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Because in August you can still more or less drive freely in Afghanistan, and in February you can't because the mountain passes are still snowed in.
Due to the elevation, topography, and regional climate, the term 'fighting season' in Afghanistan was literal, not just figurative. Fighters would literally drive / ride / walk out of Afghanistan before the winter snows, because if they didn't before they were liable to be unable to (or risk death if they tried, because no help is coming on those roads or in those passes). Civilization basically shuts down, and while there is no hard dates, the fighting season is typically over in October and doesn't start again until March-April, once the passes free of snow and you can get people in
In turn, this made the summer season an escalating tempo, as more reinforcements / seasonal fighters would enter the country, prepare for major attacks in the country, and so on. Typically the there would be a peak during whatever the last major islamic holiday was of the fighting season- basically islamist theology that virtuous actions are holier then- and then the tempo would fall off as militants began to move out for the winter.
In 2021, when Afghanistan fell in August, the offensives that started building the pressure were basically timing to such religious holiday offensives. Specifically, while Kabul fell on 15 August, in 2021 that was 3 days before the Day of Ashura, a week after the Hijra, Islamic new year, and Eid-al-Adba, was 20 July, less than 4 weeks before.
Put another way- the Taliban took over in the middle of a series of obvious, typically, and routinely foreseen religious holiday offenses at the height of the fighting season. These offensives were going to occur because they'd occurred yearly for the previous decade, almost two. The offensive was as fast as it was because you could literally drive from a village that had just flipped to the next village, with the village leader who flipped, and make the point that if he flipped, maybe you should to, and anyone who was familiar with Afghan tribal / clan based politics could have told you the implications that had- which were forewarned more than once.
In the original Trump-era plan, the plan was for the US forces by 1 May 2021. Since the American troops don't literally board the plane the last day, but typically do so over weeks and months, the actual pullout would have been in the preceeding months. That means March and April on the final combat units, before the fighting season is in full swing, and January February for everyone else, still in the winter lull.
Which is to say, the Americans would have stayed in force for the climax of the last fighting season, had an uncontested winter non-fighting season to withdraw in good order, and have the opening months of the first fighting season (March/April) to make a decision of re-surging if necessary before a major Taliban offensive could get the people and material in-country for a country-wide offensive.
That, in turn, would have given the western leaders who wanted to more time to decide to send in a relief force to secure Kabul, rather than be overtaken by events on the ground, and given the Afghan government a gradual escalation of enemy activity rather than a sudden shock of attacks everywhere. Because the situation would have taken longer to unfold, the nature of the system shock that enabled / incentivized the domino cascade would have differed, in part because, again, you couldn't just drive from Pakistan to Kabul.
Kabul might still have fallen, but it would have taken considerably longer without the political cascade effect, and most notably well after the Americans had mostly withdrawn, without the Taliban able to claim the momentum of an uncontested crescendo.
In the Biden plan, which became a thing because Biden tried to abandon the Trump plan but then wasn't able to secure another full year for withdrawal, the Americans withdrew in the middle of the fighting season. Which, of course, the Taliban knew, and the Afghan government knew, and all the tribals elders knew. This, in turn, set the conditions for the sudden offensive shock that saw the rapidity of the cascade we saw in history, as American forces ceased combat support operations in preparation for the multi-month pullout process.
What this also did was mess with the coalition evacuation plans. Up to the year before, the plans to leave Afghanistan if necessary relied on using Bagram Airfield, the major American military airbase in the capital. As long as the US was in Afghanistan, it was the safest / most defensible / easiest to access route for any entry or exit movement. When it was abandoned- because of the summer pullout schedule- various states and organizations hadn't actually updated their plans on how to leave Kabul. Which left Kabul airport, with the results you saw of the American airborne basically flying in to occupy from the inside while the Taliban controlled the gates, rather than having American and their Afghan partners at the guard points.
Further, the nature of the speed- and thus shock- is what led to the American embassy implicitly burning all its Afghan personnel records in the 'burn it all / don't let anything get captured' continency that most warzone embassies have. Except... in part because the embassy hadn't actually had to follow through on the evacuation according to the earlier timetable, the US Embassy in Kabul was the only location with the various documents such as the pre-approved visas for Afghan partners who were intended to be pulled out last moment. Which were supposed to be what cleared Afghan friends and partners to get on the planes to get out.
So when those went into the burn pit, you had literally nothing distinguish -person who helped US soldiers for decade at great risk to themselves- from -person who sees opportunity to get into US / flee the Taliban-. Which is how you got the stories of afghans calling American soldiers they worked with years ago, who called actively serving soldiers at the airport, to guide people to sneak in side doors, using nothing but 'I know a guy who knows a guy' levels of trust and coordination.
Because the partner document packets were burned in a panic that wasn't necessary.
