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【命运】
At least 69,000 Afghan soldiers, as well as 47,000 civilians, died in the conflict
 
 
 
（社论）History repeats itself in the tragedy of Afghanistan | Financial Times
Joe Biden’s miscalculation will haunt the rest of his presidency
THE EDITORIAL BOARD
 
 
 
【帝国的逻辑】
"The Taliban is a force in decline" says Major General Eric Olson, who conducted the U.S. military's counter-insurgency battle in Afghanistan until last month...What turned the tide? In a word, nation building."
"The Taliban on the Run", Time, 28 March 2005
沃尔特有自己的想法：
 
 
 
 
 
 
Luce
But as the president on whose watch the concluding fiasco took place, Joe Biden’s name will be indelibly linked to it.
he was partly elected on a promise to restore competence
“This comes as something of a body blow to Biden’s ‘America is back’ message. Everyone thought he was going to be different to Trump.”
 The first is the volume of US military equipment, The second is whether Biden ignored intelligence estimates suggesting the Taliban could recapture power on a far more rapid timeline than the six to 18 months the White House was saying. The third is Biden’s failure to consult fully with Nato allies
A US Army Chinook helicopter flight engineer sits on the ramp during a training exercise at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan
Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign affairs chief, told the European parliament that the departure was “a catastrophe for the Afghan people, for western values and credibility and for the developing of international relations”. Armin Laschet, Germany’s possible successor to Angela Merkel after September’s general election, described it as “Nato’s biggest debacle since its founding”. Even the reliably Atlanticist British failed to conceal their disappointment with an America that had failed to keep them abreast of the details of its pullout
The further the distance from Washington DC, which is split along fiercely partisan lines, the greater the blurring between Biden and Trump. “This looks like America First except that its officials can speak French,”（布林肯）
Biden’s foreign policy priorities are the three Cs — China, Covid and Climate
“The joke was that in 1989 the ISI defeated the Soviets with American help,” says Sarah Chayes, an Afghan expert who was a senior Pentagon adviser. “Now the ISI has defeated the United States with American help.”
“The question is has Biden learned from that episode?” asks Chayes. “I think the answer is probably no. He made up his mind on Afghanistan long ago.”这句话的意思是，撤军导致极端主义复苏、蔓延、壮大，最终把美国拉回去，这是（理性）主战派的立场
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
【崩溃前的黑暗】
 
 
【妇女】
 
【脸，面子】
Afghans attempt to climb onto US military plane
 
 
美国训练的军队是一支依赖美国在背后支持的军队，离开美国，所有武器、情报（侦察手段）、运动方面的优越性将会消失，阿富汗军和塔利班军只能面对面，枪对枪打，人数、地利和意志成了主要的因数。
western power was in a way absolute, overwhelming, but also very disconnected and superficial
It was so separated from Afghan society, that there were in fact two worlds: the world of Afghanistan, and the world of embassies and military bases. And they were not connected whatsoever
美国和西方一直生活在自己的一种幻觉之中，对外界的真实世界毫无感觉，也不屑去认识、感受
If you, during the last months, would tell the embassy staff, or NGO worker in Afghanistan: go out and click with the local people and understand them truly, they would laugh into your face. The idea that we could learn from Afghanistan was laughable to many of these people
Biden’s Afghan speech didn’t help. That he just said “Well...we'll go home.” Because if you want to be a superpower美国第一，拜登比谁都急
 
 
美军为了自己因毫无准备造成的慌乱撤退，把机场封闭，大部分占为己有，而阿富汗普通老百姓入地无门
 
Assurances Biden gave at a news conference on Friday about security around the Kabul airport were contradicted within minutes by network reporters on the ground — and later by his own administration
 
人从军机上掉下来，不是阿富汗人急、惨，而是美军无能制止
Ultimately what has to be said about Afghanistan is that if you are stuck in Kabul and being evacuated you are lucky to be French or German, Emirati or Indian - not American. That is new
 
A source tells me, “Situation [in Afghanistan] is rapidly deteriorating… We’ve had Americans get beaten throughout the night.” One of them, an American woman, was beaten “twice” even though she was carrying a U.S. passport.
 
