Americans in Saigon. The Soviets in Kabul. Americans in Lebanon, Libya, Iraq. And now Kabul. If the collapse of the US mission in Afghanistan and return of the Taliban feel familiar, it’s because it is. We’ve seen it before. More than once and, unless we take a good hard look at ourselves and question the premises that undergird our interventionist foreign policy, it will happen again and again and again.
The latest “Taliban offensive … started in May when the United States began withdrawing troops,” the New York Times reported. And their “rapid successes have exposed the weakness of an Afghan military that the United States spent more than $83 billion to support over the past two decades. As the insurgents’ campaign has accelerated, soldiers and police officers have abandoned the security forces in ever greater numbers, with the cause for which they risked their lives appearing increasingly to be lost.”
The Taliban’s return to power should offer a lesson, though we are unlikely to heed, because we refuse to let go of the mistaken notion that we are the indispensable nation, that we are exceptional, that we are stronger and more moral than other nations.
As Nick Turse wrote in The Intercept, the “Afghan collapse (may have been) far more precipitous than that of the South Vietnamese armed forces” under Gerald Ford. But the “clear parallels between that past moment of defeat and the current one” should not be ignored. Ford and the administrations that followed failed to make “any real attempt at redefining American foreign policy.” What is needed, Turse says, is a “true reevaluation this time around,” or “the US risks falling into well-worn patterns that may, one day, make the military debacles in Southeast and Southwest Asia look terribly small.”
Re-evaluations must start at the beginning and they must be honest. The devastating scenes we witnessed as the Taliban overran Afghanistan and the remaining American presence fled might be our focus today, but they should not be laid only at the feet of the current president or even at the feet of his immediate predecessor. More needed to be done to protect those who worked with American forces, to ensure the rights won by Afghan women over the last two decades are not shredded, that the Taliban’s religious extremism does not marginalize religious and social minorities.
But this debacle is not (completely) Biden’s fault. The return to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan feels preordained. The war was a response by the administration of George W. Bush to the 9/11 terrorist attacks; it always lacked a sense of conclusion, a plan for what success might look like or how we would extricate ourselves. The likely endgame there always pointed toward failure, a replay of the Soviet retreat amid chaos, which gave birth to the Taliban in the first place.
Biden was correct to pull out the remaining troops, as Donald Trump had promised before him and as Barack Obama promised before both. American interests in the country were always hazy, and the program put in place by Bush — his goal to democratize the region at the barrel of a gun — was ever more than a pipe dream.
The failure of the American foreign policy establishment to see the world as it really is and to chart a new direction for the United States in dealing with the rest of the world is the real culprit here. The causes and ultimate failure of the American mission in Afghanistan — and Iraq — were bipartisan, brought on by foreign policy group think that has long inflated the reach and efficacy of American military might. The Afghan war was supported by both parties, endorsed by Biden when he was in the Senate — though he ultimately became the Obama administration’s chief skeptic as Vice President — and prosecuted by four separate presidents.
Occurring in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, Afghanistan was supposedly the good war, a direct response to al Qaeda, which had operated from bases in Afghanistan with Taliban. Democrats like to say that Bush took his eye off the prize in Afghanistan when he invaded Iraq, but that tells the wrong story. Neither war was the correct response to 9/11. In both cases, we expected to be met by adoring populations freed from the grip of truly brutal regimes. In both cases, the love eroded quickly, with both nations descending into long battles for control.
Retired Lt. Col. Jason Dempsey, who served twice in Afghanistan, summed up our hubris in an interview with the Washington Post’s Greg Jaffe: “‘We assumed the rest of the world saw us as we saw ourselves,’ he said. ‘And we believed that we could shape the world in our image using our guns and our money.’ Both assumptions ignored Afghan culture, politics and history. Both, he said, were tragically wrong.”
This is the real lesson of the Afghanistan debacle. The failures at the end, the dangers to more liberal elements of Afghan society, were encoded in our occupation from the beginning. They always are.
Hank Kalet is a writer in central New Jersey. Email, hankkalet @gmail.com; Twitter, @newspoet41 and @kaletjournalism; Instagram, @kaletwrites. Subscribe to his Substack at hankkalet.substack.com.
From The Progressive Populist, September 15, 2021
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