Tuesday, September 11, 2001. Al Qaeda's attack on the Twin Towers and Washington D.C. and where we are today.

 

Today will be widely marked as the 25th Anniversary of Al Queda's attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and attempted attack on the White House and Pentagon.

This blog existed at the time, but it was very inactive.  Indeed, most of the posts that are found in the 2001 section of this blog were posted, actually, in 2026 and then moved back to that date as they track historical events in sequence.  At that time my computer time was devoted to a forum on cavalry topics.

I'm not going to go into huge depth on the topic.  It's 25 years ago but seems like yesterday in a lot of ways to me, but at the same time it must be noted how much time has passed. The country really rose to the occasion, and then starting in the 2010s betrayed itself massively, showing that history isn't written at the onset, but the conclusion.  I've written a prior partial introspection on the event here:

September 11, 2001. Where we were then, and where we are today.

Al-Qaeda is of course the entity that made the assault.  It was, and remains, a radical Sunni pan-Islamist militant organization who seek to restore an Islamic Caliphate.  Various caliphates have existed since Muhammed, but the last anyone could claim that one existed was in 1924. That year the Ottoman Empire dissolved and the caliphate that was claimed by the Ottomans dissolved with it.  Like all such larger empires, it'd had grown fairly icky, and nobody would want to restore an empire of that type.  Al-Qaeda has more of a hardcore Sunni empire in mind.

The organization was founded in 1988 with that goal in mind and the intent to use violence to bring it about.  Contrary to what some people like to claim, forcing a goal such as this is common in Islam.  Islam itself was forced upon the Middle East by violent expansion. At the time of Muhammed, the Middle East was well in the process of becoming an entirely Catholic region of the globe, although large populations of pagans and Jews lived throughout the region.  The extent to which Muhammed founded a religion that would mirror Islam today is quite debated, and frankly there are quite strong reasons to believe his original religious views were significantly different from modern Islam's.  It seems fairly evident that Muhammed was influenced by his first wife, Khadija, who was either Catholic or Coptic.  While Muslims hate the idea, and therefore reject it, his much older wife (she was 40, he was 25, when they married) had one daughter who clearly was Catholic and was married to a Catholic..  Muhammed also was influenced by an uncle of hers who seems to have been a Nestorian priest as well as Catholic monks.

Like a lot of would be religious reformers, he seems to have started off pretty conventional, to the extent we can tell, and then basically justified his own vices through his claim to be a prophet.  He'd adopt polygamy and clearly had an eye for women.  This extended right down to minors as the youngest female he married, Aisha, was only six years old at the time and was nine when he first had sex with her.  Fully sanctioning armed expansion of his faith by that time, he seems to have justified taking sex slaves in order to satiate the lust of his troops who were complaining about being away from their wives.

All this sounds gross, and it is, but it's not really unique.  Other would be Christian leaders have gone off the rails along these lines as well, sort of, with Joseph Smith perhaps being the best example of a conventional American lay preacher who founded his own religion.

Anyhow, in Islam there's no separation really between the faith and government. There's also no one real head, and the divisions within the faith are gigantic.  It's never been the case that all Muslims have accepted one religious or secular ruler, but Al Qaeda would force that, which is why, in spite of American confusion on the issue, Al Qaeda has no support in Shi'a cultures, including the one we're presenting loosing a war to.

The rise of Al Qaeda in general reflects an odd event that the end of the Cold War helped bring about.  In 1992 Francis Fukuyama wrote The End of History arguing that with the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy and the dissolution of the Soviet Union humanity has reached "not just ... the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

He was way off the mark.

Indeed, what Fukuyama, and darned near everyone else, failed to realize that that the Cold War had resulted in the suppression, some voluntary, some not, of hardcore, non liberal, conservatism, everywhere.  In the Middle East much of the regions underground, and above ground, political forces had been completely secular.  Communist parties and movements were strong. The Baath Party was a fascist party.  There wasn't a single country in the Middle East that took the took the thought of an Islamic state seriously until the Islamic Revolution installed a theocracy, to everyone's surprise, in Iran in 1979, which was thought to be a freakish exception attributable to Shia, which is a minority millennialism branch of the faith.

But the end of the Cold Wat took the lid off of such forces everywhere. They were there all along, but with the threat of Communism gone, and the support of the USSR ended, very conservative religious forces emerged and began to threaten the stability of Islamic states, and for that matter non Islamic ones.  Indeed, the US is going through such a struggle right now with millennialist Evangelical conservatism.

