Glenn Reynolds writes,
US forces fled Bagram under cover of darkness, with no warning to anyone. (But botched even that, turning off the lights as they left, which gave looters free rein for many hours before Afghan officials showed up.)
Not only did that midnight skedaddle deprive us of a valuable resource (we could use a secure airfield about now), it signaled weakness to the Afghans on both sides of that country’s civil war. When the Soviets left Afghanistan, they were defeated, but they left in order; we snuck out like a guilty lover with a husband approaching the front door.
Our efforts were marked by institutional failure at every level, from the lack of planning at the top to the spooks who told us, last Thursday, that the Afghan army might hold out for more than 90 days (it lasted fewer than 90 hours). These are the same intelligence agencies, by the way, that spent four years promoting the exploded “Russian-collusion” fable.
To begin with, Milley must resign or be fired. And the same for our triple-masking defense secretary, Lloyd Austin. This was a failure that happened on their watch, and it happened through bad management. We could have pulled out without nearly the level of chaos, confusion and terror.
Likewise, the intel agencies and officers who provided the bad, er, intelligence need to go. Many others who failed, from contractors to lower-level officers and bureaucrats, need to go, too. You punish a bureaucracy by shrinking its staff and cutting its budget. That needs to happen here.
The brass and agencies will complain that it was Biden who ultimately made the call. Indeed, they are already furiously leaking to that effect to the press. Maybe they’re right. But it’s up to voters to fire the president at the ballot box. If they thought what Biden planned was disastrous, they should have resigned in protest. But they didn’t.
Our society is run by a technocratic-managerial class that never pays a price for failure. Democracy is a glossy finish over an unelected administrative state that isn’t really accountable to anyone and measures success or failure in terms of budgets, p.r. and power, not results.
Read more here: https://nypost.com/2021/08/18/fire-military-and-intelligence-bigs-who-bungled-afghanistan-now/
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