Because the Embassy thought it was going to be overrun in an offensive that wouldn't have been possible 6 months earlier or later.
Because the Embassy thought it had several more months to get around to dispersing the documents because Biden pushed the pullout date back to the end of the fighting season.
Because anything but Trump was the order of 2021, and after his election in 2020 Biden was signaling he was going to redo the pullout (but was 'convinced' not to by his opposite negotiators).
Because Biden wanted a big ceremonial 9-11 anniversary rather than an unceremonious pullout that would have been a minor political critique in his first year.
I, too, approve of actually getting out of Afghanistan. I don't think that was a mistake. I even think biting the bullet and accepting the humiliation was the correct move. History would be significantly different had Biden doubled-down, and had a major military force in Afghanistan when Russia invaded Ukraine.
What reason would you need to see to convince you that the military was simply compliant as opposed to maliciously compliant, particularly for an order to withdraw at a date that practically guaranteed bad order in pursuit of domestic political advantage?
The American military was not responsible for the decisions to re-adjust the military pullout to the middle of the fighting season. They were not responsible for the decision to handover Bagram, the main military airbase to be used for emergency evacuation plans, or the timeline to do so. They were not responsible for the decision by the Embassy to destroy partner national documentation, or to only have the copies literally in Kabul. They weren't even responsible for sending the airborne to into Kabul airport at the end, where the world then got to see Afghans falling to their deaths off of military aircraft.
And I do not even believe those were all bad decisions to make. Once the offensive was clearly racing forward, embassy purge was not an unreasonable choice to make. Having already given up a military airbase, a civilian airport is not the worse substitute. The Afghan pullout, as much as it is remembered as a shameful defeat, was an unprecedented logistical effort that, coincidentally, got a lot of people- including non-Afghan partners- safely out of Afghanistan when the Taliban took over. Many of the ISAF partners were in more or less the same boat of having no backup plan to Bagram, because they, too, thought ISAF would have time to muster a relief force.
But the Biden administration, including Biden himself, made a significant number of political decisions with easily predictable- and predicted- consequences that led to those reasonable-in-context decisions. Consequences that- had the administration struck to the start-of-the-fighting season pullout- would have substantially reduced the various costs, reputational and otherwise, to the americans in general and to the Biden administration in particular (which certainly did itself no favors by claiming no one warned them and claiming that a 9-11 anniversary just happened to be necessary for a well-ordered pullout).
Thanks you for the effortful post, and Jesus Christ on a cracker, what a mess.
This is not an easy question to answer. Complicated opaque processes require trust, and if trust is broken, you're left with a question of balance between false positives and false negatives in your oversight.
First, it's worth pointing out that, at least in my view, trust has been broken here. The DoD is a bureaucracy, with all the attendant moral hazard that label implies. We know they can be incompetent. We know they cover their incompetence when they can. We also know they can be malicious: we have the papers out of Afghanistan showing that DoD leadership was lying to the public for two decades, and we have numerous examples of them lying to Trump to circumvent his direct orders, and even bragging about it publicly.
More abstractly, at some point, "never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence" ignores the fact that malice is easily disguised as incompetence in a complex, opaque environment, and also the fact that sufficiently advanced incompetence is isomorphic to malice, and the DoD over the last few decades has, in my view, cleared this bar.
There's been several threads of discussion above about the DOGE versus USAID; one side of those threads is "why not just do cuts in an orderly fashion?" The answer that keeps emerging is "we don't trust the bureaucracy to cooperate in good faith, so it is better to treat them as hostile and simply cut everything." You seem amenable to that explanation. If I asked you "what would convince you that USAID is simply compliant rather than maliciously compliant", what would your answer be?
Or maybe it's a bit simpler. If someone can present a DoD planning document stating "if you issue these orders, here are the negative consequences", and Biden signed it saying "do it anyway", that would be a pretty open-and-shut case of this being Biden's fault. Only, I'm pretty sure that document doesn't exist.
Further, reading through the description you've provided, I find a lot of the items seem to simply kick the can down the road. Okay, the Taliban has a known fighting season. We could have avoided the known fighting season, but that's been scotched. But by your explanation, what happens next should be predictable, which means our extraordinarily-well-resourced DoD should adapt to the change in circumstances. That adaption doesn't appear to have materialized. I understand that the enemy gets a vote, that the DoD and our military personnel are also human, that morale on the very end of a twenty-year mission was probably not high, and that requests for additional resources for an operation explicitly aiming at reducing resources to zero is not going to work well. All of these are plausible forces pushing against success.
But at the end of the day, our military's job is to take a mission assigned and execute it done with a high degree of professionalism, and that very evidently did not happen here. To the extent that constraints complicate matters, it is their job to work the problem and deliver a solution. To the extent that the mission was simply not possible within the given constraints, they need to say so (and I don't expect they actually will; Yes-Manning seems to be endemic throughout the officer corps of at least the army and navy, from what I've observed.)
