{"id":59787,"date":"2021-10-10T07:06:14","date_gmt":"2021-10-10T12:06:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=59787"},"modified":"2021-10-10T07:06:14","modified_gmt":"2021-10-10T12:06:14","slug":"karen-greenberg-apologies-all-around-unfortunately-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=59787","title":{"rendered":"Karen Greenberg, Apologies All Around (Unfortunately, Not)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Karen Greenberg, Apologies All Around (Unfortunately, Not)<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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Just in case you didn\u2019t realize it, the lost war in Afghanistan was\u00a0their\u00a0<\/em>fault, not ours. If we had any fault at all, as Secretary of Defense and former Iraq War commander Lloyd Austin pointed out at a Senate hearing last week, it was not fully grasping how bad our Afghan allies \u2014 in other words, the very government and military we had created there \u2014 were. \u201cWe need to consider some uncomfortable truths,\u201d he\u00a0said<\/a>. \u201cThat we didn\u2019t fully comprehend the depth of corruption and poor leadership in the senior ranks. That we didn\u2019t grasp the damaging effect of frequent and unexplained rotations by President Ghani of his commanders.\u201d Oh yeah, and maybe that weird president we had not so long ago had something to do with it, too, when he reached an agreement with the Taliban at Doha, Qatar, for the withdrawal of American troops. As Austin put it: \u201cAnd that the Doha agreement itself had a demoralizing effect on Afghan soldiers.\u201d<\/p>\n

The only people who had nothing to do with disaster in that country, it seems, were the splendid generals of the U.S. military who commanded up to\u00a0100,000 American troops<\/a>\u00a0and monumental air power against the Taliban at the height of the war and have never wanted to give up the ghost. As we now know, until the very last moment (almost 20 years of devastating failure after it began), they were still \u201cadvising<\/a>\u201d President Biden not to withdraw our troops from that land.<\/p>\n

Honestly, our commanders who,\u00a0like Austin<\/a>, often enough made\u00a0literal fortunes<\/a>\u00a0off their war records, should be ashamed and yet, two disastrous decades later, there isn\u2019t an apology in sight, as\u00a0TomDispatch<\/em>\u00a0regular<\/a> Karen Greenberg…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Karen Greenberg, Apologies All Around (Unfortunately, Not) Just in case you didn\u2019t realize it, the lost war in Afghanistan was\u00a0their\u00a0fault, not ours. If we had any fault at all, as Secretary of Defense and former Iraq War commander Lloyd Austin pointed out at a Senate hearing last week, it was not fully grasping how bad […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[2487,31935,522,7413,827,862],"class_list":["post-59787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-afghanistan","tag-karen-greenberg","tag-middle-east","tag-tomdispatch","tag-united-states","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=59787"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59787\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59788,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59787\/revisions\/59788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}