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U.S. Embassy in Kabul Tells Staff to Destroy Sensitive Material and Evacuate

131 points by everybodyknows 5y ago

cjbenedikt 5y ago
So what was this whole war, its death toll (particularly in "collateral damage" i.e. civilian deaths), its costs good for? Is anyone being held accountable? Will we learn anything from it? Of course not. We need to keep the war machine well oiled so something has to come up.
- cjbenedikt 5y ago
  Feel free to deduct another point or two. That seems to be the case with my comments recently. Welcome to an open discussion on HN ( ...and here's anothecpoint gone for criticism).
  - johng 5y ago
    Don’t know why anyone would downvote you. It’s a valid question.
  - gambiting 5y ago
    I just don't understand why you'd make this comment literally 2 minutes after writing the original one. 1) you can still edit the original to add this remark if you really want to, although it's frowned upon 2) initial downvotes mean nothing, I've had comments go to -10 before jumping back up to +30 few hours later. Why would you complain about it within 3 minutes of posting is beyond me.
    - bpodgursky 5y ago
      Because it's really annoying getting reflexively downvoted by idealogues or zealots who have nothing else to say.
      - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
        Not everyone who thinks you're flat-out wrong is an idealogue or a zealot.
  - myrandomcomment 5y ago
    My first read on your comment was the tone in it is inflammatory and designed to provoke vs make a point or a validate argument. That is likely why you were downvoted. I can very much be accused of doing the same thing in some of my comments on emotional topics and in general the results are not as good as if I had framed things as a statement or a question without being emotional. YMMV.
  - cjbenedikt 5y ago
    And success! Lost more points than I could've hoped for.
- hindsightbias 5y ago
  The public wanted it and will not hold itself accountable https://news.gallup.com/poll/9994/public-opinion-war-afghanistan.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/9994/public-opinion-war-afghani...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - ren_engineer 5y ago
    the public was brainwashed and outright fed misinformation by the government who wanted to invade sounds like victim blaming the public
    - hindsightbias 5y ago
      > victim What an interesting word for a bloodthirsty mob. I’m sure the real victims, the Afghans, appreciate that you have no agency.
      - ren_engineer 5y ago
        the alternative would be US citizens placing no trust in the media or US government, because they became a "blood thirsty mob" under their influence. people wonder why today so many people are skeptical when it comes to the pandemic and anything else the government says, the government constantly lying to them is the primary cause
- flyinglizard 5y ago
  Maybe things were a bit better for a while. Life's essence is an integral of happiness.
  - hollerith 5y ago
    Maybe so, but as a US taxpayer, I object to any plan or program that buys so little happiness for so many US tax dollars.
  - dweekly 5y ago
    With a quarter of a million dead[1], I'm not sure I can agree with "better" for the families of those impacted. On a "Dollars Per Amount of Joy Conferred" metric for success (which I like!), I think this one gets a pretty big negative score. [1] https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/human-and-budgetary-costs-date-us-war-afghanistan-2001-2021 https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/human-and-b...
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  >So what was this whole war, its death toll its costs good for? It's a message. For the next several hundred years every warlord and extremist groups that's about to consolidate power over a nation is going to point at the Taliban and say "we want to run this nation, we don't want our sons to be running it" when kicking out particularly odious house guests who have dreams of attacking the 1st world. Was it worth it? IDK, doubt it. But that's what we bought at the end of the day. We bought a precedent.
  - flyinglizard 5y ago
    I agree with you in principle but in reality it was the US who was deterred, more than Afghanistan (which does not really seem to exist in any sovereign capacity). Warlords can operate with relative impunity knowing the US public would not let another Afghanistan take place.
  - digdigdag 5y ago
    You put forth a quasi-patriotic interpretation and a false premise, as the true benefactors of attacks on the 1st world have long been indicated (though not officially confirmed) to state sponsored groups in Saudi Arabia. Yet there they still stand, completely untouched by the quagmire that was Afghanistan and Iraq for the past 20 years. Secondly, we gave an entire generation of orphaned children (now adults at this point) all the more reason to focus their rage and frustration at the United States. I'm not sure what the net effect of all this is down the road, but I don't think it will be a case of these nations fearing the first world. Quite the opposite I think.
  - xorcist 5y ago
    Make no mistake, the Taliban stands to gain from this conflict. Not to mention Pakistan.
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      Of course they do. They want their country back. They want to pick up where they left off in 2001. And frankly I think they deserve their country back. But I doubt they'll harbor people who attack the first world again. That venture was nothing but a waste of 20yr and blood to them, same as it was to us.
- laurent92 5y ago
  There aren’t many ways to cope with this realization. The tipping point was Colin Powell’s “definitive proof” at the UN Counsel that Irak had WMD. As long as such criminals are free, we are not. Citizen may even too aware of this, as half melt into guilt of what the USA has done, the other half still have hope but also cynicism, even despair. As for other nations, if I were Iran, Irak, the Talibans, the Afghans, I’d fund efforts to destabilize USA. If I were China, I’d even organize it to ensure it weakens them without weakening the commercial exchanges. If I were Russia I’d tip into the jar too. USA made many enemies, it may be the target of coordinated spy work. And I say this as a staunch partisan of the USA. We should spend more on looking benevolent.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    About your third paragraph: You seem to think this isn't already happening. I think you're several years late.
