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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 23-Aug-2021
23-Aug-21 World View -- The Afghanistan catastrophe

Web Log - August, 2021

23-Aug-21 World View -- The Afghanistan catastrophe

Biden says he is just following Donald Trump's policy

by John J. Xenakis

This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com

The Afghanistan catastrophe
Reconstitution of al-Qaeda and 'Over the Horizon' warfare
Resurgence of ISIS Khorasan (ISIS-K)
Biden says he is just following Donald Trump's policy
Generational Dynamics and the Democide Pattern
Using economic leverage against the Taliban

The Afghanistan catastrophe

Bitter, defiant President Joe Biden angry at non-compliant press coverage (Huffington Post)

Bitter, defiant President Joe Biden angry at non-compliant press coverage (Huffington Post)

The disastrous events in Afghanistan are still unfolding, so all we can do is summarize what happened, and make some guesses about what's about to happen. I will say that this situation has sickened and infuriated me more than any other article I've written.

Once President Biden made the decision to evacuate all American forces, he made a number of additional decisions, related to the execution of the evacuation, that turned out to the cause of the disaster. And these assessments are based on numerous analyses that I've heard on Fox News, MSNBC, the BBC and al-Jazeera.

The two worst decisions were the following:

Setting a "date certain" of August 31 when all American troops would be withdrawn, with no conditionality on the part of the Taliban.

Evacuating Bagram airbase on July 5, leaving behind billions of dollars in advanced weaponry, before American civilians had been evacuated from Afghanistan.

Analysts I heard agree that all civilians should have been evacuated first, then all the weapons should have been removed, and only then should Bagram airbase have been evacuated.

The most immediate results of these decisions are the following:

10-15,000 American citizens are left behind in villages and provinces across Afghanistan, with no credible plan to evacuate them. The same is true of the tens of thousands of Afghans who had worked for and aided Americans in the last 20 years, such as interpreters. Their lives have been threatened by the Taliban. The Americans will be used as hostages for years to com.

The 70,000 or so Taliban fighters are now flooded with some $85 billion in advanced American weaponry left behind, including: warplanes, drones, m16s, blackhawks, night vision goggles, 200 small aircraft, and advanced battlefield communications technology.

This was not just an American mission. It was a NATO mission. If you listen to the BBC, the Brits are heartbroken and furious at Biden for destroying the entire NATO mission without even consulting with the other countries. The Germans, French and British calling it the "biggest debacle in Nato's history," questioning whether Nato can survive. Biden did not consult with any of them in advance.

The disaster is compounded by the numerous lies that Biden told in the last two weeks, getting visibly angry and defiant whenever anyone challenges him. He said that Americans are free to leave the country, which is a lie. He said that America's allies approve of what he's doing, which is a lie. He said that he wasn't warned about a likely debacle by DoD and the CIA, which is a lie. He said that al-Qaeda is gone, which is a lie. He said that America has no further interest in Afghanistan, which is a lie. He said that girls and women will be safe, which is a lie. He said that it will be possible to control terrorism in Afghanistan with "over the horizon" technology, which is a lie. He said that he made no mistakes in the way he ordered the evacuation to be performed, which is a lie.

Biden responded to criticism by claiming that he had two choices: continue the war with more troops, or end the war. This was spin. He used this claim to deflect from the incompetency of the evacuation, and also, evacuating the troops was never going to end the war.

There's an increasing belief that Biden is so cognitively challenged that he is completely out of touch with reality, his presidency is a danger to the country. Unfortunately, his vice-president is not much better.

Reconstitution of al-Qaeda and 'Over the Horizon' warfare

Biden made several false claims -- that al-Qaeda was completely gone, that the mission in Afghanistan over the last 20 years had been accomplished, and that Afghanistan was no longer relevant to America.

The claim that al-Qaeda was gone was contradicted by a UN report that claimed that elements of al-Qaeda continued to exist in numerous provinces. Al-Qaeda have always been closely related to and a part of the Taliban, and analysts say that when the American troops have been withdrawn, al-Qaeda will reconstitute itself fully.