这位发言人于是直接甩锅美国务院，说他们才是估计人数的部门，又说美国人出国不是都会登记，所以难以获得准确数字。18日，美军方承认目前军队行动范围仅限于机场，无法为散布在喀布尔的美国人开辟安全通道，让他们抵达机场撤离。
 
 
 
【崩溃】
 
 

 

They were slowly losing a war that Americans once overwhelmingly supported. Kagan was right
1. Afghan will follow one direction
2 "half hearted"?
3 US can change it
blaming it all on poor execution
no accountability
直接把美国的动机写在纸上
 
 
《阿富汗文件》一书摘要（一、二）
 
Behind the scenes: Senior U.S. officials privately express little confidence in the Afghan security forces, citing military incompetence, disorganization and poor communications skills rendering them unable to adequately coordinate U.S. air support to protect territory against the Taliban
美国人除了把锅甩阿富汗身上，也不问问自己，这20年自己干嘛了，
A Biden State Department spokesperson told Axios that Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. envoy, is in Doha, where the Taliban has its political office, to "press the Taliban to stop their military offensive and to negotiate a political settlement."
"If the Taliban continue down this path," the spokesperson added, "they will be an international pariah without support from the international community or even the people they say they want to govern."
美国反对派说，谈什么谈，制裁啊，好像那就行了
美国自己制造出来的，不能说是进步的一种尝试，但缺乏对后果考虑，在真正要承担后果时，退缩了
 
 
美国政府对阿富汗局势镇静自如，一切皆在“意料之中”，
he Taliban has also captured the country’s second and third-largest cities, Kandahar and Herat
“But senior U.S. officials are privately acknowledging that the Afghans appear psychologically defeated — and there was insufficient accounting for the psychological consequences of the long war”美国又找到借口了，“都想清楚了，就是这点忘了”
At the same time, Biden's diplomatic team in Doha, Qatar, was trying to talk sense into the Taliban. But events on the ground have made a mockery of the peace process
 

 

马赛尔斯：这次大逃亡揭露最深刻的美国政府的无能，从判断、决定上的无能到行动上的无能，美国政府可以高唱对台湾坚如磐石般的承诺，但一个无能的政府的承诺值几个钱？
 
美国政府真的无能吗？自然不是，但这就是“纸老虎”这个叫法的意思了，纸老虎在被捅破之前还是老虎，很厉害，
 
美国英国外长纷纷给王毅打电话（王毅找英国），未必是要求中国，但至少是去稳住中国，让中国别添乱，这就看出他们的被动地位
 
You know, not only soldiers but also all security contractors were forced to leave. And they took everything..even the software to operate airplanes..So when you see Biden saying, why don't Afghans fight..they are very much being prevented from doing so
But we expected empathy, strategy and wisdom from Biden. His messaging targeted Trump’s base, not rest of the world, and not allies, past or (we’ll need them) future
 
拜登在接受采访时话都说不清，在台湾问题踩雷，
 
【天亮】
 
 
Was he so determined not to be cowed by the Pentagon, as perhaps he felt Obama was, that he ignored warnings he should have heeded
主战派操纵了美国舆论
 
恳求
Reassurances From Taliban, but Fearful Afghans Look for the Exits - The New York TimesThe E.U. and NATO try to coordinate evacuations and limit refugee flows
 
 
 
印度：
 
 
杂乱无章，群龙无首，老鼠当道，越问回答越丢脸，防长说“不行啊，咱没这本事”
 
7月，其实这是废话，因为就一份报告，不能左右大局判断
 
不能不说美国这种开放是中国没有的，中国一个声音，是缺乏自信的最突出的反映
16 commanders of American or ISAF troops Afghanistan, ten commanders of CENTCOM, six Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ten Secretaries of Defense, two special envoys to the region, seven administrators of USAID, 11 Ambassadors Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, seven Secretaries of State, nine Directors of the Central Intelligence Agency, seven Directors of National Intelligence, ten National Security Advisors, five chairmen of the House Armed Services Committee, six chairmen of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and Select Committee on Intelligence, seven chairmen of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, their staffs, and several dozen secretaries, deputy secretaries, undersecretaries, deputy assistants, desk officers, station chiefs, and division or brigade commanders have directed this defeat. 2The war in Afghanistan is not the failure of a man, or even of a few men, but of an entire leadership class
 
 
这次大逃亡阿富汗精英都流落了
 
【灯塔派】
疯了
 
America in Kabul was distant, yet all-powerful
The editor responded that America had left, to which the official replied: “They have not left, they never leave, they are everywhere!”
What you have in Afghanistan is a country that has been under foreign rule for 20 years. I am always surprised that people think a country that has lost its independence can still have a strong state and be capable of addressing its own challenges
马赛尔斯：很多人忘了，阿富汗政府是傀儡，从来就没独立过，什么是屁事都得美国人点头，你还骂它不争气，它哪有什么气？
美国军队就是一支占领军，
 
 
 
【现实】
 in U.S. foreign policy, when the call sounds to “do something,” the outcry is unlikely to stop until the bombs drop
中国的冷酷和美国的黑心
They overwhelmingly support the president so far, after a decade of democratic rule has failed to put food on the table. A street vendor sparked the revolution by lighting himself on fire in 2011, but now young men self-immolate by the dozens each year.
一人是烈士，百人成街头景象
 
