Afghanistan and the United States: White House, or White Flag?
Sam Rydderch
As Netflix rush to activate their emergency send-actors-into-dusty-desert ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ sequel protocol – HBO, Paramount, and Disney fight to be heard on Tom Cruise’s voicemail:
‘We need you to fall off a plane’ screams a HBO exec – *beep* – ‘Hey Tom same scene but you let go this time’. Disney have accidentally called Tom Brady, who says he can’t hold on to a plane, but he could probably throw a football at one.
If there’s anything we’ve learnt over these past few weeks from the endless media reporting on the ground, it’s that evacuating one-hundred thousand US, UK, Afghan, and EU citizens in fourteen days from an airport surrounded by terrorists is actually quite difficult, most definitely impractical, and – you heard it here first – probably not what the United States had considered ‘Plan A’ in the Pentagon’s ‘So you want to escape from Afghanistan discreetly?’ instruction handbook.
The US has packed up and shipped its final marine from the dusty battlefield that is Kabul airport, but not before a desperate drone strike hits a car in Khajeh Baghra. US officials state their intention to kill a suspected ISIS-K suicide bomber, the reality is that drone strike instead killed seven children and two men who worked with allied forces in Afghanistan. To describe the withdrawal as chaotic is an understatement; to describe it as a success would be a gross negligible interpretation of the truth.
‘Do not panic’, state the Taliban on live television, as they take over TV news station ‘Peace Studio’ (the irony isn’t lost on me) with the sort of facial clothing and weaponry which would instantly suggest intense panic.
This is the sort of chaos that has engulfed the Afghan region over the past recent weeks.
There is no point in me going into the rights or wrongs of going into Afghanistan twenty-years ago, nor indeed the decision-making involved at the highest levels to pull out and withdraw permanently. I do think, however, there is particular merit in contextualising some of the events which have conspired in the past few weeks; a few comparisons to the withdrawing of Saigon, a smattering of sardonic humour and opinion commentary. That sort of thing.
Writing a singular article on all the events that have passed through the media and onto the desks of our leaders would contain the sort of word-count usually reserved for PHD theses. So, I’ve picked some of the best-bits instead.
Pen and his pets
‘It’s raining cats and dogs’ was probably one phrase Pen Farthing hoped not to hear at cruising altitude as the last of his 200 pets are tossed into the back of a charter jet bound for Blighty.
‘It’s just so depressing we have to leave them [his staff] behind’ Pen tutted to the stewardess, staring out of the window as she handed him a glass of champagne. ‘Woof’ and ‘Meow’ went his dogs and cats as they reclined their seats. ‘Yes, a real shame’ Pen replied, swilling his glass to get rid of the bubbles. Probably.
If the numerous reports in the Daily Telegraph and Twitter are anything to go by, then it seems as though the MoD are very angry at the way Pen Farthing conducted himself with the Foreign, Home, and Defence civil servants on the phone and on the ground. Accusations of “bullying, falsehoods and threatening behaviour” towards MoD staff are rife in the press; so much so that Tim Shipman has stated that he’s ‘heard more vitriol from within government about the ridiculous Pen Farthing and his travelling circus this week than I have about the Taliban’ – and Tim Shipman is basically an extended arm of insider government gossip, so treat this as gospel.
I adore animals, but if I was an MoD civil servant, and someone ever asked me to put the life of a sausage dog in the same quadrant as the life of an Afghan man, woman, or child, I would say ‘yes of course’, and kindly ask that person – in this case Mr Farthing – to kindly give up his place on the charter jet for said sausage dog. I doubt that in this case that Mr Farthing would accept the reconciliation between man and dog. That being said, I would be careful about picking a fight with a former marine with over two-hundred dogs and cats in tow – Whitehall is easy to find, and an MoD civil servant is easy to sniff out if you’re a hungry Rottweiler who was kept waiting by the Taliban.
People, planes, and physics
I can remember being told many things as a kid. Eating mud is good for you, don’t accept sweets from a kind old lady in a white Ford transit van. Or something along those lines, I wasn’t a very bright kid nor was I very interested in what my parents had to say from 1998 onwards.
You would think, however, that some things would not have to be taught, or indeed said. Things such as ‘do not hold on to the wheelbase of an aircraft when it is taking off’, for example, follow the sort of logic that is naturally and anthropologically passed down through a basic understanding of how physics works.
If I fall out of a moving car at 150mph, I will probably die. But if I lose my grip on a military C-17 Hercules hurtling down a runway combining speeds in excess of 150mph with an altitude of over two-hundred feet, then I will almost certainly die.
And I realise that these Afghans were desperate, so desperate – but that does not and cannot explain the insane dogmatic fly-in-the-face-of-Newton decision-making thought process that went through the minds of the few who clung on for dear life, because surely if you cling on to something for ‘dear life’, you therefore find life quite endearing, and so too the prospect of living. I struggle to reconciliate the juxtaposition of wanting to live and escape with holding on to the wheelbase of an aircraft.