Al Qaeda's complaint with the United States is and has always been significantly different than Iran's.  What Al Qaeda objected to was the presence of U.S. military forces in the region, which it regarded as intolerable and a sort of religious defilement.  

On February 26, 1993 Islamic terrorists, some with connections to Al Qaeda, attempted to blow down the World Trade Center, something that seems to now be completely forgotten.  In October 2000 Al Qaeda itself attacked the USS Cole. After that action, it was ready to try something more bold.

By that time the organization was hiding in Afghanistan and Pakistan, having effectively been driven out of Saudi Arabia. Afghanistan was ruled then, as it once again is due to Trump's surrender, by the Sunni Taliban, which was at that time engaged in a civil war against more moderate forces.

The concept, which was inept, was that attacking the towers (again) would destroy the U.S. economy and attacking the Pentagon and the White House would decapitate the U.S. government.

Of course, that didn't occur.

We could play out the conventional history from there, but we'll large omit it.  The US and its Allies went to war in Afghanistan, and mistakenly in Iraq.  The Baath government was defeated in Iraq, which now has a shaky democracy.  A long war in Afghanistan more or less defeated Al Qaeda there, but the American people grew tired of the long protracted was there and betrayed the Afghanis, with Donald Trump surrendering to the Taliban.

A budding civil war is developing there.  As we've often stated here, wars change everything, and the wars this sparked are no exception.  

The US overreacted to what was effectively a criminal assault on the US by converting it into sort of a global war.  Domestically the US government consolidated agencies into the Naziesque named Department of Homeland Defense, creating a sort of permanent war time footing where it did not need to exist.  It acclimated itself to the use of the military, and intelligence organizations, in extra legal operations.  "First Responders", in the form of firemen and policemen, were regarded as heros, legitimately, with their occupations, along with that of veterans, to go on and receive hagiographic treatment, which is not good at all.

An entire generation of Americans have grown up thinking this is normal.  First 

And the structure and atmosphere that created set up a condition in which a rogue President could use that force in a way that no Cold War era President ever could.

After World War One strong empires ruled by hereditary families supported by ultra conservative forces fell.  In some countries, the war brought about more liberal governments, which an expansion of democracy.  In others, it brought about radical right and left wing governments.  

Al Qaeda did not bring about a caliphate as a result of September 11, 2001.  It did succeed, however, in making the world worse.  The US can pull out of its own descent into fundamentalism, but the question is whether it will or not.

On the anniversary of 9/11, in this a year with an election campaign going on, it's worth remembering. . .

that the plot was hatched in an Afghanistan ruled by the Taliban.

That resulted in George Bush launching a campaign against the Taliban regime.

Bush's focus on Iraq, however, which wasn't involved in 9/11, and Rumsfeld's belief that he could wage war with a minimum of forces, lead to us initially grossly under committing to Afghanistan.

Barack Obama committed to a surge there, which lead to the war being ultimately a low grade one, albeit one that Afghan forces did poorly in, overall.

Donald Trump arranged a deal with the Taliban to withdraw, which would ultimately mean its return to power.  Joe Biden merely carried it out.

Saturday, August 28, 1943. Change of governments.

King Boris III of Bulgaria died after becoming suddenly ill.  He had met with Hitler two weeks prior, and there was suspicion at the time, and some still believe, he was poisoned while in Germany.

He was 49 years of age.

His six year old son Simeon became king, with a regency.  He'd be the last King of Bulgaria, but would later become Prime Minister as Simeon Sakskoburggotsk in 2001.

The Danish government resigned rather than prosecute saboteurs in German military courts.

Monday, April 26, 1943. Intrepid launched.

 

USS Intrepid in 1944.

The USS Intrepid was launched in Newport News.  The aircraft carrier would serve throughout World War Two and two following wars, and be decommissioned in 1974. She is a museum ship today, docked in the Hudson in New York, and served as the FBI operations center following the September 11 attacks on New York.

Riots broke out at Uppsala, Sweden between Swedish Nazis and anti-Nazi demonstrators.

Saturday, November 1, 1941. Coast Guard Katyusha.

Adolf Hitler issued a formal statement claiming that the United States had attacked Germany, making reference to the German sinking of the USS Reuben James the day prior.

During wartime the Coast Guard has traditionally serves as an auxiliary of the Navy, while during peace time it used to be part of the Department of the Treasury.  Post 9/11 it's been part of the Department of Homeland Safety.