【几个月、几年前】
拜登从阿富汗撤军
中国傻帽，真的吗？
颂歌
2014
 
【数据】
 
 
Since 2001, the US has spent $2.26 trillion in Afghanistan, the Costs of War Project at Brown University calculates. The biggest chunk – nearly $1 trillion – was consumed by the Overseas Contingency Operations budget for the Department of Defense. The second biggest line item – $530bn – is the estimated interest payments on the money the US government borrowed to fund the war
 
Since 2001, the US has appropriated more than $144bn to Afghan reconstruction. Much of that money went to private contractors and NGOs the US government tasked with implementing programmes and projects to build Afghanistan’s security forces, improve governance, aid economic and social development and combat illicit drugs
 
was the $88.3bn spent training and equipping the Afghan army from May 2002 to March this year
 
For example, a 2017 report on US efforts to train Afghan security forces found that Washington’s “politically constrained” timelines “consistently underestimated the resilience of the Afghan insurgency” while overestimating the capabilities of Afghan government forces.
 
perpetuating Afghan dependence on US forces rather than creating an Afghan army that could stand and fight on its own
 
This is rank nonsense, and Biden knows it. The United States did not do enough—and even enabled the current onslaught.
The United States is begging the Taliban for assurances they will not attack U.S. personnel as Washington scrambles to evacuate its personnel, leaving its long-standing Afghan partners to fend for themselves as the Taliban hunt them and their families down.
The failure to create a functioning state was particularly catastrophic when it came to the Ministry of Defense and Ministry of Interior Affairs, which controls the police. From the beginning, the United States and NATO partners struggled to develop efficacious training programs. Training concepts and doctrines changed often as different parts of the recruiting and training mission came under different contractors and national oversight. The United States consistently sought shortcuts
which was more resource intensive and provided by contractors, training these militias was still dependent on contractors but less so. Americans tried to justify equipping militias by applying Afghan names to them, such as Arbaki,
 
The United States insisted on the country’s security architecture but has retrenched from its willingness to pay for it. Since 2014, Washington has provided about 75 percent of the $5 billion to $6
the U.S. Congress appropriated around $3 billion for Afghanistan’s fighting forces, the lowest amount since fiscal year 2008.
尽管美国的大部分支出与国防有关，但美国表面上投资于阿富汗治理的其他领域。截至6月30日，自2002财政年度以来，美国已为阿富汗的重建和相关活动支出了约1449.8亿美元的资金，其中886.1亿美元用于安全(包括46亿美元用于禁毒举措)；362.9亿美元用于治理和发展(包括43.7亿美元用于禁毒举措)；41.8亿美元用于人道主义援助；和159.1亿美元用于机构业务
Although these numbers are staggering, much of U.S. investment did not stay in Afghanistan. Because of heavy reliance on a complex ecosystem of defense contractors, Washington banditry, and aid contractors, between 80 and 90 percent of outlays actually returned to the U.S. economy
In many cases, U.S. firms even defrauded Afghans. In 2010, one military official with the International Security Assistance Force explained to New York Times journalist Carlotta Gall that “without being too dramatic, American contractors are contributing to fueling the insurgency.”
As the sham of peace talks faltered in March 2020, the Trump administration threated to withhold $2 billion in assistance if the Afghan government didn’t return to the negotiation table. Equally appalling, the United States forced the Ghani government to release more than 5,000 hardened Taliban prisoners in return for hundreds of government officials taken captive by the Taliban
 
What the US did with its $2.3Trillion in Afghanistan in 20yrs? The number of Afghans living in poverty has doubled, and the areas under poppy cultivation have tripled. More than one-third of Afghans have no food, half no drinking water, two-third no electricity - Ashok Swain
 
And the cost? Unimaginable. Incalculable. Or to put it more accurately, $2.261 trillion as of April, according to the Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs at Brown University
 Oh and Afghans killed, at least 150,000. (This all according to the AP.)
America supports and has deep affinity for the people of Taiwan but when it comes to military intervention over that island — with its Mandarin speaking population of 23 million, 100 miles off the coast of China — I actually hope Beijing is right
 
US troop levels in Afghanistan. 2002 - 2020. Chart showing US troop levels in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2019 2020 figure as of December.
Total civilian casualties in Afghanistan. 2009-2020. .
 
