On balance, Americans should not feel shame on Afghanistan. Our country tried and tried. More importantly, there is a time to acknowledge limits that are real. This is not something Americans like to do, but we must.
At the time of the authorization to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban, I published an article advocating a quick plebiscite and an immediate withdrawal. I’m sorry to say I was right.
On the other hand, the effort that we have put in to try to help Afghan society recover from 200 years of terrible conflicts preventing its advancement, was real and had noble intentions.
But sometimes, good intentions are not enough. This is a classic American failing: thinking that “we can do anything if we put our mind to it” and also thinking that good intentions are sufficient.
The same failing is infecting all kinds of commentary with regard to the current situation in Afghanistan and President Biden’s role in it.
I fell for the false choice myself. Upon reflection, I realize it was an illusion.
What do I mean?
It is dangerous and counterproductive for us to pretend that there was the choice to just keep the status quo with a mere 3000 military members in Afghanistan, and have that sustain itself over time without major ongoing casualties.
Biden actually had two real choices:
1. Renege on the Trump agreement, which essentially handed the store and keys to the Taliban in exchange for their ceasing attacks on US troops and then and conduct yet another surge yet another time; or
2. Finally end the effort and stop putting young Americans in the line of fire for an Afghan military that – while having valiant rank and file troops – trapped those lower rank troops in a corrupt system that left them in the field under-protected to be slaughtered by the Taliban (as TEN THOUSAND were in a short period in 2019).
I would’ve preferred to see another surge. But then again, I don’t have children in the military. And it’s Biden’s responsibility to think of that as well, to weigh it, and make the call.
Joe Biden made and is sticking with a brave decision. And by the way, he was right to put out that photo of him alone at the table. Unlike his predecessor who is all about spin and falsehoods and lies, we have a man who takes responsibility for himself and is not going to spread the responsibility.
The buck stops with him.
Any withdrawal of this nature is going to be difficult, but we have little to be ashamed of. Democrats need to get backbone in their support of Biden on this issue, as should all Americans.
And context is everything. The threat to our democracy remains. I fully support President Joe Biden, including at times like
I directed an NGO in Tajikistan for a year, and I know exactly who those people are who are suffering, and I also have a very good idea what they’re going through right now. The pain is unfathomable. But it is also absolutely not our fault.
In fact, the way this has played out confirms precisely Biden‘s instincts: the Afghan military and its government were a mirage. He hoped the sheer numbers of troops would make the difference, but his decision shows that he suspected strongly that it was WILL that mattered, as is so often underestimated in military matters, not numbers.
He was somehow able to see through the baloney in the intelligence reports more easily than his predecessors, for whatever reason. He deserves credit for that, not condemnation.
Remember, the reason few American troops had died in Afghanistan over the past two years was not because we had reached some kind of stable situation.
It was because we (the Trump Administration) had made an agreement with Taliban not to shoot at us because we were to withdraw!
This is why the straw-man idea that there was a status quo in which Afghanistan was going to be Germany or South Korea with a paltry 2500 troops is simply not supported by the evidence – evidence playing out before our eyes today.
To paraphrase John Kerry after the Vietnam war, ‘What parent wants their child to be the last one to die for a lost cause?’.
The people, especially the women, of Afghanistan have gotten another taste of cultural freedom over the past 20 years, as they did in the 1960’s and 1970’s. We can still find ways to stand for our values over time. But to do it militarily in a counter-insurgency you need a government-partner that has the support of its people. As we now see, we did not.
Sacrificing more of our sons and daughters for a mirage is not right.
As difficult as it is to say worrying about my friends in that region, these choices are unspeakably difficult but Joe Biden made the right difficult call on behalf of his country, and it is admirable the way he is sticking to it, and taking responsibility for it under a barrage of criticism.
Perhaps we have forgotten what it is like to see a leader take responsibility.
Is there any real doubt that the same people who are savaging Biden on television right now about the exit from Afghanistan would have blamed him for undercutting the Afghan government if we had been air lifting out people for months?
That is an absolute certainty.
Joe Biden is showing the courage that makes him a great president.
America supported the Taliban (among others) during the ten-year war that the Soviet Union waged against Afghanistan while trying and failing to impose a Soviet-style government. All of us old enough to remember should recall that in those years the Taliban and others were “freedom fighters”.