    - laurent92 5y ago
      I didn’t want to dive into how the Congress invasion could be an artifact of enemies successfully mounting us against each other.
- mattnewton 5y ago
  Cynically? The executive branch got a bunch of new powers in the Patriot act, Halliburton shares soared for a few years, and the only people who were punished were a handful of traditional republicans associated with the Bush administration not already retired before isolationists like Trump took over the party. The main architects all did very well. I can only hope that the next generation learned not to trust government as quickly, but Vietnam wasn't that long ago so I don't know how realistic that hope is.
mrtksn 5y ago
Is all material digital at this point? It reminds me of the “Argo” movie(that is supposed to be quite accurate) where the Iranians manage to reconstruct shredded documents that expose the identities of the persons of interest. They also destroyed a device for encrypted communications. That part must be the easy part these days. In a morbid way, I enjoyed these photos of “savages” capturing advanced military equipment: https://twitter.com/oryxspioenkop/status/1426101381363027969?s=21 https://twitter.com/oryxspioenkop/status/1426101381363027969... It reminds me of Civ series where you could destroy advanced armies with large enough primitive ones. I used to dismiss it as unrealistic but apparently it wasn’t that unrealistic.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  It's 99.5% digital. They're mostly drilling holes in hard drives, not burning documents. Edit: Of course "everything" is encrypted. You still destroy stuff anyway because of defense in depth.
  - mrtksn 5y ago
    how good is a hole on a platter. I suspect, some data can still be recoverable. A photograph with some parts missing is better than no photo.
    - soperj 5y ago
      depending how you're doing it, it's actually quite difficult to properly drill a hard drive.
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      I was never privy to the true details but I suspect that they are making good use of torx screwdrivers and abrasives (wire brush, sandpaper, etc) right about now. It's slower but they have a fairly good amount of time to deal with it. If they have time they're wiping things first. You can also just burn them. It's not the Taliban they're worried about, it's the Russian and Chinese spies who will sneak in and pocket stuff, but that's mostly dealt with with policies that keep the kind of info those people would want off of hard drives in an unrelated nation.
jdhn 5y ago
This is going to be Saigon all over again. The pictures coming out of this will be remarkable. That being said, my thoughts go out to the Afghanis who helped us for decades as interpreters and other support roles. Both parties are failing those brave men and women in not expediting approval for them to come to the US, as their lives will assuredly be in danger if they stay in Afghanistan.
- onepunchedman 5y ago
  I really hope it won't be another Saigon, the videos coming out of the final days are harrowing. A lot of other countries are also closing their embassies for now, and seem to be more willing to bring home Afghans who've helped. In Norway we're also bringing their families.
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > I really hope it won't be another Saigon, the videos coming out of the final days are harrowing. Unless Biden changes course, it's going to be another Saigon, whether the pictures show it or not (e.g. they may get the Americans out before the Taliban is too close, and avoid pictures of throngs of desperate allies mobbing the embassy hoping to get evacuated with the last Americans, but most of those allies will still be stranded).
    - onepunchedman 5y ago
      Ye I've already seen images that look exactly like the ones from that evacuation.
  - angelzen 5y ago
    Perception >>> Reality Rest assured, there won't be another Saigon. The videos coming out of Afghan countryside and Kabul will be erased by BigTech under some corporate speak reason or another. The masses will never see them. 'Covid Misinformation' (TM) is just the dry run.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
BitwiseFool 5y ago
I remember the sentiment right after 9/11 and the country was baying for blood. It seems like the most prudent thing to have done was to adopt a kind of Fabian Strategy where we don't invade a nation halfway around the globe and hope to change a culture that has stubbornly been able to avoid being conquered by the major empires in world history. When you really look at it, no major act of terrorism of the same scale was going to happen anyways. I mean really, mass shootings end up killing more people. And it's not like the hijack an airliner strategy is going to work again. But here we are, 2+ Trillion burned and nothing to show for it.
- throwaway1777 5y ago
  I’m surprised no one has pulled off a hijackjng again. Has security really improved that much? Because listening to the comments here you’d think it was all farcical security theater.
  - MiddleEndian 5y ago
    The real security was locking the door to the cockpit alongside passengers being unwilling to let some dude with a knife hijack a plane anymore. The rest of the changes are security theater.
  - soperj 5y ago
    The security theater does nothing. They installed pilot doors that could only be opened from the inside. Can't exactly high jack a plane with box cutters anymore can you?
    - loonster 5y ago
      Prior to 911, hijackers took over planes for ransom. 911 was a zero day exploit. The opportunity to use hijacked planes as weapons ended with flight 93.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    Locking cockpit doors and having the awareness that hijacking isn’t a (mostly) nonviolent stunt is sound security, not theater. TSA (Thousands Standing Around) is much more effective as a jobs program than a security program in my estimation.
throwawaysea 5y ago