The Coast Guard was transferred from the Treasury Department into the Department of the Navy for the ongoing emergency, recognizing that the US was very near being in a state of war.

Selective Service issued a list of key occupations which were to receive conscription deferments.  The last two items are noted here:

Today in World War II History—November 1, 1941

The first mass use of Soviet multiple rocket launchers occurred.  The production effort, which had actually commenced prior to the war, was so secret that the Soviets didn't even inform the soldiers assigned to them what their official designation, the BM13, was until after the war. As they were marked with the letter "K" soldiers nicknamed them Katyusha after the popular wartime Russian song, although Stalin Organs was also a popular name for them.

The weapon was groundbreaking.  Inaccurate, it went for volume of fire and was deployed in mass batteries.  It was copied by other combatants once it became known, being a simple weapon to make, and its the origin of multiple rocket launching batteries that have replaced heavy artillery in some armies, including the United States Army.

The song was written just before the war, in 1938, and has gone on to remain a hugely popular Russian tune.  About a girl on the Steppes, it is in the same category as Lili Marlene in that it was copied by other parties in the war, including those fighting the Red Army, with new lyrics being written in some instances.  A search for it on YouTube will bring up a zillion Russian versions, many with dancing Russian women dressed in wartime uniforms.  It's remained popular with Russian expatriot populations, and is popular in Israel as a folk tune.   The crowed singing the farewell tune in The Deer Hunter, in the wedding scene, is singing it, most likely spontaneously as it the extras in that scene are actually parishioners of an actual American Russian Orthodox Church.

The Slovakian government issued orders requiring Jews to ride in separate train cars and to wear to mark their mail with the Star of David.

Rainbow Bridge over Niagara Falls, another Depression Era project, was opened to traffic.

These servicemen and clergymen attended a service at St. Andrew's Church.  I'm not sure where, but probably in Wales or Scotland.

The only President to get the war in Afghanistan right was. . .

 

Barack Obama.

Yes, I meant that.

Already I can hear screaming from some that this is absurd.  Obama was a Marxist Socialist Agent of Destruction who never got anything right. . . 

Well, gentle readers, I'm not a fan of President Obama's.  Basically, I think he stood for very little and like Woodrow Wilson confused talking with action.  But he got Afghanistan right.

Here's why.

President Bush blew it with Afghanistan. The US had to go into the country after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the US, but the US should have treated that as a criminal act, not military one, which Obama would have done, had he been in office in 2001.  Going into Afghanistan was necessary, but a short, sharp, destructive punitive expedition would have sufficed.

Yes, the last punitive expedition the country went into didn't catch the bad guy, Pancho Villa, but then neither did the long slow invasion of Afghanistan. That took years, and indeed it occurred under President Obama's watch.  The Punitive Expedition into Mexico did serve, FWIW, to keep big forays across the border (well, at least armed ones, big forays across the border are going on right now, but not armed ones), from occurring again.

We could have done that.  We pretty much could have destroyed much of the Taliban, maybe killed Bin Laden, and wrecked Afghanistan as a potential threat for some time without occupying it.

But once you do that, you are in it.  You break it, and we did, you bought it.

President Obama seems to have gotten that. He intended to get out, but didn't. He even launched a "surge" which regained lost ground.

President Trump didn't get it, or didn't care.  Probably the latter.  No matter how you look at it, however, the Doha Agreement was inexcusable.

Also inexcusable was committing to a May pull out, which under the circumstances was abandoning the country to the Taliban.  Further inexcusable was the effort to abandon the country prior to President Biden's inauguration.  It's still unclear what that was even about.

At least Trump listened to his military advisers to the extent he didn't pull out in January of this year.

Then came in Biden and made a hasty, botched, departure.   The administration has given the thin excuse that they expected the country to fall, but not so fast.

So, we have three Presidents who messed it up, and only one who got it right.  We rarely give President Obama credit for much here, but we'll give him credit for that.

September 11, 2001. Where we were then, and where we are today.

 I was getting ready for work.  My wife was getting ready to take our son to preschool.

She was watching the Today Show, and called me up because a jet had hit one of the Twin Towers.  I came up and watched the footage.

Then the second one hit.  I was watching from the stairs.  Right away, I told her it was terrorism.

We all seemingly know the story.  Another jet hit the Pentagon.  Heroic passengers stormed the cockpit of a fourth and in the resulting struggle it went down, taking all of them, and the Islamic jihadist who justified murder in the name of God, to their deaths.

President Bush promised revenge and retribution.

The nation united.

