At The Strategist professor of strategic studies Brahma Chellaney is critical of President Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in no uncertain terms:
Afghanistan is on the brink of catastrophe, and it is US President Joe Biden’s fault. By overruling America’s top generals and ordering the hasty withdrawal of US troops, Biden opened the way for Taliban terrorists to capture more than a quarter of Afghanistan’s districts. Now, the Taliban are pushing towards Kabul, and the United States is looking weaker than ever.
Unlike most he does not shrink from proposing his alternative:
Biden had a better option: the US could have maintained a small residual force in Afghanistan, in order to provide critical air support and reassurance to Afghan forces. Yes, that would have violated the deal Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, struck with the Taliban in February 2020. But the Taliban have already violated that Faustian bargain. Biden was happy to overturn many of Trump’s other actions, making his insistence on upholding this deal difficult to understand.
which is not unlike what I proposed 16 years ago: maintaining a small, lethal force with the dual missions of counterterrorism and force protection in Afghanistan indefinitely. Notate bene: I didn’t think we should have invaded Afghanistan in the first place. If it were felt that we needed to do something, we should have engaged in the punitive raid to end all punitive raids and left it at that.
But all of this makes me wonder if we’re going to see the return of something like the malaise about which President Jimmy Carter warned 42 years ago. There are major differences between now and 42 years ago not the least of which is that then we had the world’s largest economy very nearly by an order of magnitude. If we have another “crisis of confidence” it will be well-deserved.
America is Back!!!
(16 years ago at Winds of Change, one or more people were advocating the U.S. garrison an island in the Indian Ocean from which the U.S. could act as an off-shore balancer. The idea was intriguing, but I couldn’t tell if it was at all feasible. Offshore balancer has the advantage of a very secure defensive posture, but offensively has to be dependent on others, including for intelligence)
You’ve brought up a subject not mentioned enough, PD: “dependent on others”, i.e. Pakistan. We have been dependent on Pakistan for the last 20 years not just for intelligence but their permission to transport supplies across Pakistani territory. The Pakistani government doesn’t like to admit it but we’ve paid them about $2 billion a year every year since 2001. Since Pakistan’s total annual budget runs around $45 billion that’s not an unappreciable sum and the enthusiasm for continuing it will probably wane.
Assuming he is not being ironic, the base PD Shaw writes of was, in fact, established on Diego Garcia in March, 1971, some 50 years ago. The Brits evicted the whole civilian population to set up the joint base. Now it is a large Navy and Air Force base, and routinely houses B-52’s, B-1’s, and B-2’s. Many air strikes in Afghanistan and the Middle East have been launched from Diego Garcia. Air strikes from there on Iraq and Kuwait go back to the first Gulf war in 1991.
As to Brahma Chellaney, one can only weep in frustration at such overweening stupidity and smugness. With such thinking among our Masters, how can we survive?