Biden's Afghanistan mess may be worse than Britain's infamous retreat

[oeb11]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world...S07?li=BBnb7Kz
As the last American forces left Kabul, many pundits, especially those who wanted to paint the withdrawal as a success, drew parallels to the infamous British retreat from Kabul after the first Anglo-Afghan War.
© Provided by Washington Examiner MSNBC’s Rick Stengel said, "Here’s a disastrous withdrawal. When the British left Afghanistan in 1842, 4,500 troops left Kabul and one Englishman 11 days later arrived in Jalalabad. That was a disastrous evacuation." The Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s Simon Henderson repeated the analogy at the Hill. "A famous painting depicts William Brydon, a British surgeon and the only survivor, reaching the safety of Jalalabad," he writes.

While Henderson, unlike Stengel, is correct that the withdrawal was to Jalalabad and not out of Afghanistan entirely, he is wrong that Brydon was the only survivor. Notwithstanding, that is, Elizabeth Thompson’s 1879 oil painting, the late Peter Hopkirk’s flowing Great Game narrative, or the fictionalized account narrated by Flashman, the character made famous by the late George MacDonald Fraser.
While it is true that several thousand British soldiers, family members, and their camp followers departed Kabul, and only Brydon arrived in Jalalabad, he was not the only survivor. Several dozen British citizens survived the long march from Kabul, but they were taken hostage en route during the multiple hit-and-run attacks led by partisans of Dost Mohammad, the once and future Afghan king. Dost Mohammad was, at the time, the nemesis for British strategists who sought to prop up Shah Shuja and turn Afghanistan into an important piece of informal empire. (Prior to his death, Taliban propaganda likened Mullah Omar to Dost Muhammad and implied that post-Taliban Afghan Presidents Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani were like the hapless Shuja).
Over the next several years, Dost Mohammad’s forces ransomed off (and, in some cases, married off) his British hostages, much to the benefit of his treasury and to the continued humiliation of the British Empire. The retreat from Kabul would mark one of its worst military defeats, at least until the loss of Singapore a century later.
Herein lies the true parallel with Afghan history.
President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken left behind more than 100 Americans. The true figure may be much higher: No one has confirmed how the White House and State Department generated that number and are simply assuming its accuracy. National security adviser Jake Sullivan suggested the United States has leverage, although the only leverage it might have is the up to $9.4 billion in Afghanistan’s foreign reserves that American banks physically hold.
However, the disaster of the American withdrawal might be worse despite Stengel’s potted analogy or, separately, Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin’s effusive praise of the State Department’s efforts. There is a pattern not only in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen but also in Afghanistan where tribesmen and criminals kidnap foreigners for profit. Sometimes, as in 19th-century Afghanistan, they seek to ransom hostages themselves, but today, they also often sell them to transnational terrorist groups such as al Qaeda. While Biden, Blinken, and Special Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad differentiate between the Taliban on one hand and al Qaeda and the Islamic State’s Khorasan branch (ISIS-K) on the other, no American official has ever shown any evidence to suggest that the Taliban have disassociated themselves from such groups.
Simply put, as the White House seeks to turn a new page, it is likely that the Taliban will flip an old one: The Taliban will negotiate for as much of the $9.4 billion as they can get but will keep the pressure on Biden’s White House by selling American prisoners sporadically to groups that might make a spectacle of their execution. In that scenario, Washington spin will be irrelevant, as will Biden’s angry rhetoric and blame-shifting. The withdrawal was strategic malpractice. Leaving Americans behind was unforgivable, but what comes next could be even worse.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

minions won't read this - it is not consonant with their marxist revolutionary rhetoric/narrative
No additional comment needed
fiden , and LSM - Lie!

[ICU 812]

From the reading I have done over the years, my collection is that the British retreat from Kabul was a fighting withdrawal through the Khyber Pass. . . .a bit more like the Little Big Horn
in that casualties among the British troops and their civilian dependents were so heavy that very few survivors made it out at all.

The American withdrawal was, in my opinion, more like the British rescue at Dunkirk. . . .but so what?

I don't mean to quibble or be contentious. The OP is a serious presentation of the events in the 19th Century. However else we characterize it, the current events in Afghanistan are a debacle, a catastrophe . . .a dishonorable surrender of historic proportions. And the ramifications will continue to develop with bad outcomes for those on our side.

The duplicity of the US State Department in this is just beginning to be come evident, Ask Glen Beck.

This will be written about and analyzed by historians for a hundred years; longer probably. Whatever spin the Biden apologists put on it now in real-time will be excoriated 50 years from now by historians who have no interest in anything other than the unbiased truth.

[royamcr]

Trump surrended with the Doha agreement. Biden carried it out. We are largely done with Afghanistan. Trump said he defeated ISIS. Guess that was a lie, or is it ok now that it is called ISIS-K?

Trump may have never exited. The only way to make this exit less messy would have been to escalate the war before leaving. That may have even made things worse due to the cease fire in the agreement... Some pundits critize the Taliban "offering" Kabul to Biden. How were we going to secure a city of 4 million without escalating our presence by 1000s or 10000s of thousands. This all goes agains the exit strategy.

As for the 100s left, do they all want to leave? A lot have dual citizenship and live there for one reason or another. Don't be so quick to assume that they all want to leave. Some probably do now that the military actually pulled out. A lot probably stayed cause they thought it would never actually happen.

[Jacuzzme]

That’s such a bullshit excuse. biden went into office and reversed any Trump policy he possibly could, but his apologists pretend that this particular policy was set in stone because they botched the implementation. Trump’s withdrawal was conditional and based on prevailing circumstance. biden took nothing into consideration, tucked tail and ran completely haphazardly, arming up a terrorist state in the process.

[royamcr]

Those were domestic policies reversed, a little easier than negotiating with a terrorist state. We had 2 choices in Afghanistan, increase our presence and break the agreement or pull out. After 20 years it was time to go. The "Arms" were already there. We didn't give them more.

[rexdutchman]

But But Puddens an chief is gonna work it out with afghan,and the terrorist YEA OKAY its all good