The Administration soon went off course, mistaking necessarily retribution against Al Queda, to whom the jihadist belonged, with the Baathist of Saddam Hussein's Iraq, with whom the same didn't get along.  The nation soon set ground in Afghanistan, but the commitment was small.  A larger one went to war in Iraq, leading to the end of the Baathist regime there, but a guerilla war against ISIL thereafter which was eventually won.  In Afghanistan, the larger commitment, and one to rebuilding the nation with a democratic model after the Taliban regime that gave safe harbor to Al Queda was removed.   The slow commitment lead to a messy and protracted war.

That war was more or less won, but a guerilla war against the armed Islamic students of the Taliban, a force that exists only because of Pakistan's support, continued on for 20 years.  President Obama tried to extract the US and then reversed course.  At the end of his administration President Trump negotiated with the very entity which had given safe harbor to those who attacked us on this day 20 years ago and then committed to withdrawal.  President Biden, whom never approved of the nation building mission in Afghanistan, completed what Trump had started with an inept and messy withdrawal that amounted to a surrender to the Taliban and an abandonment of our allies in Afghanistan.

The nation will look back on this day with sadness, as it should.  But what it should be considering as well is what its recent acts mean in terms of its immediate future.  We've left our enemies in power and rejuvenated in a region which gave rise to this attack 20 years ago and their dedication to an isolated and extreme interpretation to a religion that started as a Christian heresy and spread first by excusing primitive and male vices, and then spread by the sword remains unabated and will not abate.

Killing Osama Bin Laden and devastating Al Queda has made us safer, to be sure.  But the ineffective and misdirected nature of our following efforts, followed by the abandonment of that which we created, has not made the world safe.

Defeat in Afghanistan

This morning, when I stumbled out of bed at what has now become a stress induced "late" time for me of 4:45 a.m., and then clicked on the computer and saw the morning's news, I saw a photograph of a Chinook helicopter landing on the US embassy roof in Kabul.

The Taliban has entered Kabul.

It immediately made me recall the North Vietnamese Army entering Saigon and our embassy personnel being taken off the roof.

There is no reason this had to happen.  And it's going to be a bloody disaster.  

That blood will be on our hands.

There's a lot of reasons this has occurred, and the blame for the disaster goes back to President Bush II and his Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld.  There was never a reason for the United States to launch a war against Iraq in 2001 and the fact that we committed our forces, there, rather than in Afghanistan were there was a dire need to do so, set us off on a half cocked strategy of minimal force that allowed the Taliban to continue to exist and, eventually, recover.

Beyond that, the simple fact of the matter is that the American concept of instant national reform, simply because we are there, is idiotic.  Germany didn't reform at the end of World War One.  It took a second war and the dismantling of the nation to cause that to occur, and it had somewhat of a history of civil government.  Japan, which had a parliament that had been semi functioning as well before it was co-opted by the military, saw its military dismantled and its culture swamped by Americans.  Simply setting up a democratic government and thinking it was going to work right away was naive.

An American general has recently opined that significant forces in the nation combined with an intent to stay until 2030 was what was really needed.  Rather than that, we hoped for a cheap and easy war and that people would suddenly become democratic and peaceful as that's in their DNA.  Recent events should cause us to question if that's even in our political DNA.

If we were going to just go in, get Bin Laden, and not worry about what happened after, we could have done that.  We didn't.  And that was an option. A big raid just designed to kill Bin Laden could have been done. But once you invade a country, it's your responsibility.

There's no excuse for this whatsoever, and every American administration from George Bush II on deserves the blame for it.  There's going to be piles of hand wringing and excuse making, and one of the things we will here is that our actions over the last several months don't really mean that our troops died in vain.

A person should question that.

Losing in Afghanistan.

 

United States Navy photograph by Lt. Chad Dulac.

A recent article I saw somewhere stated that a lot of Vietnam veterans are having an unwelcome recollection of the end of that war.  One Vietnam vet I know personally told me that.

And the reason why is that they're seeing an abandonment of a cause we fought for in Afghanistan, just like we did in Vietnam.

It's an open question how long a democratic country can maintain a fight against an enemy that doesn't threaten to overrun it.  The US fought for four years in the Civil War over what the nation would be, and twice that long to bring the nation into existence in the 1770s and 1780s.  World War Two was fought, by the US, for four years as well.  All those wars, and others, were fought to a conclusion, so obviously the US will do that.  We more or less did that with Iraq, actually completing what we had started with the second Gulf War.