 
 
 
难民
Map showing con?ict-induced displacements in Afghanistan, by province of origin, Jan 1 to Aug 9 2021
 
美国坚持资金用在美式装备上，还有其他报道
 
Chart displays statistics on Afghanistan war deaths
 
 
美国“援助”并没有到阿富汗的又一证据
2022.01.01
 
【中国】
We have made-- kept every commitment. We made a sacred commitment to Article Five that if in fact anyone were to invade or take action against our NATO allies, we would respond. Same with Japan, same with South Korea, same with-- Taiwan. It's not even comparable to talk about that.
拜登为了挽回面子，公开说美国将捍卫台湾，不是说漏嘴了吧？这有代价吗？
Most Chinese counterparts I know are unclouded by any optimism about their capacity to transform Afghanistan. They harbor no ambition to run Afghanistan or to turn Afghanistan into a model of their own form of governance. Beijing is master only of its own interests in Afghanistan, which are predominantly animated by security concerns
 
Largest military exercises since Cold War come to Western Pacific as U.S. seeks to reassure allies of military commitments
 
 
 
背景：
阿富汗解放组织史略
 
 
【记者】
 
 
Vice President Kamala Harris smiles after introducing President Joe Biden.
美国副总统贺锦丽，最可笑的角色
 
做美国军机是要买路费的（后来好像美国政府否认）
一着不慎满盘输
 
CNN’s @clarissaward  in Kabul: “I'm sitting here for 12 hours in the airport, 8 hours on the airfield and I haven't seen a single US 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.”
 
 
【时间】
 
 
 
杨建利和美国自由派还真信这个。想杨建利这般死挺美国民主体制，将世界未来寄托在美国的不断完善至少，是可以理解的。撤军，拜登时做出了一个勇敢的决定。但近日阿富汗政府崩溃和美国人被塔利班踢屁股赶着逃走，全世界一边觉得不可思议一边看笑话的
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
没责任
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
塔利班实际上有优势，美国当前的驻军力量不足以与之抗衡，之前的和平是幻觉（calm status quo）
 
 
【杂】
阿富汗
美国又导演一出西贡大逃亡
 
美国乞求向塔利班放过美国大使馆
 
TIME Magazine Cover: The Taliban -- Dec. 17, 2001
2001.12.07
 
 
 
美国的“可信度”这一问题在美国也有激烈的争论，国防鹰派大多以“撤军即失去可信度”这一立场坚决反对撤军，支持撤军的阵营里，有的避免回答这一问题，说美国在阿富汗已经失败了，不承认只是否认现实，另一派又有两种说法，一是美国的可信度是建立在美国能不能认识自己的错误，有没有理智的判断之上，撤军就是反思、认错、接受现实的反应，所以反而
 
 
 
2020.11.02
 
《纽约客》）大牌记者格拉瑟（Susan Glasser）
 
He said this was if China was looking towards a "peaceful resolution of the conflict" and a "truly representative and inclusive" government
当美国自己都不能保证一个“有代表性”的政府的时候，布林肯这“如果”太奇葩
Effectively US is telling Afghan refugees to go to … a third country，These are Afghans who may be targets of Taliban violence due to their U.S. affiliations
 
 
 
 
 
 
Only one president has had the courage to do the right thing in Afghanistan. It is the same man who advised we do this in 2009 when he was Vice President. It takes courage because he knows that he will receive the critiques his opponents are heaping on him now
中国如果有以为能改造阿富汗的能力，那将是自掘坟墓。只有当塔利班主动、真挚、彻底恳求中国援助的时候，中国才应当谨慎地，有选择性的投资。现在已有的投资怎么办？答案：没多少
 
 
美国“人造国”宏图
 
 
被扶植的傀儡政府是在美军环境下邮寄产生的寄生虫，民主创业者（political entrepreneur）
 
When the Soviets left the Afghan government lasted 3 years before falling. This government may not even last 3 months. The US designed the Afghan state to meet Washington's counterterrorism interests, not the interests of Afghans, and what we see today is the result
 
 
记者
 
华邮：马上崩溃
萨奇：塔利班难道不担心自己的国际形象吗？
今天说只能帮几千，而且要其他国家“临时帮美国一把，安顿这些美国卖过命的阿富汗人，等美国忙过来之后，在转到美国”，大家对即使是这么一个许诺也都不信，不是美国忙不过来，而是美国中期选举，拜登不敢，过了以后谁说拜登不会推掉？
https://youtu.be/sf_oSh13zRM
欧洲人是美国人的傀儡、帮凶
美国一直不允许阿富汗政府有任何独立性，任何决定都是华盛顿或美军做出的
 
难民：欧洲就像多年前叙利亚难民一样，被美国耍了还没清醒
 
 
塔利班确实很黑暗，没人觉得塔利班禁止妇女外出参加社会活动可以接受，美国人千辛万苦要去解放阿富汗妇女也值得称道，只是现在她们马上又要被打入深渊，那这场实验到底是值得，还是一种幻觉驱使下无谓的冲动，谁也说不清。
 
 
David Sedney, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia under President Barack Obama, put it even more bluntly: “The lesson here is that nobody should trust the United States, whether it’s Ukraine or Vietnam or Taiwan or any country.”
 
