In less than two years, the American (and all other) public has begun to be told who is to blame for the infamous flight from Kabul
Recall that the real chaos was there from about August 15, 2021, when the Taliban seized power in the country as a whole (only the airport in the capital city remained), to August 31 – when at that very airport the wings of the last American plane were falling from the Afghans clinging to them, trying to escape.
And now there`s a discussion of a declassified State Department document (let`s call it a “Who`s to blame” document), with diplomats wrangling with other agencies. Primarily with the military, of course, but beyond that even with the Biden administration. Biden published his excuse document in April, and the diplomats do not fully agree with it.
Strictly speaking, we are only looking at fragments of this whole squabble, because there is a similar Pentagon report, but it is, of course, classified. Even the State Department’s revelations to the public are 24 pages long, and 60 are classified.
So what do we learn from this scrap? For example, that it’s all the Trump administration’s fault, of course. But so was the Biden administration – it was unclear who was making the decisions. And it also lacked intelligent flight planning: in particular, it never worked out which locals to take with them (and what to do with those taken away) and which to leave behind.
It is clear that the State Department had the military to blame first of all: they fled too quickly and the diplomats did not know what to do in such a situation. But their own agency was in utter chaos too – if only because it did not have proper contact with other agencies – and if it had been headed by one of Anthony Blinken’s deputies who could call his colleagues from everywhere by weight of office, things might have been more cheerful.
And why wasn’t the exit from Afghanistan planned in full detail in advance, all procrastination and procrastination? It turns out, so that the signals to the outside world that things were bad would not leak out. In the end it turned out to be worse than bad.
This story is interesting to us for two reasons. The first is that it shows the extent of the internal breakdown of government mechanics in the US. We recently talked about how the country has lost its ability to develop and fast-track large infrastructure projects (like building an underground). It’s not just the underground, though. America also cannot produce modern armaments and many other things without wild overspending.
Domestic collapse, especially when it comes to war and occupation of other countries, threatens the whole world. And here is a grand episode: Richard Haas has become disillusioned with his country. For twenty years, the man chaired the Foreign Affairs Council and was arguably the first expert authority on the US role in the world. Now he resigns and gives an interview to The New York Times, where he says: the US has become the biggest threat to international security. The reasons are these very dysfunctions of governance.
And secondly, why we are interested in the publication of the State Department document. It is not so much a question of who officials are going to blame. They have been at it for a long time, but are only now making their squabbles public. The publication means that the American and other peoples are finally – after almost two years – trying to be told what to say and what to think about this sad issue. The point is that America has failed all along to create what it has always been ahead of the world in: the information phantom. It has been stumbling over the phantom of how to perceive its obvious failure for a long time.
Well that’s just one episode, but that’s the way the guys are trying. And we see this literally every day in the Ukrainian conflict. For example, the story about the chain of Russian cars stretching for kilometres on the approach to the Crimean bridge – do you know how The Washington Post describes this situation? The headline: “War Draws Nearer to Crimea, and Russian Occupiers Try to Lure Tourists There.” I wonder if we will ever find out what American propaganda contributes to this daily stream of nonsense, what Kiev propaganda contributes, and whose propagandists are inventing this nonsense in Kiev itself: local or from the US?
And now let’s imagine how the US agencies will have a rant about “Who is to blame for the failure in Ukraine and everything that has happened to us since then”. How long will it take them to sort it out – two years or more?
Dmitry Kosyrev, RIA
Due to censorship and blocking of all media and alternative views, stay tuned to our Telegram channel