This pullout is so incredibly hasty and poorly thought out. For weeks now, this has been a fast-moving disaster and the media coverage had been so limited until provincial capitals started falling. For those not aware, the first atrocity was that the US failed to think about all the Afghani allies who risked life to work with Americans, such as translators. While the US later scrambled to evacuate some of them (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/21/us/politics/afghanistan-interpreters-visas.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/21/us/politics/afghanistan-i...), others were left to fend for themselves and faced brutal consequences like beheadings (https://nypost.com/2021/07/24/translator-who-worked-for-us-army-beheaded-by-taliban-report/ https://nypost.com/2021/07/24/translator-who-worked-for-us-a...). For the last two weeks, the Taliban's militias have been systematically taking over one provincial capital after the next, as the Afghani government sees desertions from their uncommitted and relatively untrained military forces. The US really needs to reverse the pull out and think about what it means to cooperate with a people and nation build. Yes, there have been numerous past missteps and money wasted with little accountability - but nation building, particularly after a war, was always going to be expensive and time-consuming. Leaving the project halfway after all these sunk costs feels like a hasty PR move that is now going to turn into an absolutely disastrous legacy for Biden and for America. I'm glad to see the decision to send 3000 troops into Afghanistan (https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-middle-east-evacuations-783b4aeabe20c709feed18129c49ac1e https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-middle-east-evacuations...), but am concerned that the US's commitment ends at evacuating embassies rather than supporting a nation that clearly needs help if we want a future ally in the region, instead of a future adversary. Let's not return to square one.
- adrr 5y ago
  We’ve been nation building in Afghanistan for 20 years. It didn’t work and we’ve failed to train a military capable of holding the country even after dumping hundreds of billions of dollars into it.
  - project2501a 5y ago
    Growing poppies, helping with the heroin trade and killing civilians is not "nation building". The real solution would had been "do not invade"
sonograph 5y ago
3,000 troops to evacuate an embassy seems excessive? How many diplomats are there? Nonetheless A terrible situation for Afghanistan; I wish the world could help them but I'm not sure what else could be done after trying for two decades.
- vimy 5y ago
  Maybe it’s to protect the capital until everyone is evacuated?
- praxulus 5y ago
  I suspect the number of troops needed to keep a facility secure depends not only on the size of the facility but also on the scale of the threat.
- TkTech 5y ago
  The 3000 troops aren't solely to hold the embassy, they're to hold the Kabul airport, and to handle the evacuation of diplomats and Afghans who assisted the US, such as translators and non-diplomatic embassy staff. 3000 staff is tiny percentage of the staff of an international airport, even a small one. > The troops, consisting of two Marine battalions and one Army battalion, will be based at the Kabul airport. They will provide security for an airlift that will fly out U.S. diplomats, as well as Afghans who have worked with the U.S., and the family members of those Afghans.
- rtkwe 5y ago
  The US Embassy in Afghanistan is absolutely massive. From July 6 2021: > the embassy is currently down to 1,400 U.S. citizens and about 4,000 staff working inside the compound the size of a small town. It's a huge complex and those are the reduced staff numbers. Granted they may or may not actually be evacuating all the local staff (the US has been... not great about getting people who risked their lives to help the US in Afghanistan). https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-kabul-445f33e7bba08c382d9bc5f72bf48047 https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-kabul-445f33e7bba08c382...
- shagmin 5y ago
  If I recall correctly, some US embassies that have been built in turbulent areas are more accurately described as military bases that just happen to host an embassy. They're heavily fortified and don't resemble what we'd typically think of as an embassy.
kaminar 5y ago
This is what happens when there is no leadership in the white house...we left without any negotiations...such stupidity deserves swift justice.
cletus 5y ago
How many politicians built their careers on the blood spilt in this pointless and expensive exercise? Overthrowing governments is awful foreign policy. This was never going to work, just like it didn't in Iraq, Iran, Vietnam, the Congo, Guatemala, Syria and elsewhere. Here's the kicker: the invasion of Iraq was based on a convenient lie by hawks who had been keen to overthrow Saddam Hussein ever since the First Gulf War. This convenient lie was easily debunked to. It's really simple. If Saddam Hussein had WMD, why wouldn't he give them up to save himself and his regime? Invasion clearly wasn't an empty threat and that would not end well for him. Hussein was never a religious ideologue. He didn't dream of martyrdom or jihad. He was a self-serving dictator (creates by the US I might add as a tool against Iran in the 1980s in a war that resulted from a revolution against the Shah, a government created by the US; are you beginning to see the pattern?). The only explanation was that Iraq did not in fact have WMDs. People pointed out in the early days after 9/11 so this isn't some kind of historical revisionism. None of this ever made sense.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > creates by the US I might add as a tool against Iran in the 1980s No, earlier than that as a tool against Communism in Iraq. Later, the US rushed to support him (including in his use of chemical weapons) when he got bogged down in war with Iran that he launched expecting a quick territorial gain, but that's not where US involvement with him started.
- AndrewBissell 5y ago
