Goodnight Kabul

It is amazing how something can be both inevitable and shocking at the same time. Was there really any surprise that that the Taliban would retake Afghanistan after we Americans left? The speed with which it happened might have been stupefying, at least to those us 7,000 miles away, but the eventual return of the Taliban to power was not. And yet, it was gut wrenching to watch 20 years of futility played out in one week. 

The truth of the matter is that after 20 years there was no real Afghan government or Afghan army. There were shells in place that adopted those monikers, but there were no actual independent entities that embraced the obligations that go with governing or defending. They were stage props, fronting the US power barely hidden behind them.  

Nor was the Taliban ever really defeated. After the US invasion many of the Taliban fighters melted back into their home villages, safe from identification with the brutal regime that had terrorized opponents for the last five years. Others went to Pakistan, a US “ally” who had no interest in assisting in a rebuild of Afghanistan, and seemed happy instead to maintain the Islamic militants for as long as necessary. (Does anyone really believe that they didn’t know Bin Laden was living in Abbottabad?) 

The four administrations which oversaw this mess had to be aware of these realities. They had to know that once the US withdrew from Afghanistan the existing structures would collapse like the house of cards they were. They could not have been surprised by this outcome, any more than we were surprised by the takeover of South Vietnam by the Viet Cong in 1975. And yet, we were faced with images that eerily mirrored that those from Saigon almost 50 years ago. 

The Biden Administration bears the immediate blame for this inexplicable lack of foresight. The last six months should have used to identify everyone who had to be evacuated when the Taliban marched in, securing and/or destroying any weapons bound to fall into Taliban hands, and assuring the security of all US installations until the evacuation was complete. I cannot fathom why that was not done. 

But I don’t want to hear that the prior administration would have done any better. In fact, considering the Trump track record on advance planning, it would no doubt have been worse. Can anyone doubt that Trump would have simply denied any responsibility for the inevitable mess and tried and mask it with lie after lie? Does anyone believe that he would have authorized the evacuation of any Afghans to the United States?    

While we have to look to our own missteps, we should not avoid looking to the failures of the Afghans themselves. The news reports these days are full of stories about Afghans who took advantage of the US presence to try and change their society, but the truth of the matter is that those Afghans were few and far between. Most of the Afghan people clung to their traditional beliefs and mores, and never evinced any real interest in establishing an alternative to the Taliban.  

The American mission in Afghanistan (assuming we had one) was bound to fail unless the Afghan people embraced that mission as their own and ran with it. It was great to see Afghan women in the street protesting the return of the Taliban, but there should have been thousands of Afghans in the street over the past 20 years demanding an effective, corruption free regime answerable to the people. Unfortunately, that would have taken a popular will which was not there. 

So, was the entire an abject disaster? We initially went into Afghanistan to retaliate against Afghan support for the Al-Qaeda terrorists that masterminded the September 11 attacks. It’s a little late to debate whether that invasion was justified, but I must say that even a pacifist like me cannot dismiss this reasoning out of hand (unlike Iraq). There is no doubt that the Taliban provided Al-Qaeda with a training ground and safe haven to plan and carry out the 9/11 attacks. That initial invasion was successful in meeting this limited objective. 

The trouble was, and always is with violence “solutions”, that there was no clear path once the Taliban were thrust from power. Yes, we could militarily defeat the Taliban, but we should have realized 20 years ago that any effort to remake that country into a stable democracy was chimeric. We should have known that the only way to keep Afghanistan from lapsing into either an Islamic state or a haven for warlords was to commit to a permanent presence (our 51^st state?), which was not a real option. 

So, for 20 years we dickered around, wasting untold lives and tax dollars (because we always have money for war, even if we don’t for health care, etc.) chasing a phantom. Three administrations were reluctant to leave because they knew the probable outcome, and yet developed no tangible reason to stay. The fourth administration finally left, but in doing so planned the departure as if we were leaving something lasting behind, rather than just cutting our losses.  

I wish that I could say that Afghanistan will finally teach us that nation building is a losing proposition, especially in countries with no history of stable, democratic governance. But I am not optimistic. We have a way of talking ourselves into situations, and then refusing to admit our limitations. We did it in Vietnam. We did it in Afghanistan. We cannot afford to do it again.