacked all of our cities and blown up our buildings and accidentally killed our friends and family, I doubt we would have been interested in their version of government. I truly hope that we might finally learn this lesson, that the military is a horrific weapon of war, not a mechanism to inspire and bring about peace. Nobody listened to Eisenhower when he warned us to beware the military industrial complex.
Probably the biggest folly in this (and similar boondoggles in military adventurism) is America’s failure to come to terms with the reality that liberal democracy is a very new idea in the context of human history. We make long lists of reasons why “transplanting democracy” fails, usually without acknowledging that the American version has only existed for 250 years. And, as we saw over the last four years, it can collapse at any time. Little wonder, then, that trying to forcibly transplant it to societies with histories that date back millennia doesn’t generally work. We (almost) never draw a distinction between the wars we won and the ones we “lost.” When we go somewhere to do something that needs doing (e.g., Europe in WW II) and we commit the full force of the military to getting it done, it gets done. It doesn’t matter who’s in the way. Hitler himself couldn’t stop the US military, and we were fighting on two fronts. By contrast, when we run off into the desert or the jungle or the mountains somewhere with no clear objective beyond some person(s) we want to eliminate, it invariably goes wrong. I’m often reminded of that (possibly apocryphal) story about the massive, multi-million dollar reward we offered to Afghans with information on the whereabouts of Bin Laden. Asked what he would do with such a sum if he were to receive it, one local balloon salesman allegedly told western media he reckoned that would be enough money to buy a year’s worth of balloons. Again, that may be a myth, but the thrust of it is undoubtedly true: We go trekking off into the wild blue yonder talking to people about representative democracy the virtues of capitalism, and they don’t know what we’re talking about. It’s not that they aren’t capable of understanding it or that they wouldn’t enjoy such things, it’s just that it’s so foreign to them and, perhaps more importantly, so totally irrelevant to their daily lives, that we may as well be aliens. Aliens with guns, who accidentally killed one of their neighbors or relatives in an “oops” drone strike.
And again, when the military has a very clear objective (eliminate the fascist threat of Nazism), it is easier to inspire a group of people to go execute that mission. Go invade Afghanistan and turn them into a Democracy? Uhhhhh how the crap do you do that? Conversely, it’s backwards to go decide a country should change it’s ethos to become what you desire them to be. I mean, that’s akin to someone invading your home and telling you that you need to become a Muslim and that they are not leaving until you do so. Nobody likes to be told what to do or forced to become something they hadn’t even thought about. It’s really American arrogance that leads us into these positions where we are sacrificing service members lives because we are so certain we can turn this 3rd world country into a functioning Democracy, that we don’t even concern ourselves with the cost (or the risks). As a former service member I can tell you that watching these parallel wars come to fruition was a complete violation of leadership’s oath of office. I fulfilled my end of the bargain but, my leaders didn’t fulfil their oath to protect me, my friends, and all of our families from unnecessary harm.
There’s a great Doonesbury cartoon from the fall of 1990 (I’ve kept a copy in my files all these years). A Schwarzkopf like officer is briefing the troops on the mission, when a grunt asks something along the lines of “Gee, sir, what chance does a small band of outsiders have of changing things in a region riven by conflicts that go back centuries?” He replies, “Son, I see you’ve studied history.” “No, sir! I just read the in flight magazine.”
We had an easy win in 1990-91, which swept away a lot of the learning/humility we picked up from VietNam. That gave us Bush, Cheney, and Rummy.
I’ve not served in the military, but I spent a couple of years on the ground as a Peace Corps volunteer (no equivalence) in an Arab country. Even in a well educated, somewhat modernized albeit authoritarian society (Tunisia), things change slowly . Afghanistan? Good luck. I never made it there, but got to visit a friend working on Afghan relief in Peshawar in the late 1980’s. Another world.
A few years ago i did a presentation to our local foreign policy discussion group. In the course of preparing, I came across a copy of an Army manual (42 pages) to prepare junior officers for deployment in Iraqi Kurdistan. It was good material, but how can you possibly function with ten phrases of self taught Kurdish? (Yes, I know about interpreters.) I assume we had a similar manual for Afghanistan. Or maybe just the in flight magazine.
I processed paperwork at NKP airbase in Thailand during my service in 1973/74. Please don’t thank me for my service, because I did not protect our country. I protected the culture that Eisenhower warned us about succumbing to all these decades – corporate welfare. Welcome to a repeat of the ’70’s, the psychological effects of hopelessness will rebound the same.
Afghanistan just has more mountains, it’s a giant farm to grow poppies. They have many of the most modern automated grow systems in the world.
We were in that S___h___ to protect an extremely profitable product – heroin.
This “war” was just one of the many reasons my family and farms went ex-pat to Chile SA.
Buena Suerte
I feel like heroin might object: “Hey, now wait a minute, I’ve got a bad enough reputation as it is. I’m not taking 100% of the blame for this debacle too.”
Watch for issues (battles?) concerning lithium supplies, as well as rare-earth elements.
Lithium becomes the new oil in a green economy.
Perhaps this isn’t a relevant comment, but I feel compelled to make it if only to eject from my psyche. Watching the last few days of what’s transpiring in Afghanistan, I couldn’t help but think what a failure the State Dept, Pentagon and CIA have been in their appraisals of Vietnam, the USSR, Iraq and Afghanistan. I can’t begin to guess how many people were paid and how much money was spent to come up with evaluations that turned out to be incredibly flawed (and outright lies) and led to huge human disasters. Unfortunately, these organizations my be ‘too big to change’. American democracy may only work up to a certain population size. Congress is a good example of something that is no longer functional. When major institutions no longer fulfill their role, significant portions of the population may become so disillusioned that they will grasp at all manor of dangerous fantasies rationalizing ‘how could it get worse’.
Watching our hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan, visions of the CNN and other MSM ‘news’ broadcasts during the buildup to the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions keep replaying in my mind. Though I respect those that served, sacrificed and died in our New American Century military adventures, I’m totally disgusted with those that led us into Iraq and Afghanistan. I think someone needs to point out the fact that the trillions they say we spent on these campaigns didn’t, for the most part, leave the US or permanently improve the lives of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan but they did make some people in this country very rich.
To quote retired United States Marine Corps Major General and two-time Medal of Honor recipient Smedley Butler: “War is a Racket”. Nuf said.