Likewise with the paperwork. Why is all this paperwork being kept in an office in Afghanistan? We have telecommunications. There were no backups in Washington? Those backups weren't integrated into the bugout plan? There was no way to keep this important data other than in paper files in a cabinet in Kabul?
I am not inclined to hold Biden accountable for the outcome because he is neither a tactician nor a strategist nor a bureaucracy expert. I can readily believe he imposed restraints: get out of Afghanistan by one year from now, in time for the 9/11 anniversary. A year is a pretty damn long runway for an event that should have been pre-planned in detail twenty years ago. If there was not a plan on a shelf for this eventuality, that seems like a failure on the part of the planners. What if an actual hot war kicked off, and we needed to pull our forces out of Afghanistan not in a year, but by the end of this week? There was no plan for that?
And again, I appreciate that hindsight is 20/20, and it's all very easy for me to say, having never been involved in the un-invasion of Afghanistan. But I don't actually trust the DoD, and that lack of trust arises from what seem to me to be sound reasons. If I'm expected to blame political leadership, I want a paper trail of explicit warnings that the leadership explicitly ignored and efforts to compensate that the leadership explicitly overruled. If the system is, as I suspect, built more or less entirely around preventing such things from existing, well, that's one more reason why I don't trust it, and why you shouldn't either.
Alternatively, maybe that paper trail does exist, in which case I'll be happy to update.
Why not? It's not like the undertones of what the Congressional Research Service was writing about in 2019 were very subtle, or the military inputs to them even in the contexts where they have to take a position of supporting the President of the time.
If others are less familiar with bureaucratic speak, 'we are in a stalemate with current support' is non-code for 'and things will get worse if we no longer support.'
As politely as I can, two of those three qualities are rather fundamental job elements for the job the man in question took quite a lot of effort to secure.
As the President of the United States, Biden was literally the signature authority of American strategy. In fact, the Biden administration made a very deliberate point of releasing their own interim strategy within two months of entering office, just so Biden would have his own strategy in place before the normal strategy process took its usual timeline to produce.
As the Chief Executive, Biden was, in fact, the master of the bureaucracy. Moreover, before entering office Biden had been a career senator with decades of experience in the development of laws and oversight of the executive branch, including the quite significant Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. He was arguably the most President with the most experience of the Federal government politics of the last 25 years, not least because he had literally spent the better part of a decade helping a previous president manage a bureaucracy.
It's fine if you don't blame Joe Biden for being a tactician, unless you mean that in both the military and political tactics sense. A military tactician is not part of being the President, and it wasn't the sort of mistake that made the pullout a mess. Those were very much strategy and inter-governmental bureaucratic issues, which were precisely the job of the Commander in Chief and Chief of Executive- Joe Biden- to perform. (And Trump, of course- but, again, Trump's setup would have been a significantly different mess for Biden than what ended up happening.)
Okay, but who do you think plans for the evacuation of the embassy? Or the other countries? Or for the immigration processing for thousands of foreign nationals?
You repeat in your post that you don't trust the American Department of Defense. Sure- I'm not trying to argue that you should. But when you raise issues like these, it makes it sound like you believe that the American military is the part of the US government responsible for planning and handling a lot of things that the military isn't actually responsible for in any non-military-dictatorship that I can think of.
That is why- for rhetorical effect, not as a challenge against you or for you to actually answer- I am going to repeatedly ask what you think the DoD should have done about various issues you and I agree on that were bad.
Because the State Department chose so.
What do you think the military should have done to overrule the State Department?
Not when your executive and legislative branches for decades decline to modernize the IT infrastructure of various parts of the US government.
What do you think the military should have done to overrule previous president's and congress's spending priorities?
Not in a way that the State Department could retrieve and access in a hurry.
What do you think the military should have done with State Department data systems?
The State Department's bugout plan was to fly out of a military base that the State Department facilitated the handover of after a delay at Biden's behest.
What do you think the military should have done to overrule the turnover of a military base after they departed as directed to?
Certainly there were.
But do you think the military should be checking and auditing how the State Department handles State Department data?
I'll be perfectly open in my feelings on this: I do not believe the military wing of a government should run the diplomacy wing of government. There are a lot of no-good, very-bad, downright-awful tendencies to come from that, and I suspect you'd agree with me on at least some of them.
But a consequence of that is that it means not all planning failures are a failure of military planning. It is not actually the military's job to run the other branches of the government well, even if it becomes the military's job to clean up and mitigate messes that result.
Of course not- it wouldn't have been physically possible.
Hence why the withdrawal was the process of several months, and entailed leaving behind much of the equipment, and why the US military strategies of the era emphasized the ability to fight two wars at once.