一个月前
阿富汗
 
当时美军撤出，连阿富汗政府都没通知，就是军方对拜登露了一手，这个吐槽说得清楚
 
 
前两年的宁静给美国人一种只要美国人在，那怕是只有几个美国人，世界都能安宁，其实是塔利班有了撤军的时间表，不愿意无谓牺牲而已
 
 
“If things keep going this way, they’re risking a Saigon moment,” he said
 
阿富汗
 
 
 
鹰派，
 
 
事实只是塔利班的枪杆子吗，还是塔利班有群众基础？
 
 
拜登在阿富汗崩塌后发言
 
 
太晚了吧？
As Afghanistan unravels, European nations watch warily, worried about migrant flows
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
one intelligence assessment indicated that Kabul could be isolated by the Taliban within the week, possibly within the next 72 hours, but stressed that does not mean the militant group would enter the capital
 
 
 
 
 
 
Ghani & co fled to Uzbekistan or Tajikistan. Saw their helicopters flew out of Arg at 3:20pm. At Mohib’s residence in Arg, they left 3 land-cruisers full of dollars causing a fight among his guards while looting. I hope money is recovered. How much did they manage 2get away with?
 
 
 
 
They are also willfully not contextualizing questions like "how could the endgame have gotten this slipshod?" with the reality that the people charged with carrying out the Trump/Biden policy consistently opposed it and wanted the implementation to go badly
 
 
@EvansRyan202: There was no stalemate. The Taliban had been winning this war for many years.
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani left presidential palace without telling other political leaders; ‘He left them in the lurch’
That General Dostum is the type of person we supported in the Afghan government is part of the reason today's events are happening.
 
 
 
Lockheed Martin: 1,236%
Northrop Grumman: 1,196%
Boeing: 975%
General Dynamics: 625%
Raytheon: 331%
 
 
 
 
 
 
【补充】
 
The Afghan state is not so much collapsing before our eyes as revealing itself as a fiction.
1) U.S. officials obscured/hid evidence of deep-rooted corruption, low morale & even “ghost soldiers/police” who existed merely on payrolls
2) too much focus was given to preparing the Afghan army to repel a foreign conventional army rather than a home-grown insurgency like the Taliban.
嘴上都是主义，心里全是生意”
 
【新】
小布什一句话：“他们恨我们民主，他们是自封的；他们恨我们自由；恨我们宗教自由；恨我们言论自由；恨我们的投票、集会自由，不同意见的自由”，一代人带着理想踏上了圣战的征途。20年后，但
 
 
 
美国轰炸把阿富汗变成、逼成敌人
“At first, there was no support for the Taliban,” says Mullah Omari, a Taliban military commander who currently serves in Day Mirdad. “It was when the Americans started killing civilians that people started supporting us, giving us food, bullets, and offering men.”
 
 
楔子
The Americans, meanwhile, were suffering their own delusions
On the Friday afternoon before Kabul fell, the White House was starting to empty out, as many of the senior staff prepared to take their first vacations of Biden’s young presidency
Saturday evening Kabul time, Ghani and Blinken spoke by phone. Hoping to avert a showdown in the capital, Blinken sought Ghani’s support for a U.S.-brokered arrangement with the Taliban in which the militants would remain outside Kabul if the Afghan leader would step aside
For the United States, the scope of defeat was total
At the State Department, top brass, including Wendy Sherman, Blinken’s deputy, and Victoria Nuland, undersecretary of state for political affairs, were frantically calling foreign ministers to ask them to help with evacuation efforts and to coordinate a statement signed by 114 countries urging the Taliban to allow safe passage for evacuees. This, they realized, would be a historic evacuation effort
 And I knew — everyone here knew — that an era of hope, however uneven and misplaced, was about to end
the Taliban are touting the fact that beyond the airport, casualties of war — not long after 50 to 100 people a day were being killed — are now close to zero.
 some who were deployed to Afghanistan have died by suicide over the last few turbulent weeks.8月14日，死因未知
to check in on their mental health and see how they were handling the fall of Kabul.
很多中学毕业就去参战的年轻人一生成长期就是阿富汗，这目的没了，空的，假的，人生的价值也就没了
Many veterans have been questioning if their service was all for nothing and whether their friends lost their lives in combat in vain. Many others are grappling with numbness—anger, with the idea that the U.S. military has abandoned the very Afghans they were deployed to protect for nearly two decades
a generation of writers, reporters, foreign policy hands, think tank denizens and more became deeply identified with these missions
These are people who look more fully at the costs of war, human and otherwise, who think seriously about what we are trying to accomplish as a country in these various engagements
"who hate admitting to themselves that the mission they’ve committed their adult lives to has been a miserable failure"
 