At that point, al-Qaeda will be back where it was 20 years ago -- having a safe haven in Afghanistan to use as a platform to launch international attacks on Europe, the Mideast and possibly America.

Jihadists from all over the world will be energized, and will come to Afghanistan for training.

Biden made vague claims that al-Qaeda terrorism can be prevented by "Over the Horizon" technology, which uses such things as drones to augment local intelligence. The problem is that all local intelligence has been pretty much destroyed.

Resurgence of ISIS Khorasan (ISIS-K)

There has been an ISIS branch in Afghanistan for some years, known as ISIS Khorasan (ISIS-K). This is a jihadist group in competition with al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and they pretty much hate each other. The importance of ISIS Khorasan is that they may decide to launch some kind of terrorist attack around Kabul to embarrass both the Taliban and the United States.

Biden says he is just following Donald Trump's policy

Biden has reversed one Donald Trump policy after another, causing one disaster after another for the country. Since Biden has become president, he has turned decision making over to millennials like AOC who are sabotaging America. The result is open borders, floods of illegal immigrants from dozens of counrties, spreading Covid and bringing jihadists into the country; changing us from an energy-dependent country to a country begging other countries for energy; massive street crime in cities across the country; and now this unmitigated disaster in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan is the one Trump policy Biden chose not to reverse, but did so in the most disastrous way possible. Biden claims that he was just implementing a decision to withdraw the troops that had already been committed by his predecessor, Donald Trump. But he did so in a way most likely to sabotage America. Trump has indicated that he would have made sure that the civilians and weapons were removed before the troops were removed, and that claim is credible since it's standard military procedure and is the policy used, for example, in the evacuation of Saigon in 1975. In view of this history, it's hard to explain Biden's decision to withdraw troops first was done other than intentionally to sabotage America, just as opening the borders, ending energy production and supporting street crime are apparently done purposely to sabotage America.

However, analysts claim that Trump's decision in March 2020 to evacuate was also delusional, and I agree with that, and I said so at the time.

I started writing about this in 2009, during the Barack Obama administration. President George Bush had executed a successful counter-insurgency operation in Iraq in 2007, driving out al-Qaeda in Iraq with a troop "surge." In 2009, I ridiculed Obama's announcement that he would try to duplicate Bush's success with his own "surge" in Afghanistan. ( "People are shocked! shocked! at Obama's war plan in Afghanistan. (06-Dec-2009)")

As I explained many times since then, Iraq and Afghanistan were fundamentally different, with the result that a "surge" would work in Iraq, but not in Afghanistan. I've written about this at length many times, but briefly, the fighters in the al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) insurgency were imported from Jordan and Saudi Arabia, while the fighters, in the Afghan insurgency were Pashtuns indigenous to Afghanistan. This is so simple and so obvious that it's unbelievable how stupid the people in Washington are not to understand this. The "surge" in Iraq sent the foreign fighters out of the country, while the "surge" in Afghanistan just sent them to other villages within the country.

Here's what I wrote in "16-Feb-20 World View -- US and Taliban to sign laughable 'reduction in violence' agreement in Afghanistan" in response to Donald Trump's agreement with the Taliban to withdraw American forces:

"Why the Afghan peace agreement must fail
Afghanistan's last generational crisis war was an extremely bloody, horrific civil war, in 1991-96. The war was a civil war, fought between the Pashtuns in southern Afghanistan versus the Northern Alliance of Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks in northern Afghanistan. The Taliban are radicalized Pashtuns, and when they need to import foreign fighters, then can import their cousins from the Pashtun tribes in Pakistan.
Indeed, it's much worse than that. The ethnic groups in Afghanistan are COMPLETELY NON-UNITED and loathe each other. Pashtuns still have scores to settle with the Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks that formed the Northern Alliance, especially the Shias. These opposing groups have fresh memories of the atrocities, torture, rape, beatings, dismemberments, mutilations, and so forth that the other side performed on their friends, wives and other family members, and they have no desire to be friends or to work together. They'd rather kill each other.
The above is a brief summary of stuff that I've written about in great detail in the past about why peace will fail in Afghanistan. It's not rocket science for the so-called "Washington experts," but it does require studying history and trying to understand what's actually going on in the world. But we live in a society where SAT scores have been plummetting for decades, ever since the Boomers graduated, and where all college courses are being taught by incredibly stupid Marxist idiots. People in the mainstream media know nothing about the world except Marxist sociology and women's studies. In Congress you have total idiots like AOC who says something every day to prove how stupid she is. And in the Administration, you have "experts" who have also graduated from colleges teaching Marxist sociology and women's studies.
So there's really no hope. The above summary is not rocket science, but it's far beyond the mental capabilities of the analysts, journalists and "experts" in Washington, almost all of whom are way too steeped in metoo and socialist garbage to have any clue what's really going on in the world. The same is true about many of the other hundreds of countries and societies that I've studied, analyzed and written about in the last 15 years. All the people in Washington can do is stumble in the dark, until they stumble into World War III. Then they finally learn what's going on. That's the way the world works.
"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography." -- Attributed to American satirist Ambrose Bierce, early 1900s."