Hence also why many people felt it was better to bite the bullet and withdraw from Afghanistan sooner than later, so that the military personnel- if not the turned over equipment which would cost more to recover than simply replace- could be reallocated / repurposed / reserved for other conflicts.
Hence the initial timeline timed for an earlier pause in the fighting seasons for the withdrawal.
Which Biden entered office trying to delay.
There's a poem I learned as a kid:
You don't want to do the job, so you do a bad job on purpose.
There's a piece of advice I heard from a re-enactor once:
This isn't about not wanting to do the job, it's about not wanting the job to be done at all.
And now we reach true bureaucratic sophistication: manipulating your boss into not ordering the job done in the first place. Wag-The-Dog. Top-from-the-bottom.
For contrast:
Rogers doesn't like the order he's been given. He thinks his boss's plan is disastrously bad. He still lays out the best method to accomplish the stated objective, even while that they shouldn't do it.
That's what I'm asking for: a clear-eyed assessment saying "we have be3en ordered to withdraw by this date, here's the problems we have to overcome, here's the resources we need to do it."
The paper you linked is... not that. I'd say it's pretty disappointing, but honestly I wouldn't expect much better. It's "informative" in the loosest possible sense of the word, which is I suppose exactly what its authors are paid to be. My impression is that it's written so that, no matter what happens, its authors can be considered prudent.
Again, you understand the concept of malicious compliance and bureaucratic wag-the-dog. You're aware that the US military is not immune to these activities. Why do you believe that what we saw in the pullout was entirely or even mostly the result of policy set by the president?
"Tactics" - How to win a firefight or a battle. "Strategy" - How to string together a series of tactical victories into an overall victory. "Bureaucracy" - What drawer the papers are filed in and who does the filing.
In the abstract, an Executive is supposed to decide what value a war offers, when to fight and when to make peace. He has final command over the top-level strategy where it impinges on that question, but below that the details are down to men who have made those details their lives' profession.
Likewise for Bureaucracy; an Executive should be concerned with questions of policy, not with the nuts-and-bolts mechanics of getting the folders handed round. What we are seeing now with Trump and DOGE is not, in fact, how any of this is supposed to work; a President is not supposed to have to micromanage his underlings to ensure they are performing their jobs competently and in good faith. Likewise, the President should not be having to inform his generals about the Afghan fighting season and suggest to them the proper way to account for its effects on the pullout. He should, in fact, be able to give a date for a pullout a year in advance, and our troops should be able to pull out on that date with no further input from the President other than signing and approving the orders. I'm bewildered as to how it could possibly be otherwise.
Indeed. So, keeping the date fixed, what did Biden need to do to make the pullout not a disastrous fuckup on the part of the US forces? What, specifically, did he do wrong? I'm not accepting "pick another date", because I don't buy that a year's lead time was insufficient to plan a better pullout. I'm not buying that he forced a bad plan through over the objection of the pentagon unless I see the actual orders.
How? What was the president of the United States supposed to do to make this operation not a hilarious fuckfest?
With Benghazi, I think I have a reasonable answer to that question: Clinton and Obama slow-rolled response out of political concerns. With Mogadishu, I think I have a reasonable answer: Clinton denied heavier assets for the snatch, and when things went bad "joint" operations were a huge mess to coordinate, and also a whole lot of things went very wrong. For this, if I'm supposed to blame the president, I want to know specifically what the President did, and until I have specifics my assumption is that the people actually drawing up the plans are at fault when a plan is a complete mess.
You got me! I assumed the DoD was in overall control our presence in Afghanistan, given that it was still an active war. I'm happy to withdraw the relevant questions and resubmit them as "why the fuck is the state department this incompetent?" ...Though that surprises me somewhat less. It still seems like a pretty important question, though, and it seems to me that there are probably people who were paid a considerable salary to run this shit, and those people should probably lose their jobs and possibly go to jail. They seem to have done a really bad job, and if they are not removed they are probably going to continue to do a bad job wherever they are placed next, no? But a considerable amount of the clamor I heard was specifically over the military side of things, and the military side of things isn't the state department. And again, this looks to me like basic competence failure, to the point that I'm suspicious.
My argument isn't that the military should be running diplomacy. I am happy to complain equally about the State Department. My argument is that agents of the federal government were given a job, their implementation was disastrous, and I see people on the Right saying "well, it's all Biden's fault", and people on the left sort of shrugging their shoulders. I loath Biden, but I'm not going to blame him unless I have some actual explanation about what, specifically, he did wrong. And so far, all I've got is "he timed the pullout during the fighting season". I'm not buying that, and I don't think you should buy it either.
That's an entirely fair position, and again, the same question applies to the State department and whoever else did not comprehend what "we are pulling out in a year" meant.
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