How many people today know who “Ho Chi Minh” was? How many people remember that he to was an American asset early in his life? How many times must we repeat the disastrous strategic decisions that brought us Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq?
George W. Bush began attacking Afghanistan in 2001 because he and his advisors foolishly thought they were an easy and soft target. American passions inflamed by the 9/11 attacks were NEVER directed at the correct target — Saudi Arabia and the Saudi royal family.
Today’s right wing attacks Joe Biden no matter what he does. This is the party who proposed drinking bleach as a COVID cure, for crying out loud.
America has done more than our fair share. We tried and failed. We failed in no small part because of twenty years of lies, deceit, demagoguery, and outright sedition from the same GOP that today bleats its lies about Joe Biden.
The burden of addressing the humanitarian crisis that is now unfolding falls on the rest of the civilized world.
I know the 9/11 terrorists were themselves Saudis, but I’m not aware of Saudi Arabia being officially behind the attacks. As I understand it al-Qaeda and the Saud family were mortal enemies and a key objection al-Qaeda had was the Sauds’ allowing the US and allies to remain in Saudi Arabia, which they see as holy to Islam as the country which includes both Mecca and Medina. The Taliban were harboring al-Qaeda generally and bin Laden in particular, which is why we attacked them and IMO rightfully so. Iraq was not a valid target post 9/11 but Afghanistan was. I strongly suspect a President Gore would have avoided the former, but still engaged the latter.
“Officially” doesn’t matter.
The entire bin Laden family, including OBL, had long-lasting, close, and intimate ties with the Saudi royal family. The ties between the Saudi royal family and Bush family are deep and well-documented.
When a mafia assassin completes their mission on orders from the Don, do you focus on the assassin or do you nail the Don?
A few days of bombing as a show of force is one thing. What we did in Afghanistan is something altogether different.
I have no doubt that the Saudi government did not “officially” order the gruesome murder and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi.
They nevertheless tortured and murdered him. We’ve turned a blind eye to that as well.
MBS absolutely ordered the murder of Khashoggi, but I’m going to need your evidence that Saudi royal family at all conspired to attack an ally no matter how indirectly or secretly. Since they have ties to the Bush family, one of whom was our President at the time it especially makes no sense that they would attack us. I also see no motive for them to attack us.
Sure, we bombed Afghanistan for 20 years and created 2 1/2 million Afghan refugees but our heart was in the right place.
This war was a quagmire from the beginning. The US could have gotten out any time over the last 20 years with exactly the same results. The Taliban fighters taking over today were just toddlers and pre-schoolers when we invaded.
Just weeks ago, Biden assured us that there would be no collapse. Why do we spend $60-70 Billion on intelligence every year so that the president can be the only one in the world who didn’t know that this government would collapse?
I never said that our heart was in the right place. I believe our invasion of Afghanistan was as wrong, immoral, and evil as our invasion of Iraq.
I doubt that any of this was a surprise for Mr. Biden or his advisors. It would have been a spit-show whenever it happened.
I cannot more fundamentally disagree with your first paragraph. Unlike Iraq which had nothing to do with 9/11, Afghanistan as good as did. The regime at the time was much more responsible than the actual Saudi regime.
Your steadfast loyalty to long-outdated custom is touching in its irrelevance. I’m reminded of the perhaps apocryphal complaints that American revolutionaries cheated because they hid behind rocks and trees and didn’t wear bright red uniforms and march in straight lines like the civilized British army.
Terrorism has never been the province of governments and “official” policy. The bin Laden family has been extremely close to the Saudi royal family for generations. The Bush family has personal, political, and financial ties to the Saudis that go back decades and generations.
The reality that the US response to 9/11 made no mention of the Saudis had everything to do with those close personal ties and nothing to do with official policy. It certainly had nothing to do with US intelligence.
Should the US have bombed a few targets in Afghanistan? Sure. It would have made no difference at all.
Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA) was the lone vote against the resolution that provided the pretext for our initiation of the war in Afghanistan. The Washington Post published a piece today reminding us of that vote (https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/08/17/barbara-lee-afghanistan-vote/). It is well worth reading.
From that piece (emphasis mine):
Indeed. “Let us also pray for divine wisdom … that as we act we do not become the evil we deplore”.