We didn't do that with Vietnam.  We entered, in a minor way, in 1958 and left officially in 1973, but in reality we didn't really get rolling until 1964 and had pretty much gotten out by 1972.  Still, Vietnam was a pretty long war by American standards, and we'd grown tired of the whole thing by 1968.  Nixon was elected on a promise to get us out, which he did. 

By the time we left Vietnam the American Army had basically been destroyed.  Not a battlefield destruction by any means, the NVA and the VC were not capable of doing that. But its moral had completely been destroyed.  Of the four services, probably the Marines and the Air Force were in the best shape. The Navy actually experienced a late war mutiny on an aircraft carrier, showing how bad things were for it.  That's important to know, but it doesn't change the fact that we entered Vietnam in strength in 1965, converted the war to an American style war, were complicit by omission in the assassination of its civilian head of state, and then left.  The US could have prevented the North Vietnamese victory in 1975 by the application of air power, but we chose not to.  

That may beg the question of what would have occurred in the war had the US simply not become involved.  Frankly, the Republic of Vietnam stood a good chance of falling on its own.  But we did become involved and even had a bit of a role in seeing a non-democratic civilian government become a series of military ones.  Only the first one arguably understood the country itself.

Intervening in a nation militarily imposes obligations on a country, wish for them or not.  Wars don't end when the party initiating them concludes they're over.  They end when both parties do.  When we left Vietnam we did so under a fiction that we were turning the war over (back?) to the South Vietnamese.  But we'd converted the war's nature into something else by that time, and taught the ARVN to fight like the US Army, with US equipment, and US airpower.  It's no wonder the rank and file of the ARVN collapsed in 1975. They no longer had all of that like they had before.

And that's what is going to happen in Afghanistan.

Somebody whose feed I get on Facebook, at least for the time being, claims that we entered Afghanistan on a limited "punitive expedition" and should have gotten right back out. There's some merit to that claim, but that isn't what we did at all.  Indeed, we botched the war there right from the onset, and that set the path for the next twenty years.

Donald Rumsfeld, who just died recently, was Gerald Ford's Secretary of Defense and therefore was familiar with punitive expeditions. The US reaction to the Mayaguez's taking by Cambodia was sort of that.  But by the time he was George Bush II's Secretary of Defense, he'd become a member of the technology v. troops trap that has so often ensnared Americans.

Moreover, while U.S. troops first touched ground in October 2001, the US put the war on a back burner preferring instead to take on Iraq in a war that was completely unconnected with the 9/11 attacks and which didn't need to be fought, or if it did, it didn't need to be fought at that time.

Indeed, often missed in the story of "America's longest war" is the fact that the US never committed to it in the way that was either required or really military necessary.  At a high point, in 2011, there were 98,000 US troops in Afghanistan, which is a lot, but pales in comparison to the 500,000 men commitment that was made to Vietnam and Korea.  Of course, those were large wars in comparison as well.  By and large, however, the US kept its commitment to Afghanistan low and slow, which meant that the Taliban was able to adjuster, and for that matter so was Al Queada.  That kept the war running.  In December 2002, well after the US commitment had commenced, there were still just under 10,000 US troops in the country. 

Fighting guerilla wars isn't easy to start with, but to really have caught and addressed the Taliban, the initial commitment should have been heavy and exclusive.  We never did that.

It's also easy to now forget that Osama bin Laden wasn't killed until May 2011.  It took us a full decade to achieve that goal, which had been part of the initial goal in the first instance.  Having engaged the war in Afghanistan in 2001, and having not achieved that goal until a decade later, those who argue that the effort was to be a punitive raid have more or less missed that point.

As we were in the country for that length of time, it was necessary to attempt to restore a functioning Afghani civil government.  But that sort of thing takes a very long time, which we should have been well aware of.  As we're addressing in another post on a completely unrelated topic, democracy isn't instinctive and building a democratic culture takes a very long time.  Germany and Japan, which had functioning parliamentary systems that were not completely democratic, but which did function, flunked it in the mid 20th Century and didn't achieve democracy until they were occupied after World War Two.  China, which started off attempting in 1911, has never pulled it off.  The US, our own example, started off with the reputation of being radically democratic, but only 6% of the population could vote in the country's first democratic election.

Given this, we can't really expect the Afghani government to be stable for a long time.  It's had twenty years, some might note, but many nations have taken longer than that.