  > Overthrowing governments is awful foreign policy. This was never going to work, just like it didn't in Iraq, Iran, Vietnam, the Congo, Guatemala, Syria and elsewhere. It worked perfectly for the people who implemented the policies and their patrons. The point was never to make average Westerners more secure. It was to hand billions to contractors and oil companies, practice new forms of counterinsurgency and drone warfare, and make token moves against the latest bogeyman used to distract from the empire's exploitation and subjugation of its own people. All the examples you cite similarly benefitted the elites calling the shots in one way or another.
- tablespoon 5y ago
tonystubblebine 5y ago
The news coverage has a bit of a vibe of "Things are going south, what are we going to do about it?" I think the "What are we going to do about it" is implied by not having a conclusion attached to all the "bad" news. But isn't the rapid Taliban takeover 100% proof that we didn't build any sort of sustainable alternative while we were there?
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > I think the "What are we going to do about it" is implied by not having a conclusion attached to all the "bad" news. But isn't the rapid Taliban takeover 100% proof that we didn't build any sort of sustainable alternative while we were there? IIRC, the US pulled too much of the rug out from under the Afghani government too quickly. For instance, I've read the US long ago evacuated the maintenance contractors that maintained the Afghan Air Force, which means they can't fly even if they have the pilots.
dilippkumar 5y ago
Anyone have theories/guesses on how the Taliban are able to pull this off? I would expect that a group that has been hunted for 2 decades to be only just barely managing to survive - how do they have weapons, transportation, logistics etc to be able to basically get their act together like the past 20 years never happened?
- laurent92 5y ago
  I think Pakistan and ultimately Russia funds them? I’m not well-versed, it’s only my understanding.
  - ggm 5y ago
    Russia funding the Taliban. Ok.. run that playbook again for how the US funded the muj to undermine Russian investments in Afghanistan. Many thousands of young Russian conscripts died in Russia's Vietnam war. It fundamentally undermined the integrity of belief in the USSR and led directly to the end of soviet rule along with Chernobyl. I'm not really sure I can make Russia funding the Taliban work. Do you have any actual evidence because this would be like the CIA funding Al queda, in many ways..
    - zsmi 5y ago
      Not proof a funder per se, but there was this: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/us/politics/russia-afghanistan-bounties.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/us/politics/russia-afghan...
      - ggm 5y ago
        I'm insufficiently cynical. All I can say is, this will come back to bite them, if true. Just as US aid for the anti najibulla insurgency fuelled the problems of today.
  - fakedang 5y ago
    A lot of Taliban funding comes from Pakistan's ISI, as well as individual elements in Arab countries (prominently Saudi Arabia - wealthy ultra religious folks who might even be distant members of the royal family, but not affiliated to government). Apart from that, the Taliban do have the drug trade to keep them afloat. There are a few enough Russians in Afghanistan, but afaik, the Taliban are mostly ambivalent to them now. The Taliban mostly targets 3 types of folks - US and NATO people, Afghan government people, and open allies of the Afghan government (countries like India). Uzbekistan and Iran maintain very tight borders with Afghanistan so that the fighting doesn't spill over. For a very interesting tidbit, even very recently, Taliban was fighting ISIS near Badakhshan and Nuristan.
flowerlad 5y ago
The winner here is Pakistan. "Victory will not be claimed by Pakistan, but tacitly the Taliban will owe it to Pakistan", says Nazir, a retired brigadier and defense analyst in Islamabad. Pakistan has been allowing Taliban leaders free movement into and out of the country and continues to serve as a safe haven where fighters and their families can receive medical care. With the U.S. intention to leave publicly declared, Pakistan did away with any semblance of denial that the Taliban leadership was sheltering there. Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/15/world/asia/pakistan-afghanistan-withdrawal.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/15/world/asia/pakistan-afgha...
yyyk 5y ago
During this same day, there were several ominous articles about Afghanistan, yet the one article about Iraq was about a washing machine donation. This does help tell us something about what went wrong: For all its faults, the Iraq war was better politically conceived than the Afghanistan war - note that I do not say justified. Getting rid of the Sunni Ba'ath and giving power to Iraqi Shiites was a coherent and realistic political objective*, and once the new order was stabilized there was no real chance of going back (no, ISIS could never have realistically threatened Baghdad). The Afghanistan war never had a coherent political objective, or a realistic idea of the new order it meant to instill. Also, the US never bothered with cutting off the Taliban's support, but instead funded their main sponsor... Add in a spiteful withdrawal almost as if designed to maximize Taliban power and you get this. In general, political objectives are what decides if you can win these kinds of wars or whether they last forever, but the US let its generals run the war, and generals are bad at political and cultural understanding. P.S. Did I mention the USSR also did better? Its local flunkies actually held well after the USSR's withdrawal[0], it was only the USSR itself collapsing that eventually did them in. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_Civil_War_(1989%E2%80%931992)#Battle_of_Jalalabad_(1989) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_Civil_War_(1989%E2%80%9... * Yeah, yeah, America went in for democracy. Right. What do you think democracy means where the country had a Shiite majority? Besides, there's no other way to explain getting rid of all Ba'ath military officers on day 1.
dpaluy 5y ago
Without discussing the importance of the topic, why it’s relevant for HN?
fidesomnes 5y ago
This is one of the most shameful defeats in American history. Every single family of American heros that died or whose life was impacted forever has been shown that their sacrifice was meaningless. Not only is that unforgivable, this should be considered the highest treason imaginable.