Here were Ms. Lee’s words at the time of her vote against the resolution:
Ms. Lee was correct. The rest of the House and Senate were incorrect — as is your comment.
Our fundamental motivation in invading Afghanistan was our passionate belief that our culture was right and theirs was wrong. We invaded with the purpose of imposing our belief system, culture, and entire system of government on them. It was the same evil exploitation that we did in South Vietnam a generation or two earlier, and the same arrogant evil that the various Christian nations visited upon the indigenous peoples of North America, Central America, and South America.
You might disagree with my first paragraph. My response is that you were wrong then and wrong now.
Pretty much the totality of our response to 9/11 was ignorant, racist, and evil. It’s something we should remember as we approach the 20th anniversary of 9/11 in a few weeks.
I understand that such support would not be out in the open, but I still fail to see evidence that it existed at all. I for one am also not going to apologize for believing that Taliban actions and policies are retrograde and inexcusable. They are in fact wrong in the way they treat women and anyone who does not adhere to their strict my-way-or-the-highway interpretation of Islam. We are in fact better than they are in so many ways.
I have a feeling that Biden knew it would be a fuster cluck whenever we left and so has every other president since Bush. However, there is no way to say that to the American people, is there? I mean, heck, I’m a retired produce clerk and I knew it would be a fuster cluck as soon as we left and I’ve known that for years. Anyone who thought that we’d change Afghanistan into “Ohio” need to get their head examined.
I was always concerned this would come to pass, but I was unprepared for how quickly. I understand the domestic politics, but I am quickly turning in the direction of this was a big mistake. Nobody should ever be condemned by our negligence to live under as retrograde a regime as the Taliban. Assuming we are not completely callous we are going to have to return to Afghanistan in a few years on a humanitarian mission. Shame on us if we ever say Taliban policies and actions are an internal matter we should not intervene to stop!
Actions have consequences. This “mistake” is the harvest of the seeds of bigotry, fear, and ignorance that were sown by George W. Bush when he started this war.
The world is full of horrors that should never happen and nevertheless do happen.
I don’t know what sort of “humanitarian mission” America can ever do in Afghanistan. We did our best for twenty years and failed.
What sort of intervention do you propose? The damage is done. This is a humanitarian crisis that somebody else has to stop, because the result of twenty years of American attempts has — if anything — made it worse.
The heartbreak and suffering today is the direct, predicted, and unavoidable result of the evil committed by America at the direction of President George W. Bush and the American government in 2001.
Actions have consequences.
We need to bring aid directly to those suffering and if necessary put ourselves between the Taliban and those they would harm. We need to accept pretty much anyone who wishes to live here.
Feel free to go to Kabul and make that offer yourself.
I wholeheartedly agree with that. The more reporting I hear and see, the more clear it is becoming that a major obstacle to evacuating the tens of thousands of Afghans who helped us for decades and who now face torture, rape and murder was the miles of red tape needed to obtain a “Special Immigrant Visa” (https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/immigrate/special-immg-visa-afghans-employed-us-gov.html).
America spent the past twenty years loudly bashing and attacking any and all immigrants — especially Muslim or Hispanic immigrants. The stance towards these desperate Afghan cohorts makes the Vogons (https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Vogon) look soft and cuddly.
We created this humanitarian crisis, just like we created the humanitarian crisis of a few years when waves of refugees swept through Europe trying to escape from the consequences of our catastrophic blundering in Iraq and then ISIS (which emerged from the ruins of Iraq).
Whether intentional or not, American has been unleashing unspeakable evil across the globe in the past twenty years. It is no wonder that so many cultures hate us.
Well I didn’t sign up for the military (and would probably rejected on account of disability), but I do believe that the US military must sometimes use its might to make the world safe for democracy or at least keep people from being on the business end of a slaughter. I couldn’t find a clip that shows this well, but my ideal is actually the “Bartlet doctrine” from The West Wing as described in the inauguration episodes of season 4. Basically it’s one of using our force when direct vital interests are not readily apparent if it means saving your neighbor’s life.
John Cleese said it best:
I feel that if we had stayed in Afghanistan for another 20 years or so, we could have built an Afghan army that would have slowed down the Taliban advance quite a bit more.