And its military is collapsing in the face of a Taliban onslaught.  The best we can now hope for is that some regions of the country will become self-governing under their own local warlords.  Not a cheery thought, but the best one.  A 30,000 man strong body of Afghani commandos continues to fight well, but they are about it. The best they can hope for is that the Afghan central government becomes one more contesting force, sort of in the model of Lebanon of the 1970s.

None of this had to be.  We could have avoided this by fighting the war intelligently and according to well established military principals in 2001 and 2002.  But we botched that.

Having failed that, that committed us to the long haul. That would mean keeping some troops, and more particularly air assets, in the country for a long time, perhaps another twenty years.  If that seems outrageous, we've now had troops in Europe since they landed in Italy in 1943, and some forces on Japanese soil that have been there since 1945.  Our troops in the Philippines were there, under somewhat analogous conditions, from 1898 until the country was really made free in 1945, and continued on for various reasons decades after that.  We've been in South Korean since 1950 in a technical state of halted hostilities.

When we left Vietnam in 1972 it took three years for the country to fall, giving the US the hoped for illusion of "peace with honor" that Nixon had hoped for, even as he knew the country would fall.  The country has followed the Communist path since then, with all that entails, including a slow move towards a market economy directed from above.  Lenin's New Economic Policy may never have taken root in the USSR, but it seems to have elsewhere in the Communist world, save for the Stalinist theme park of North Korea.  No such hope can be realistically conveyed for an Afghanistan with the Taliban back in power.  It never had any interest in anything other than a strict Islamic rule. And that's what is most likely to return in that country.  We'll be complicit in that.

Addendum

Prior to the US announcing its intent to withdraw during the late portion of the Trump Presidency, total non Afghani forces supporting the government amount to 7,500 troops, of which 2,500 were Americans. The Afghan National Army was doing 98% of the fighting.

Drawdown in Afghanistan

Special Forces and Northern Alliance troops, 2001.

I'm separating out this material from the Wars and Rumors of War thread for this year due to its historic importance to the United States.  It's not, and not to put it lightly, "just one more war".

I'll of course add some commentary on the way, assuming this blog survives Google's effort to render blogspot obsolete.

While this post is going up on April 18, it includes the old posts from the Wars thread that started with President Biden's announcement of earlier this past week.

April 15, 2021

United States v. Taliban.

 THE PRESIDENT:  Good afternoon.  I’m speaking to you today from the Roosevelt — the Treaty Room in the White House.  The same spot where, on October of 2001, President George W. Bush informed our nation that the United States military had begun strikes on terrorist training camps in Afghanistan.  It was just weeks — just weeks after the terrorist attack on our nation that killed 2,977 innocent souls; that turned Lower Manhattan into a disaster area, destroyed parts of the Pentagon, and made hallowed ground of a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and sparked an American promise that we would “never forget.” 

We went to Afghanistan in 2001 to root out al Qaeda, to prevent future terrorist attacks against the United States planned from Afghanistan.  Our objective was clear.  The cause was just.  Our NATO Allies and partners rallied beside us.  And I supported that military action, along with overwhelming majority of the members of Congress. 

More than seven years later, in 2008, weeks before we swore the oath of office — President Obama and I were about to swear — President Obama asked me to travel to Afghanistan and report back on the state of the war in Afghanistan.  I flew to Afghanistan, to the Kunar Valley — a rugged, mountainous region on the border with Pakistan.  What I saw on that trip reinforced my conviction that only the Afghans have the right and responsibility to lead their country, and that more and endless American military force could not create or sustain a durable Afghan government.  

I believed that our presence in Afghanistan should be focused on the reason we went in the first place: to ensure Afghanistan would not be used as a base from which to attack our homeland again.  We did that.  We accomplished that objective.  

I said, among — with others, we’d follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell if need be.  That’s exactly what we did, and we got him.  It took us close to 10 years to put President Obama’s commitment to — into form.  And that’s exactly what happened; Osama bin Laden was gone.  

That was 10 years ago.  Think about that.  We delivered justice to bin Laden a decade ago, and we’ve stayed in Afghanistan for a decade since.  Since then, our reasons for remaining in Afghanistan are becoming increasingly unclear, even as the terrorist threat that we went to fight evolved. 

Over the past 20 years, the threat has become more dispersed, metastasizing around the globe: al-Shabaab in Somalia; al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula; al-Nusra in Syria; ISIS attempting to create a califit [caliphate] in Syria and Iraq, and establishing affiliates in multiple countries in Africa and Asia.  