From its inception in 2001 to its ignominious end, the U.S. war in Afghanistan has been defined by lies.
Perhaps the best thing about the Taliban advance over the past few weeks was that local officials didn’t resist it, thus sparing the population further violence
In 2019, the Afghanistan Papers proved that the U.S. government had been lying about the war’s progress for years. But in our hyperreal time, no one really seemed to care, least of all American citizens who didn’t directly suffer the consequences of their nation’s imperial adventures
美国巨大的代价是全社会承受的，而不是某一个政治家，也不是军人，更不是谋士或军火商。这就是美国民主，大家不愿意打仗，但大家一开始上上下下权力支持侵入阿富汗，之后政客们和精英们就以民主的名义串改了原来的目标，把全国带上一条灾难之路
We are not, as Madeleine Albright infamously affirmed in 1998, the “indispensable nation” able to “see further than other countries into the future.”
since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that the U.S. can use its overwhelming power to reshape foreign nations along American lines. This project has failed time and again, and will do so in the future.
For the past two weeks, I’ve worked alongside an ad hoc group of veterans, journalists and activists with connections to Afghanistan who are trying to coordinate the evacuation of not just our Afghan friends but also strangers
Never have I witnessed a greater, swifter collapse of competence than what I have seen with the U.S. evacuation of Afghanistan
empathy and service. Events in Afghanistan this week indicate this promise was, at worst, false and, at best, limited大家真信
Mr. Biden showed no contrition for his administration’s policies, which have sentenced tens of thousands of our Afghan allies to life under the yoke of the Taliban. This is an oppressive, barbaric regime that has shown no respect for the rule of law, no respect for women’s rights. There is no Taliban 2.0.
It shouldn’t fall to our service members to clean up the mess made by this catastrophic withdrawal.
What is the value of service? How can the Biden administration claim to know, when it seems so willing to squander that value in pursuit of ill-laid plans?
 
the George W. Bush administration chose to reformulate the mission in terms of a systemic transformation across the region as the sine qua non of victory
U.S. power was applied to transforming cultures, a near-impossible goal whose ancillary consequences had never been fully considered.
 to abandon fashionable post-Cold War shibboleths about “institutions trumping culture and history” that have shaped our strategic decisions since
 
“Tomorrow the Taliban will start surrendering their weapons,” the Taliban’s spokesman, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, announced on Dec. 7, 2001. “I think we should go home.”
But the United States refused the group’s surrender, vowing to fight on to shatter the Taliban’s influence in every corner of the country.
By the end of that decade, the United States had backed itself into a mission at odds with itself: to impose a new order from the top-down while seeking to destroy a group — the Taliban, representing a crucial rural Pashtun constituency — that was building its own from the bottom up
In essence, the United States was trying to enforce a lasting peace between Afghanistan’s factions while standing in the way of reconciliation with one of the most important ones
But the United States rejected that model from the outset, refusing even the Taliban’s modest terms of surrender: that its leader be allowed to return home after fleeing to Pakistan
That system was foreign to many Afghans, in some cases displacing local, traditional institutions.
It was the era of counterinsurgency, in which American-led troops would pacify an area by force, install an outpost of the central government, then wait for locals to embrace the new order
美国要按自己的模式重新塑造阿富汗，是一种强加在上的方式，自上而下，而且要融合这个社会，而一个社会要变，要改，必须由下而上，塔利班代表着一股底层的势力，把塔利班排除在外，一是与合理的由下而上的方式对立，而是自然排除了一大部分人，是个自身的矛盾
 
It was autumn 2013 and I was on a Nato-organised trip
assurances of the success in securing Lashkar Gah were accompanied by a categorical refusal to allow us one foot outside the British wire
“胜利”一直是一种“信念”，而不是事实
At Camp Shorabak, we were taken to see Nato’s mission to train Afghan soldiers in the use of the new and alien US weaponry that Congress had compelled them to adopt under the influence of the US military-industrial complex
步枪：阿富汗熟悉苏制冲锋枪，但美国一定要兜售美国产品
In each doorway stood a Georgian soldier in full body armour, holding an automatic rifle poised with the safety catch off, the Caucasian nation displaying its eagerness to join Nato through its readiness to shoot our Afghan allies on the spot if they made a move to attack their teacher
For far too long, far too many western officials and journalists convinced themselves of the absurd line that the Taliban was simply a creation of Pakistan without deep roots in Afghanistan, and that their ideology was alien to Afghan tradition
 
7月初已经秘密进入喀布尔了，4月开始渗透
It was the ultimate victory over America’s high-tech military, whose air surveillance proved powerless against this army of pedestrians and motorcyclists
The grumblers of today were themselves involved in this debacle, the most expensive act of self-deception of the century so far
 
The term self-deception isn’t often used in its plural form, but it should be in the case of Afghanistan. The misconceptions from the West started at the very beginning of the intervention, when Washington thought the military would be sufficient to pacify the country, to the end, when Berlin was still asserting that it would only take just a bit longer to reverse the situation. Another fallacy was the assumption that a nation could be built and protected if enough money was invested and enough training undertaken. The Afghans, too, were guilty of self-deception, with the government and a large share of the population believing for two decades that the U.S. would never pull out.
 