So what was this whole war, its death toll (particularly in "collateral damage" i.e. civilian deaths), its costs good for? Is anyone being held accountable? Will we learn anything from it? Of course not. We need to keep the war machine well oiled so something has to come up.

cjbenedikt 5y ago
Feel free to deduct another point or two. That seems to be the case with my comments recently. Welcome to an open discussion on HN ( ...and here's anothecpoint gone for criticism).
- johng 5y ago
  Don’t know why anyone would downvote you. It’s a valid question.
- gambiting 5y ago
  I just don't understand why you'd make this comment literally 2 minutes after writing the original one. 1) you can still edit the original to add this remark if you really want to, although it's frowned upon 2) initial downvotes mean nothing, I've had comments go to -10 before jumping back up to +30 few hours later. Why would you complain about it within 3 minutes of posting is beyond me.
  - bpodgursky 5y ago
    Because it's really annoying getting reflexively downvoted by idealogues or zealots who have nothing else to say.
    - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
      Not everyone who thinks you're flat-out wrong is an idealogue or a zealot.
- myrandomcomment 5y ago
  My first read on your comment was the tone in it is inflammatory and designed to provoke vs make a point or a validate argument. That is likely why you were downvoted. I can very much be accused of doing the same thing in some of my comments on emotional topics and in general the results are not as good as if I had framed things as a statement or a question without being emotional. YMMV.
- cjbenedikt 5y ago
  And success! Lost more points than I could've hoped for.
hindsightbias 5y ago
The public wanted it and will not hold itself accountable https://news.gallup.com/poll/9994/public-opinion-war-afghanistan.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/9994/public-opinion-war-afghani...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ren_engineer 5y ago
  the public was brainwashed and outright fed misinformation by the government who wanted to invade sounds like victim blaming the public
  - hindsightbias 5y ago
    > victim What an interesting word for a bloodthirsty mob. I’m sure the real victims, the Afghans, appreciate that you have no agency.
    - ren_engineer 5y ago
      the alternative would be US citizens placing no trust in the media or US government, because they became a "blood thirsty mob" under their influence. people wonder why today so many people are skeptical when it comes to the pandemic and anything else the government says, the government constantly lying to them is the primary cause
flyinglizard 5y ago
Maybe things were a bit better for a while. Life's essence is an integral of happiness.
- hollerith 5y ago
  Maybe so, but as a US taxpayer, I object to any plan or program that buys so little happiness for so many US tax dollars.
- dweekly 5y ago
  With a quarter of a million dead[1], I'm not sure I can agree with "better" for the families of those impacted. On a "Dollars Per Amount of Joy Conferred" metric for success (which I like!), I think this one gets a pretty big negative score. [1] https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/human-and-budgetary-costs-date-us-war-afghanistan-2001-2021 https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/human-and-b...
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
>So what was this whole war, its death toll its costs good for? It's a message. For the next several hundred years every warlord and extremist groups that's about to consolidate power over a nation is going to point at the Taliban and say "we want to run this nation, we don't want our sons to be running it" when kicking out particularly odious house guests who have dreams of attacking the 1st world. Was it worth it? IDK, doubt it. But that's what we bought at the end of the day. We bought a precedent.
- flyinglizard 5y ago
  I agree with you in principle but in reality it was the US who was deterred, more than Afghanistan (which does not really seem to exist in any sovereign capacity). Warlords can operate with relative impunity knowing the US public would not let another Afghanistan take place.
- digdigdag 5y ago
  You put forth a quasi-patriotic interpretation and a false premise, as the true benefactors of attacks on the 1st world have long been indicated (though not officially confirmed) to state sponsored groups in Saudi Arabia. Yet there they still stand, completely untouched by the quagmire that was Afghanistan and Iraq for the past 20 years. Secondly, we gave an entire generation of orphaned children (now adults at this point) all the more reason to focus their rage and frustration at the United States. I'm not sure what the net effect of all this is down the road, but I don't think it will be a case of these nations fearing the first world. Quite the opposite I think.
- xorcist 5y ago
  Make no mistake, the Taliban stands to gain from this conflict. Not to mention Pakistan.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    Of course they do. They want their country back. They want to pick up where they left off in 2001. And frankly I think they deserve their country back. But I doubt they'll harbor people who attack the first world again. That venture was nothing but a waste of 20yr and blood to them, same as it was to us.
laurent92 5y ago
There aren’t many ways to cope with this realization. The tipping point was Colin Powell’s “definitive proof” at the UN Counsel that Irak had WMD. As long as such criminals are free, we are not. Citizen may even too aware of this, as half melt into guilt of what the USA has done, the other half still have hope but also cynicism, even despair. As for other nations, if I were Iran, Irak, the Talibans, the Afghans, I’d fund efforts to destabilize USA. If I were China, I’d even organize it to ensure it weakens them without weakening the commercial exchanges. If I were Russia I’d tip into the jar too. USA made many enemies, it may be the target of coordinated spy work. And I say this as a staunch partisan of the USA. We should spend more on looking benevolent.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  About your third paragraph: You seem to think this isn't already happening. I think you're several years late.
  - laurent92 5y ago
    I didn’t want to dive into how the Congress invasion could be an artifact of enemies successfully mounting us against each other.
mattnewton 5y ago
Cynically? The executive branch got a bunch of new powers in the Patriot act, Halliburton shares soared for a few years, and the only people who were punished were a handful of traditional republicans associated with the Bush administration not already retired before isolationists like Trump took over the party. The main architects all did very well. I can only hope that the next generation learned not to trust government as quickly, but Vietnam wasn't that long ago so I don't know how realistic that hope is.