With the terror threat now in many places, keeping thousands of troops grounded and concentrated in just one country at a cost of billions each year makes little sense to me and to our leaders.  We cannot continue the cycle of extending or expanding our military presence in Afghanistan, hoping to create ideal conditions for the withdrawal, and expecting a different result.  

I’m now the fourth United States President to preside over American troop presence in Afghanistan: two Republicans, two Democrats.  I will not pass this responsibility on to a fifth. 

After consulting closely with our allies and partners, with our military leaders and intelligence personnel, with our diplomats and our development experts, with the Congress and the Vice President, as well as with Mr. Ghani and many others around the world, I have concluded that it’s time to end America’s longest war.  It’s time for American troops to come home.  

When I came to office, I inherited a diplomatic agreement, duly negotiated between the government of the United States and the Taliban, that all U.S. forces would be out of Afghanistan by May 1, 2021, just three months after my inauguration.  That’s what we inherited — that commitment.  

It is perhaps not what I would have negotiated myself, but it was an agreement made by the United States government, and that means something.  So, in keeping with that agreement and with our national interests, the United States will begin our final withdrawal — begin it on May 1 of this year.  

We will not conduct a hasty rush to the exit.  We’ll do it — we’ll do it responsibly, deliberately, and safely.  And we will do it in full coordination with our allies and partners, who now have more forces in Afghanistan than we do.  

And the Taliban should know that if they attack us as we draw down, we will defend ourselves and our partners with all the tools at our disposal.  

Our allies and partners have stood beside us shoulder-to-shoulder in Afghanistan for almost 20 years, and we’re deeply grateful for the contributions they have made to our shared mission and for the sacrifices they have borne. 

The plan has long been “in together, out together.”  U.S. troops, as well as forces deployed by our NATO Allies and operational partners, will be out of Afghanistan before we mark the 20th anniversary of that heinous attack on September 11th.  

But — but we’ll not take our eye off the terrorist threat.  We’ll reorganize our counterterrorism capabilities and the substantial assets in the region to prevent reemergence of terrorists — of the threat to our homeland from over the horizon.  We’ll hold the Taliban accountable for its commitment not to allow any terrorists to threaten the United States or its allies from Afghan soil.  The Afghan government has made that commitment to us as well.  And we’ll focus our full attention on the threat we face today.  

At my direction, my team is refining our national strategy to monitor and disrupt significant terrorist threats not only in Afghanistan, but anywhere they may arise — and they’re in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere.  

I spoke yesterday with President Bush to inform him of my decision. While he and I have had many disagreements over policies throughout the years, we’re absolutely united in our respect and support for the valor, courage, and integrity of the women and men of the United States Armed Forces who served.  I’m immensely grateful for the bravery and backbone that they have shown through nearly two decades of combat deployments.  We as a nation are forever indebted to them and to their families.  

You all know that less than 1 percent of Americans serve in our armed forces.  The remaining 99 percent of them — we owe them.  We owe them.  They have never backed down from a single mission that we’ve asked of them. 

I’ve witnessed their bravery firsthand during my visits to Afghanistan.  They’ve never wavered in their resolve.  They’ve paid a tremendous price on our behalf.  And they have the thanks of a grateful nation. 

While we will not stay involved in Afghanistan militarily, our diplomatic and humanitarian work will continue.  We’ll continue to support the government of Afghanistan.  We will keep providing assistance to the Afghan National Defenses and Security Forces. 

And along with our partners, we have trained and equipped a standing force of over 300,000 Afghan personnel today and hundreds of thousands over the past two decades.  And they’ll continue to fight valiantly, on behalf of the Afghans, at great cost.  They’ll support peace talks, as we will support peace talks between the government of Afghanistan and the Taliban, facilitated by the United Nations.  And we’ll continue to support the rights of Afghan women and girls by maintaining significant humanitarian and development assistance. 

And we’ll ask other countries — other countries in the region — to do more to support Afghanistan, especially Pakistan, as well as Russia, China, India, and Turkey.  They all have a significant stake in the stable future for Afghanistan.  

And over the next few months, we will also determine what a continued U.S. diplomatic presence in Afghanistan will look like, including how we’ll ensure the security of our diplomats. 

Look, I know there are many who will loudly insist that diplomacy cannot succeed without a robust U.S. military presence to stand as leverage.  We gave that argument a decade.  It’s never proved effective — not when we had 98,000 troops in Afghanistan, and not when we were down to a few thousand. 

Our diplomacy does not hinge on having boots in harm’s way — U.S. boots on the ground.  We have to change that thinking.  American troops shouldn’t be used as a bargaining chip between warring parties in other countries.  You know, that’s nothing more than a recipe for keeping American troops in Afghanistan indefinitely.  