The UN Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1368, legitimizing the coming attack as an act of self-defense.
 
It hadn’t been self-defense at all, but a planned attack...If you couldn’t defeat the Americans, you could apparently use them for your own purposes.清除异己
"The moment when U.S. Special Representative Zalmay Khalilzad brought back the warlords." They were the men who had destroyed the country in the earlier civil war, but who had helped the U.S. government of Bush
一开始就不是“民主”，而是一个犯罪集团，塔利班反而是揭竿而起，为民除暴的义士
When a new police chief was then appointed and he established a regime of horror in Kunduz, beating farmers and destroying their market stands when they didn’t pay sufficient protection money, the German troops stood by ...
By then, Germany and the U.S. had invested so much capital, both financial and political, that they had become hostages of their own project不能丢脸啊，要干下去
Washington, he said, didn’t want to expose Karzai.
 
This narrative of foreign occupation was so useful that it was deployed by the Taliban and the Afghan government alike
wanted to buy peace in the provinces under their control. They contracted construction projects and sponsored local media outlets ...
 "We have never really believed in anything," says the old militia leader Hadji Jamshid in the north, who already fought against the Taliban 25 years ago. "They fought for the wrong thing. But damn it, they’re prepared to die for it. We aren’t."
 
Most pressing, though, could soon be the question as to how the Taliban can rule at all. Already, several million Afghans are dependent on food aid from the World Food Program. Western Afghanistan is currently suffering under the worst drought it has seen in a decade. The state coffers are empty and the central bank’s assets are largely stored outside the country, where they are inaccessible. Whether the West likes it or not, if aid deliveries are not made and assistance is not provided to the country’s health-care facilities, many people will die
Soon, the humanitarian situation may force the West to do something it spent the last 20 years trying at all costs to avoid: Support Taliban rule in Afghanistan
 
New documents prepared for Congress by the Defense Department show the total number of all kinds of contractors in Afghanistan has dropped by more than half in the last three months from almost 17,000 as of April to only 7,800 this month, with fewer than 2,700 Americans among them
The number of logisticians and maintainers has also more than halved from 5,500 in April to 2,150 now
Some are flying out of Bagram Air Base, a monster American stronghold once home to 40,000 military personnel and civilian contractors at the peak of the war here. Today, there are 3,300 U.S. troops in the entire
Contractors are a force both the U.S. and Afghan governments have become reliant on, and contracts in the country are big business for the U.S. Since 2002, the Pentagon has spent $107.9 billion on contracted services in Afghanistan
 
war on terrorism
 
Congress gave $2.02 trillion to the top five weapons companies — Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Boeing and Northrop Grumman — between 2001 and 2021
 
The single biggest generator of corruption was the U.S. military’s sprawling supply chain. The Pentagon paid Afghan and international contractors to deliver between 6,000 and 8,000 truckloads of fuel, water, ammunition, food and other supplies to the war zone each month.
THE AFGHANISTAN PAPERS
A SECRET HISTORY OF THE WAR
The single biggest generator of corruption was the U.S. military’s sprawling supply chain. The Pentagon paid Afghan and international contractors to deliver between 6,000 and 8,000 truckloads of fuel, water, ammunition, food and other supplies to the war zone each month.
 
Transportation costs were exorbitant. Most convoys had to travel about 900 miles from the nearest seaport at Karachi, Pakistan, to reach the main Khyber Pass border crossing at Torkham. Then they had to cross patches of hostile Afghan territory to reach U.S. bases scattered throughout the country.
 
A convoy of 300 trucks typically required 500 armed guards as basic protection. On top of that, trucking companies paid fat bribes to warlords, police chiefs and Taliban commanders to guarantee safe passage through their turf. A 2010 congressional report called the system “a vast protection racket” that was underwritten by U.S. taxpayers.
 
My wife was the corporate director of quality for a US contractor with construction work in Afghanistan. I can tell you that this is absolutely true. ?@Sarah_Chayes?
 
