The "fiasco" that wasn't - American media sanctimoniously editorializing & blantantly lying about alleged "failure" of Afghanistan withdrawal:https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/08 ... rawal.html$1:
America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan has yet to cost our nation a single casualty. Evacuations of U.S. citizens and allies from Kabul’s airport are proceeding at a faster pace than the White House had promised, or than its critics had deemed possible. Afghanistan’s decades-long civil war has reached a lull, if not an end. On the streets of Kabul, “order and quiet” have replaced “rising crime and violence.” Meanwhile, the Taliban is negotiating with former Afghan president Hamid Karzai over the establishment of “an inclusive government acceptable to all Afghans.”
In other words, Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan has been a “disastrous” and “humiliating” “fiasco,” in the words of the mainstream media’s ostensibly objective foreign-policy journalists.
This may be an accurate description of what recent events in Kabul have meant for the president, politically. The latest polls have shown sharp drops in Biden’s approval rating, driven in part by widespread opposition to “the way” his administration handled its (otherwise popular) exit from Afghanistan. Yet this political fiasco is not a development that the media covered so much as one that it created.
The Biden administration made some genuine errors of contingency planning. It could have done (and should now do) more to facilitate the mass resettlement of Afghan refugees. But as far as conclusions to multi-decade wars go, America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan is thus far proceeding with relatively little chaos and tragedy. And it’s far from clear that the withdrawal could have been much more orderly had the White House only executed it in a better “way.”
It has long been apparent that America’s exit from Afghanistan would be tantamount to the Taliban’s victory. U.S. intelligence officials may have been excessively optimistic about the Afghan government’s staying power, but even they thought the government in Kabul would collapse within two years of America’s retreat. Simply put, there is no proud way to lose a war to a cult of heroin-dealing child rapists (especially when your side in that war featured no small number of men who fit a similar description). There probably wasn’t a non-chaotic way of doing so, either. The Biden administration advised all U.S. civilians in Afghanistan to leave the country in May. Forcibly evacuating those who chose to stay, along with every Afghan ally who feared Taliban reprisals — before the Afghan government fell — would have been a Herculean task in terms of pure logistics. And it was an impossible task in terms of geopolitics: Before its collapse, the Afghan government had pressured the United States to limit its evacuation efforts, so as to avoid broadcasting the message that America deemed a Taliban victory inevitable. This was a reasonable concern. Few in the Afghan security forces were eager to die for a lost cause, which is one reason why the Taliban met weak resistance by the time it reached Kabul. Had the U.S. attempted to evacuate all its allies before the capital fell, the initial stages of that effort would have almost certainly expedited the surrender of the Afghan security forces and thus, left many Afghans who worked with the U.S. in the same basic predicament they find themselves in now.
All of which is to say: Ascertaining how much of the heartache in Kabul today derives from imperfections in Biden’s withdrawal plan — and how much would have occurred under any plausible U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan — is no easy task.
It is also a task that the media has felt no obligation to undertake. Mainstream coverage of Kabul’s fall and its aftermath has been anything but circumspect. Attempts to weigh the benefits of America’s withdrawal (e.g., the humanitarian gains inherent to the cessation of 20 years of civil war) against its costs have been rare; attempts to judge Biden’s execution of that withdrawal against rigorous counterfactuals have been rarer still. Instead, ostensibly neutral correspondents and anchors have (1) openly editorialized against the White House’s policy; (2) assigned Biden near-total responsibility for the final collapse of the proto-failed state his predecessors had established; and then (3) reported on the potential political costs of Biden’s actions, as though they were not actively imposing those costs through their own speculations about just “how politically damaging” the president’s failures of “competence” and “empathy” would prove to be.
Some manifestations of media bias have been overt. Declan Walsh, the New York Times’ chief Africa correspondent (a reporting position, not an opining one) tweeted shortly before the Taliban’s final victory, “Jalalabad gone, only Kabul left. For those who lamented ‘forever wars’ — is the phrase anything more than a comforting cop-out for epic failures of policy and the imagination? — here’s what the end looks like.” It is difficult to read that statement as anything but open advocacy against U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, a policy supported by both the sitting president and a majority of the American public.
Meanwhile, Richard Engel tweeted Friday, “Biden says U.S. in constant contact with Taliban to get safe passage to airport. So, U.S. asking former enemy, the Taliban, to please allow us to get our people out while they take the country.” There were many ways that NBC News’ chief foreign correspondent could have characterized the news that Biden had secured the cooperation of Afghanistan’s reigning regime in the evacuation of U.S. citizens. He chose to portray it — dubiously — as a display of national self-abasement; in Engel’s account, Biden was “asking” an enemy to “please allow” Americans’ safe passage out of the country, as though the U.S. president were groveling at Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar’s feet, rather than threatening ruinous sanctions should harm come to U.S. nationals. This is the sort of commentary one expects from jingoists on right-wing radio, not high-ranking reporters at major networks.
At the same time, CNN’s chief foreign correspondent Clarissa Ward saw fit to present her own pessimistic hunches about the Biden administration’s future performance as established fact, reporting Friday, “I’m sitting here for 12 hours in the [Kabul] airport, 8 hours on the airfield and I haven’t seen a single U.S. plane take off. How on Earth are you going to evacuate 50,000 people in the next two weeks? It just, it can’t happen.” The U.S. evacuated about 21,600 in a 24-hour span between Monday and Tuesday; as of this writing, the U.S. has evacuated more than 82,300 people in the past 11 days.
Yes, it could have been done better but it also could have been a hell of a lot worse. Approaching nearly 100,000 Americans evacuated in less than two weeks is a major accomplishment, not a failure.
And this needs to be asked, because it sure as hell hasn't been questioned so far - the US has been openly stating over the last two years that withdrawal from Afghanistan would happen sooner, not later. The deal to leave, that Biden extended to August 31, was signed off on last year, not last month. So what in the hell are so many Americans, and other foreign nationals, still doing in Afghanistan when the official writing has been on the wall for months? Why in the hell is something like this happening:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/25/us/san-d ... index.html$1:
(CNN)Two dozen San Diego students and their families who traveled to Afghanistan this summer are now stranded in the country and unable to get to Kabul's airport, school and congressional spokespeople told CNN.
The six families stuck in Afghanistan were there to visit relatives, said Howard Shen, spokesperson for the Cajon Valley Union School District.
"There is not a whole lot we can do at this point," Shen said. "At least we have contact with them."
So they went there while the collapse of the Afghan military was already well in progress. But it's the fault of the US government that they're now in danger? Their own choices and actions are void of personal responsibility.
Bullshit. The US government and military are not at fault, not when some utterly delusional Americans have gone to Afghanistan on their own, quite willingly, and apparently deliberately ignoring what was happening there. Did these individuals, or American companies with employees over there doing the grand survey of Afghani mineral wealth they were planning to loot, think they were going for a nice walk through the backwoods of Denmark and not traveling of their own free will into one of the most dangerous countries on the entire planet?
Personal responsibility has to be taken into account at some stage - the government cannot be perpetually expected to rescue fools from their own stupidity.
CKA Moderator 