I also know there are many who will argue that we should stay — stay fighting in Afghanistan because withdrawal would damage America’s credibility and weaken America’s influence in the world.  I believe the exact opposite is true.  

We went to Afghanistan because of a horrific attack that happened 20 years ago.  That cannot explain why we should remain there in 2021.  

Rather than return to war with the Taliban, we have to focus on the challenges that are in front of us.  We have to track and disrupt terrorist networks and operations that spread far beyond Afghanistan since 9/11. 

We have to shore up American competitiveness to meet the stiff competition we’re facing from an increasingly assertive China.  We have to strengthen our alliances and work with like-minded partners to ensure that the rules of international norms that govern cyber threats and emerging technologies that will shape our future are grounded in our democratic values — values — not those of the autocrats. 

We have to defeat this pandemic and strengthen the global health system to prepare for the next one, because there will be another pandemic.  

You know, we’ll be much more formidable to our adversaries and competitors over the long term if we fight the battles for the next 20 years, not the last 20.  

And finally, the main argument for staying longer is what each of my three predecessors have grappled with: No one wants to say that we should be in Afghanistan forever, but they insist now is not the right moment to leave.  

In 2014, NATO issued a declaration affirming that Afghan Security Forces would, from that point on, have full responsibility for their country’s security by the end of that year.  That was seven years ago.  

So when will it be the right moment to leave?  One more year, two more years, ten more years?  Ten, twenty, thirty billion dollars more above the trillion we’ve already spent? 

“Not now” — that’s how we got here.  And in this moment, there’s a significant downside risk to staying beyond May 1st without a clear timetable for departure.  

If we instead pursue the approach where America — U.S. exit is tied to conditions on the ground, we have to have clear answers to the following questions: Just what conditions require to — be required to allow us to depart?  By what means and how long would it take to achieve them, if they could be achieved at all?  And at what additional cost in lives and treasure? 

I’m not hearing any good answers to these questions.  And if you can’t answer them, in my view, we should not stay.  The fact is that, later today, I’m going to visit Arlington National Cemetery, Section 60, and that sacred memorial to American sacrifice.  

Section sisty [sic] — Section 60 is where our recent war dead are buried, including many of the women and men who died fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.  There’s no — there’s no comforting distance in history in Section 60.  The grief is raw.  It’s a visceral reminder of the living cost of war.  

For the past 12 years, ever since I became Vice President, I’ve carried with me a card that reminds me of the exact number of American troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.  That exact number, not an approximation or rounded-off number — because every one of those dead are sacred human beings who left behind entire families.  An exact accounting of every single solitary one needs to be had.  

As of the day — today, there are two hundred and forty- — 2,488 [2,448] U.S. troops and personnel who have died in Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Freedom’s Sentinel — our Afghanistan conflicts.  20,722 have been wounded.  

I’m the first President in 40 years who knows what it means to have a child serving in a warzone.  And throughout this process, my North Star has been remembering what it was like when my late son, Beau, was deployed to Iraq — how proud he was to serve his country; how insistent he was to deploy with his unit; and the impact it had on him and all of us at home.  

We already have service members doing their duty in Afghanistan today whose parents served in the same war.  We have service members who were not yet born when our nation was attacked on 9/11.  

War in Afghanistan was never meant to be a multi-generational undertaking.  We were attacked.  We went to war with clear goals.  We achieved those objectives.  Bin Laden is dead, and al Qaeda is degraded in Iraq — in Afghanistan.  And it’s time to end the forever war.  

Thank you all for listening.  May God protect our troops.  May God bless all those families who lost someone in this endeavor.

2:45 P.M. EDT 

April 17, 2021

United States v. Taliban, cont.

Interestingly enough, the drawdown in Afghanistan is now predicted to temporarily increase the US troop presence in Afghanistan.   This includes reasons that run from logistical to force protection needs during the drawdown.

In addition to the 2,500 U.S. troops being withdrawn, it should be noted, 7,000 allied troops will also be withdrawn.  It's little appreciated that the US forces amount to only about 1/4 of the non Afghan forces supporting the Afghan government.

April 18, 2021

United States v. Taliban.

Wyoming Representative Elizabeth Cheney has strongly criticized President Biden's announcement to withdraw from Afghanistan.  Cheney was also a strong critic of President Trump on the same issue.

May 1, 2021

The US withdrawal commenced.