mrtksn 5y ago

Is all material digital at this point? It reminds me of the “Argo” movie(that is supposed to be quite accurate) where the Iranians manage to reconstruct shredded documents that expose the identities of the persons of interest. They also destroyed a device for encrypted communications. That part must be the easy part these days. In a morbid way, I enjoyed these photos of “savages” capturing advanced military equipment: https://twitter.com/oryxspioenkop/status/1426101381363027969?s=21 https://twitter.com/oryxspioenkop/status/1426101381363027969... It reminds me of Civ series where you could destroy advanced armies with large enough primitive ones. I used to dismiss it as unrealistic but apparently it wasn’t that unrealistic.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago
It's 99.5% digital. They're mostly drilling holes in hard drives, not burning documents. Edit: Of course "everything" is encrypted. You still destroy stuff anyway because of defense in depth.
- mrtksn 5y ago
  how good is a hole on a platter. I suspect, some data can still be recoverable. A photograph with some parts missing is better than no photo.
  - soperj 5y ago
    depending how you're doing it, it's actually quite difficult to properly drill a hard drive.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    I was never privy to the true details but I suspect that they are making good use of torx screwdrivers and abrasives (wire brush, sandpaper, etc) right about now. It's slower but they have a fairly good amount of time to deal with it. If they have time they're wiping things first. You can also just burn them. It's not the Taliban they're worried about, it's the Russian and Chinese spies who will sneak in and pocket stuff, but that's mostly dealt with with policies that keep the kind of info those people would want off of hard drives in an unrelated nation.

jdhn 5y ago

This is going to be Saigon all over again. The pictures coming out of this will be remarkable. That being said, my thoughts go out to the Afghanis who helped us for decades as interpreters and other support roles. Both parties are failing those brave men and women in not expediting approval for them to come to the US, as their lives will assuredly be in danger if they stay in Afghanistan.

onepunchedman 5y ago
I really hope it won't be another Saigon, the videos coming out of the final days are harrowing. A lot of other countries are also closing their embassies for now, and seem to be more willing to bring home Afghans who've helped. In Norway we're also bringing their families.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > I really hope it won't be another Saigon, the videos coming out of the final days are harrowing. Unless Biden changes course, it's going to be another Saigon, whether the pictures show it or not (e.g. they may get the Americans out before the Taliban is too close, and avoid pictures of throngs of desperate allies mobbing the embassy hoping to get evacuated with the last Americans, but most of those allies will still be stranded).
  - onepunchedman 5y ago
    Ye I've already seen images that look exactly like the ones from that evacuation.
- angelzen 5y ago
  Perception >>> Reality Rest assured, there won't be another Saigon. The videos coming out of Afghan countryside and Kabul will be erased by BigTech under some corporate speak reason or another. The masses will never see them. 'Covid Misinformation' (TM) is just the dry run.
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

BitwiseFool 5y ago

I remember the sentiment right after 9/11 and the country was baying for blood. It seems like the most prudent thing to have done was to adopt a kind of Fabian Strategy where we don't invade a nation halfway around the globe and hope to change a culture that has stubbornly been able to avoid being conquered by the major empires in world history. When you really look at it, no major act of terrorism of the same scale was going to happen anyways. I mean really, mass shootings end up killing more people. And it's not like the hijack an airliner strategy is going to work again. But here we are, 2+ Trillion burned and nothing to show for it.

throwaway1777 5y ago
I’m surprised no one has pulled off a hijackjng again. Has security really improved that much? Because listening to the comments here you’d think it was all farcical security theater.
- MiddleEndian 5y ago
  The real security was locking the door to the cockpit alongside passengers being unwilling to let some dude with a knife hijack a plane anymore. The rest of the changes are security theater.
- soperj 5y ago
  The security theater does nothing. They installed pilot doors that could only be opened from the inside. Can't exactly high jack a plane with box cutters anymore can you?
  - loonster 5y ago
    Prior to 911, hijackers took over planes for ransom. 911 was a zero day exploit. The opportunity to use hijacked planes as weapons ended with flight 93.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  Locking cockpit doors and having the awareness that hijacking isn’t a (mostly) nonviolent stunt is sound security, not theater. TSA (Thousands Standing Around) is much more effective as a jobs program than a security program in my estimation.