If you read the above, you get some idea why I'm always right and the Washington experts are almost always wrong. The catastrophe going on in Afghanistan right now shows the result. I would add that you can also get some idea why being always right has never made me loved. It's brought me no joy, no money, but plenty of contempt. Generational Dynamics has been a curse on my life and has only brought me misery, as the ability to foretell the future did for the mythical Cassandra and the Biblical Jeremiah. I've been doing this for 20 years, and since I'm now age 77, I hope I won't be doing this much longer.

Generational Dynamics and the Democide Pattern

So now we can use some Generational Dynamics analysis to predict some patterns that we can expect to see in Afghanistan.

Regular readers know that I've written several times about the differences that depend on whether the preceding crisis war was an external war with another country versus an internal crisis civil war between tribes and ethnic groups. In the former case, when the war ends, the two armies each withdraw from the other country, and further contact between the populations is done diplomatically. But in the latter case, the two populations continue to live with each other when the war ends -- in the same country, the same villages and even on the same streets. This means that the hatred and the desire for revenge continue at a very personal level.

After a generational crisis civil war, the two sides are never really at peace. The losing ethnic group uses demonstrations and riots to attack the winning government, while the winning government uses violence and extrajudicial torture and jailing to control the losing group. I use the term "Democide Violence" to describe this violence by the winning ethnic group government against the losing ethnic group.

In the case of Afghanistan, we can expect to see this Democide Pattern played out by the Taliban against their enemies in the 1990s civil war -- the Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks that formed the Northern Alliance.

The Democide Pattern was extremely bloody in the late 1990s, following the 1991-96 civil war, when the Pashtuns committed massacres against the Hazaras in northern Afghanistan.

Those massacres ended with the defeat of the Taliban 20 years ago by Nato, but they may begin again. The Panjshir Valley in northern Afghanistan is a hotbed of the old Northern Alliance. The Taliban says that they are sending hundreds of fighters to the Panjshir Valley. This drama will unfold in the next few days and weeks.

In the past, the Taliban have been unable to subdue the Panjshir Valley because of its geography -- high mountains on three sides with a narrow pass on the fourth side. However, there is a difference this time because the Taliban will be armed with the advanced weapons that the Americans left behind. This will be the first major test of the Taliban's use of American weapons.

Using economic leverage against the Taliban

Biden is going to try to get the August 31 deadline extended. The Taliban have said that they will refuse to allow that, but Biden can use economic leverage. There $16 billion in Afghanistan Central Bank assets being held by the United States or by the IMF, and unfreezing these funds can be used as leverage.

However, this may cause the Taliban government to ask China or Pakistan for a temporary infusion of funds. It's not clear how all this will play out.

This may well end up being another humiliation for the United States. It is just one more example of how President Biden's evacuation of Afghanistan is, according to many analysts I've heard, the greatest foreign policy disaster since the end of World War II, and completely preventable.

In my opinion, the country is being led by an arrogant, bumbling fool for a president, and an arrogant, bumbling fool for a vice-president. This is an extremely dangerous time for all of us.

Sources:

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(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the Generational Dynamics World View News thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be posted anonymously.) (23-Aug-2021) Permanent Link
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