“This is manifestly not Saigon”
‘This is manifestly not Saigon’, said Anthony Blinken – the US Secretary of State – with all the confidence of a year 11 student about to sit his GCSE history exam. He was right, of course. This was far, far worse.
It’s July 8th 2021, and Joe Biden has just held a press conference in which he was asked if a possible Saigon-type incident could occur in the evacuation of civilians from Afghanistan – referring to the world-famous photograph taken of an Air America helicopter squatting on the roof of the US embassy on 18 Gia Long Street April 29th 1975, as a lone CIA agent crouches down to help the dozens of evacuees waiting to be airlifted to safety.
“There’s going to be no circumstance where you’re going to see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy” Biden proclaimed to the glass of water on his podium – perhaps what he meant to say was “There’s going to be no circumstance where you’re going to see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy in an Air America Bell 205 helicopter, instead we will be using a much larger helicopter – the Chinook”, because then at least he wouldn’t have looked so silly come August 15th.
This was part of Operation Frequent Wind, which consisted of a 19-hour long operation involving 81 helicopters in what became known as the largest helicopter evac on record. The morning after the famous photograph, on April 30th, eleven marines were crouched on the flat roof of the US Embassy waiting for their ride out as the Vietnamese charged up the tear-gassed stairwell of the Embassy, as the US Sea Knight chopper hovered above, the eleven marines along with their flag clambered on board and thus marked the end of the Operation.
The chaotic Vietnam withdrawal from Saigon is almost a carbon copy of the current US withdrawal of Afghanistan. An impending rapid advancement of the enemy, a ringfencing of the main airport by US troops, US citizens waving passports only to be turned back at gunpoint; the only difference is, the US was much better prepared for Saigon, but completely ill-prepared for the Afghan withdrawal from Kabul.
Over these past few weeks, the US and its allies have been lucky enough to have had a collaborative enemy focused on launching an impressive domestic and international Public Relations operation to legitimise their breathtakingly staggering sweep to power, thus allowing the US and allies to evacuate using fixed-winged aircraft on an un-shelled runway.
Compare this to Saigon, where the Tan Son Nhut Airport was heavily bombarded and rendered unusable for evac. But the US was prepared way beforehand for every sort of eventuality, they had four plans for the evacuation, four options from which to choose – options one to three relied on the fixed-wing operation and so was dead in the water, but Kissinger (US Secretary of State) and Noel Gayler (Commander in chief of US pacific forces) had option four, which involved 81 helicopters and coded broadcasts for evacuees to listen out for when the time came to make their way to the Embassy.
‘Yes but they didn’t have the threat of ISIS-K’, you may retort. It’s true, they didn’t. Instead what they had were Vietcong on motorbikes tossing grenades into the crowd at the entrance of the US Embassy. And unlike the US and the UK in the current Kabul withdrawal, the CIA detonated communications equipment in the dead of night, which probably means that they probably didn’t leave behind any hand-held biometric equipment, for, say, an enemy like the Taliban to use. Helicopters used for evac were also sunk during the operation.
The problem is the US military relies on a chain of command which leads from the ground in Kabul all the up to the White House and the Oval office. This limits the on-the-ground decision-making capability of US personnel in Kabul.
This usually works fine when you have a President such as Gerard Ford and a Secretary of State such as Henry Kissinger working closely together through the dead of night, but doesn’t work very well when you have a President who has to be prodded in the direction of the podium with the kind of slurring elocution and clear messaging you’d expect to hear from your elderly grandfather after far too many bud lights.
America, advice, and autocracy
I have strong words, too, for Joe Biden’s White House advisers. Those seemingly too scared to tell Biden that he was wrong. If you are lucky enough, or fortunate enough, to have worked your way up to a point in your career where you have the ear of the office of the Presidency, then you have a solemn duty to dispatch your advice not only on behalf of the administration, but also on behalf of the American people, and those American soldiers directly impacted by decisions made in the White House and the Oval Office.
One official claimed that the Biden administration functions like ‘an autocracy’; I, for one, do not and cannot believe that. I would have believed it if we were still under the guard of the Trump administration, but not under Joe Biden. I do not believe that Biden radiates the sort of threatening unitary presidential authority once wielded by figures such as Donald Trump or Dick Cheney – who was arguably acted with the sort of executive authority usually vested in the Presidency. The above suggests an innate weakness, inability, and ineptitude by Biden’s advisers within the Administration.
If there are suggestions of an autocracy at the White House, then this can only mean that an official other than Joe Biden has internally assumed the autocratic functions of this White House administration. And that is something we should all worry about, and that is a separate discussion to be had in a subsequent article.