throwawaysea 5y ago

This pullout is so incredibly hasty and poorly thought out. For weeks now, this has been a fast-moving disaster and the media coverage had been so limited until provincial capitals started falling. For those not aware, the first atrocity was that the US failed to think about all the Afghani allies who risked life to work with Americans, such as translators. While the US later scrambled to evacuate some of them (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/21/us/politics/afghanistan-interpreters-visas.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/21/us/politics/afghanistan-i...), others were left to fend for themselves and faced brutal consequences like beheadings (https://nypost.com/2021/07/24/translator-who-worked-for-us-army-beheaded-by-taliban-report/ https://nypost.com/2021/07/24/translator-who-worked-for-us-a...). For the last two weeks, the Taliban's militias have been systematically taking over one provincial capital after the next, as the Afghani government sees desertions from their uncommitted and relatively untrained military forces. The US really needs to reverse the pull out and think about what it means to cooperate with a people and nation build. Yes, there have been numerous past missteps and money wasted with little accountability - but nation building, particularly after a war, was always going to be expensive and time-consuming. Leaving the project halfway after all these sunk costs feels like a hasty PR move that is now going to turn into an absolutely disastrous legacy for Biden and for America. I'm glad to see the decision to send 3000 troops into Afghanistan (https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-middle-east-evacuations-783b4aeabe20c709feed18129c49ac1e https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-middle-east-evacuations...), but am concerned that the US's commitment ends at evacuating embassies rather than supporting a nation that clearly needs help if we want a future ally in the region, instead of a future adversary. Let's not return to square one.

adrr 5y ago
We’ve been nation building in Afghanistan for 20 years. It didn’t work and we’ve failed to train a military capable of holding the country even after dumping hundreds of billions of dollars into it.
- project2501a 5y ago
  Growing poppies, helping with the heroin trade and killing civilians is not "nation building". The real solution would had been "do not invade"

sonograph 5y ago

3,000 troops to evacuate an embassy seems excessive? How many diplomats are there? Nonetheless A terrible situation for Afghanistan; I wish the world could help them but I'm not sure what else could be done after trying for two decades.

vimy 5y ago
Maybe it’s to protect the capital until everyone is evacuated?
praxulus 5y ago
I suspect the number of troops needed to keep a facility secure depends not only on the size of the facility but also on the scale of the threat.
TkTech 5y ago
The 3000 troops aren't solely to hold the embassy, they're to hold the Kabul airport, and to handle the evacuation of diplomats and Afghans who assisted the US, such as translators and non-diplomatic embassy staff. 3000 staff is tiny percentage of the staff of an international airport, even a small one. > The troops, consisting of two Marine battalions and one Army battalion, will be based at the Kabul airport. They will provide security for an airlift that will fly out U.S. diplomats, as well as Afghans who have worked with the U.S., and the family members of those Afghans.
rtkwe 5y ago
The US Embassy in Afghanistan is absolutely massive. From July 6 2021: > the embassy is currently down to 1,400 U.S. citizens and about 4,000 staff working inside the compound the size of a small town. It's a huge complex and those are the reduced staff numbers. Granted they may or may not actually be evacuating all the local staff (the US has been... not great about getting people who risked their lives to help the US in Afghanistan). https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-kabul-445f33e7bba08c382d9bc5f72bf48047 https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-kabul-445f33e7bba08c382...
shagmin 5y ago
If I recall correctly, some US embassies that have been built in turbulent areas are more accurately described as military bases that just happen to host an embassy. They're heavily fortified and don't resemble what we'd typically think of as an embassy.

kaminar 5y ago

This is what happens when there is no leadership in the white house...we left without any negotiations...such stupidity deserves swift justice.

cletus 5y ago

How many politicians built their careers on the blood spilt in this pointless and expensive exercise? Overthrowing governments is awful foreign policy. This was never going to work, just like it didn't in Iraq, Iran, Vietnam, the Congo, Guatemala, Syria and elsewhere. Here's the kicker: the invasion of Iraq was based on a convenient lie by hawks who had been keen to overthrow Saddam Hussein ever since the First Gulf War. This convenient lie was easily debunked to. It's really simple. If Saddam Hussein had WMD, why wouldn't he give them up to save himself and his regime? Invasion clearly wasn't an empty threat and that would not end well for him. Hussein was never a religious ideologue. He didn't dream of martyrdom or jihad. He was a self-serving dictator (creates by the US I might add as a tool against Iran in the 1980s in a war that resulted from a revolution against the Shah, a government created by the US; are you beginning to see the pattern?). The only explanation was that Iraq did not in fact have WMDs. People pointed out in the early days after 9/11 so this isn't some kind of historical revisionism. None of this ever made sense.

dragonwriter 5y ago
> creates by the US I might add as a tool against Iran in the 1980s No, earlier than that as a tool against Communism in Iraq. Later, the US rushed to support him (including in his use of chemical weapons) when he got bogged down in war with Iran that he launched expecting a quick territorial gain, but that's not where US involvement with him started.
AndrewBissell 5y ago
> Overthrowing governments is awful foreign policy. This was never going to work, just like it didn't in Iraq, Iran, Vietnam, the Congo, Guatemala, Syria and elsewhere. It worked perfectly for the people who implemented the policies and their patrons. The point was never to make average Westerners more secure. It was to hand billions to contractors and oil companies, practice new forms of counterinsurgency and drone warfare, and make token moves against the latest bogeyman used to distract from the empire's exploitation and subjugation of its own people. All the examples you cite similarly benefitted the elites calling the shots in one way or another.
tablespoon 5y ago

tonystubblebine 5y ago

The news coverage has a bit of a vibe of "Things are going south, what are we going to do about it?" I think the "What are we going to do about it" is implied by not having a conclusion attached to all the "bad" news. But isn't the rapid Taliban takeover 100% proof that we didn't build any sort of sustainable alternative while we were there?