 
号召继续下去
揭露本质
 
真实情况
For two decades, American leadership on the ground and in Washington proved unable to take in this simple message
when, in 2011, an interagency process reached the decision that the U.S. would not address corruption in Afghanistan
Cronyism, rampant corruption, a Ponzi scheme disguised as a banking system, designed by U.S. finance specialists during the very years that other U.S. finance specialists were incubating the crash of 2008. A government system where billionaires get to write the rules
Pakistan
Hamid Karzai
 
 
 
 
One: For 20 years, politicians, elites and D.C. military leaders lied to us about Afghanistan
Two: What happened last week was inevitable, and anyone saying differently is still lying to you
 
 
武装承包商抱怨利润受损
 
 
 
Almost everyone else in Washington seemed determined to fight not just one but several “endless wars” and do so, well, endlessly.
Mark Milley, were appalled. This was not the way to conduct policy—with no consultation, no input, no process for gaming out consequences or offering alternatives.”
“你不能这样，政策可不是这么定的，不行。不征求意见，不商量，不考虑后果，不考虑其他方案。怎么行！”
 who had repeatedly thwarted the commander in chief’s demands over four years.
had become convinced that the Pentagon was working against him, boxing him into staying in countries that he broadly viewed as terrorist‐?filled gas stations in a desert
When I visited Afghanistan a decade ago, some officers were refreshingly candid, but only when we were talking informally, without their superiors present
不过，他们预测对了，是不是故意捣乱？
They painted a vivid picture of Kabul falling to the Taliban if U.S. forces withdrew precipitously in the final days of the Trump presidency. In previous conversations with Trump, they had raised the specter of Saigon in 1975, where images of American helicopters evacuating people from rooftops as the North Vietnamese took control of the capital city would become engraved in the historical record of the Vietnam War. The unsubtle warning: This would be Trump’s legacy if he rushed to the exit.
 
The first 20 years of America’s occupation of Afghanistan cost, by one estimate, 241,000 lives (including 2,448 U.S. troops and 71,000 civilians)
To assess the withdrawal, mainstream media go to the ‘experts’ who were wrong or lied about the war for the past 20 years
 
2013
“The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan,” one American official said, “was the United States.”
 
参见【现实】【数据】里的
 
美国在为不行丧命的几位士兵哀悼，在为美国的冒险反省，但没人为几十万在美国这场被夺去生命的阿富汗人花费几秒钟，这正是帝国的逻辑。这次撤离，美军有再次使用无人机阻击自杀勇士，而且是在居民区，伤害的平民更多，大部分是儿童
Update: US military says bomb in car bomb blown up by drone strike in Kabul may have killed others.
Local officials say five or six civilians, including children, were killed.
Capt. Bill Urban of CENTCOM: "We would be deeply saddened by any potential loss of innocent life."
 
崩溃，瘫痪了的拜登当局
面子
谎言
阿富汗的苦难
From 2001 to 2014 the Afghan forces suffered 14,000 dead, but from 2015 to 2020 an estimated 45,000 were killed. While the US has suffered just under 2,500 combat deaths in Afghanistan since 2001, they lost 93 servicemen from 2015 to 2020. The Kabul airport casualties were the first US combat deaths in Afghanistan since February 2020
With the exception of its special forces, its morale plummeted when western logistical and military back-up was suddenly withdrawn, leaving forces spread widely, isolated and unable to move casualties out and supplies forward
But for Biden to pass the buck to ordinary Afghan soldiers is dishonourable. If anyone is to blame, it is not them. Rather, it is a tribute to their bravery that despite such poor leadership
Further, Biden’s story that US forces were in Afghanistan to “establish a democratic government” is inaccurate. Since at least 2014, the role of US forces there, who by 2020 numbered only 2,500, was simply to act as a backstop for the Afghan forces, not to nation build. With that relatively modest military commitment acting as a keystone, the Afghan army had been able to contain a well organised and well-funded Islamist insurgency
 
 
美国一直是阿富汗这腐朽、金玉其外败絮其中，充满普世价值的庙宇的缔造者和维护者
Those interviews reveal there was no consensus on the war’s objectives, let alone how to end the conflict.
(1) Year after year, U.S. officials failed to tell the public the truth about the war in Afghanistan
“The strategy became self-validating. Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible.”
The Lessons Learned interviews contradict years of public statements by presidents, generals and diplomats. The interviews make clear that officials issued rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hid unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable
(2) U.S. and allied officials admitted the mission had no clear strategy and poorly defined objectives
意思是，不知干什么，于是找借口，接着待下去
（3） Many years into the war, the United States still did not understand Afghanistan
were destined to fail because they were based on flawed assumptions about a country they didn’t understand.
（4） The United States wasted vast sums of money trying to remake Afghanistan and bred corruption in the process
drenching the destitute country with more money than it could absorb. There was so much excess that opportunities for bribery, fraud and corruption became limitless
 
 
帝国机器
 
残酷
 
故事，没什么价值
 
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来源: 文学城-笨狼
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