Thursday, August 19, 2021
PMT: Afghanistan
Well, that didn't go well.
Of course, it never was going to go well. Afghanistan has proved resistant to foreign powers for centuries, and those were foreign powers who at least were proximate to them (the Soviet Union, after all, shared the country's entire northern border). For some reason, we thought we could do it from the opposite side of the world. A succession of presidents managed to not quite lose the war while also not winning it, all while propping up a corrupt government and not really garnering freedom for women (as I discussed on Tuesday). Someone had to end it. Trump started the end, and Biden continued his trajectory.
I'm disappointed in President Biden and his intelligence network. It appears that there were reports this summer predicting exactly this outcome-- but they were dismissed. The current chief advisors, such as Jake Sullivan, are retreads from the Obama administration (and, of course, that network was largely strained by the Trump administration's purges and obsessions).
My worry from the start-- especially in my primary area of knowledge, criminal law-- was that Biden's ambition was to be Obama Lite: that he would bring back Obama people, continue the same themes, and ignore the Obama failures, just without the genuine passion that Obama had for some things, and the brute intelligence he brought to others. On top of that, Obama Lite is problematic because Obama's downfall was often timidity (as we saw with clemency).
There is little boldness in Biden, right now. The fear is that we may be in a time that requires it.
And now he is at a turning point. His inattention and reliance on the Obama Lite approach failed him badly. Is it in him to pivot?
But, as we have seen over and over again, Presidential Administrations can't seem to do more than a few things at the same time. Afghanistan was not a priority for the Biden people. I don't think it should have been. George Kennan was right about focusing on our strategic interests, and other than the fact that its a hotbed for mayhem and that we had a lot of troops there., Afghanistan is low on our list of geo-global concerns. But we DO have troops there. So, yes, they should have done a better job of preparing for the inevitable Taliban takeover. That was going to happen no matter what we did.
I suspect that we could have come up with a dozen plans, but in the end, we would have ended up where we are now. American Troops defending the last piece of ground until we got everyone out that we could.
The bottom line is that the U.S. Military, nor any military, is not designed to "keep the peace." After the initial invasion in the wake of 9/11, there was never a "military objective" in Afghanistan. AS you said, we were attempting to stop murder, mayhem and terrorism in a region where no one has ever been able to do such a thing. The British failed in the 1800's (The book “Flashman,” is a fictionalized account of THAT disaster) and the Russians failed in the 80's (The book and movie "Charlie Wilson's War" cover that). Perhaps, if we had truly committed ourselves to ripping out terrorism by the root, as Colin Powell suggested in 2001, implemented a draft and sent a quarter of a million soldiers to Afghanistan, sustained 10's of thousands of casualties, and not gotten distracted by Iraq, we could have wiped out most of the 14-30 year old Taliban fighters in that country. But thousands would have escaped into Cambodia and Laos. Ooops, I meant Pakistan and other Islamic neighbors. And the resentment would have been even more of a spur to vengeance than what we did do. Sure, the events of the past week or so are tragic. But totally pre-ordained. We were in hole. We stopped digging.
Trump’s idiotic “peace plan” forged in Doha in 2020 made this haphazard evacuation inevitable. The Taliban knew they just had to be patient for a few months and as soon as we started closing air bases, they could act. This was pre-ordained.
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