tablespoon 5y ago
> I think the "What are we going to do about it" is implied by not having a conclusion attached to all the "bad" news. But isn't the rapid Taliban takeover 100% proof that we didn't build any sort of sustainable alternative while we were there? IIRC, the US pulled too much of the rug out from under the Afghani government too quickly. For instance, I've read the US long ago evacuated the maintenance contractors that maintained the Afghan Air Force, which means they can't fly even if they have the pilots.

dilippkumar 5y ago

Anyone have theories/guesses on how the Taliban are able to pull this off? I would expect that a group that has been hunted for 2 decades to be only just barely managing to survive - how do they have weapons, transportation, logistics etc to be able to basically get their act together like the past 20 years never happened?

laurent92 5y ago
I think Pakistan and ultimately Russia funds them? I’m not well-versed, it’s only my understanding.
- ggm 5y ago
  Russia funding the Taliban. Ok.. run that playbook again for how the US funded the muj to undermine Russian investments in Afghanistan. Many thousands of young Russian conscripts died in Russia's Vietnam war. It fundamentally undermined the integrity of belief in the USSR and led directly to the end of soviet rule along with Chernobyl. I'm not really sure I can make Russia funding the Taliban work. Do you have any actual evidence because this would be like the CIA funding Al queda, in many ways..
  - zsmi 5y ago
    Not proof a funder per se, but there was this: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/us/politics/russia-afghanistan-bounties.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/us/politics/russia-afghan...
    - ggm 5y ago
      I'm insufficiently cynical. All I can say is, this will come back to bite them, if true. Just as US aid for the anti najibulla insurgency fuelled the problems of today.
- fakedang 5y ago
  A lot of Taliban funding comes from Pakistan's ISI, as well as individual elements in Arab countries (prominently Saudi Arabia - wealthy ultra religious folks who might even be distant members of the royal family, but not affiliated to government). Apart from that, the Taliban do have the drug trade to keep them afloat. There are a few enough Russians in Afghanistan, but afaik, the Taliban are mostly ambivalent to them now. The Taliban mostly targets 3 types of folks - US and NATO people, Afghan government people, and open allies of the Afghan government (countries like India). Uzbekistan and Iran maintain very tight borders with Afghanistan so that the fighting doesn't spill over. For a very interesting tidbit, even very recently, Taliban was fighting ISIS near Badakhshan and Nuristan.

flowerlad 5y ago

The winner here is Pakistan. "Victory will not be claimed by Pakistan, but tacitly the Taliban will owe it to Pakistan", says Nazir, a retired brigadier and defense analyst in Islamabad. Pakistan has been allowing Taliban leaders free movement into and out of the country and continues to serve as a safe haven where fighters and their families can receive medical care. With the U.S. intention to leave publicly declared, Pakistan did away with any semblance of denial that the Taliban leadership was sheltering there. Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/15/world/asia/pakistan-afghanistan-withdrawal.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/15/world/asia/pakistan-afgha...

yyyk 5y ago

During this same day, there were several ominous articles about Afghanistan, yet the one article about Iraq was about a washing machine donation. This does help tell us something about what went wrong: For all its faults, the Iraq war was better politically conceived than the Afghanistan war - note that I do not say justified. Getting rid of the Sunni Ba'ath and giving power to Iraqi Shiites was a coherent and realistic political objective*, and once the new order was stabilized there was no real chance of going back (no, ISIS could never have realistically threatened Baghdad). The Afghanistan war never had a coherent political objective, or a realistic idea of the new order it meant to instill. Also, the US never bothered with cutting off the Taliban's support, but instead funded their main sponsor... Add in a spiteful withdrawal almost as if designed to maximize Taliban power and you get this. In general, political objectives are what decides if you can win these kinds of wars or whether they last forever, but the US let its generals run the war, and generals are bad at political and cultural understanding. P.S. Did I mention the USSR also did better? Its local flunkies actually held well after the USSR's withdrawal[0], it was only the USSR itself collapsing that eventually did them in. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_Civil_War_(1989%E2%80%931992)#Battle_of_Jalalabad_(1989) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_Civil_War_(1989%E2%80%9... * Yeah, yeah, America went in for democracy. Right. What do you think democracy means where the country had a Shiite majority? Besides, there's no other way to explain getting rid of all Ba'ath military officers on day 1.

dpaluy 5y ago

Without discussing the importance of the topic, why it’s relevant for HN?

fidesomnes 5y ago

This is one of the most shameful defeats in American history. Every single family of American heros that died or whose life was impacted forever has been shown that their sacrifice was meaningless. Not only is that unforgivable, this should be considered the highest treason imaginable.