On Afghanistan, Can We All Just Take a Chill Pill?

By DICK POLMAN

It’s surely blasphemy for me to suggest that we all just chill out a wee bit about Afghanistan. But here goes:

Thanks to the hyperactive 24/7 news cycle and the instant gratification of Twitter hysteria, we don’t chill very well in this benighted century. The grim images of Taliban-fleeing refugees at the Kabul airport are predictably playing on an endless loop on cable news, everyone who’s hooked on retweets is typing 280-character treatises about how President Biden is stuck with an unmitigated disaster that will sink him forevermore, and the Beltway media – eager to flex its Both Sides muscle by beating up on a Democrat – is piling on.

But hang on. How about – dare I say this – we all watch and wait a minimum of a few days to see how things play out, instead of presuming to know what in truth we don’t yet know?

Let’s start with what we do know. We were always going to leave Afghanistan at some point, for all the reasons that Biden nailed Aug.16 in his White House remarks: “How many more generations of America’s daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghans — Afghanistan’s civil war when Afghan troops will not? How many more lives — American lives — is it worth? How many endless rows of headstones at Arlington National Cemetery? I’m clear on my answer. I will not repeat the mistakes we’ve made in the past – the mistake of staying and fighting indefinitely in a conflict that is not in the national interest of the United States, of doubling down on a civil war in a foreign country, of attempting to remake a country through the endless military deployments of US forces.”

That’s what most Americans believe.

Biden also said, “I will not mislead the American people by claiming that just a little more time in Afghanistan will make all the difference.” Finally, some candor. We’d all been misled way too many times by US spokesmen slinging the bull about the great job we were doing with the Afghan military and police.

Of course, what most Americans presumably want is an orderly and peaceful withdrawal. The reality – so far, anyway – has been “hard and messy,” “far from perfect,” thanks to a Taliban takeover that “did unfold more quickly than we anticipated.” Those too were Biden’s words. And he fully acknowledged that the buck stops with him. He’s on the hook to hasten “the departure of US and allied civilian personnel from Afghanistan and to evacuate our Afghan allies and vulnerable Afghans to safety.”

My advice, for what it’s worth, is that we ignore the caterwauling critics – particularly the neocons who would’ve kept us in Afghanistan forever; and the MAGA Republicans who only recently hailed Trump for negotiating with the Taliban while freezing out the Afghan regime – and give the Biden team a little space to sort things out.

Granted, Biden was clearly wrong on July 8 when he said the regime was well equipped to slow down the Taliban, and he was wrong when he said that our departure wouldn’t mirror some of the optics of Saigon in 1975. (“None whatsoever. Zero … It’s not at all comparable.”) But so far in Kabul, no US soldiers or diplomats have been killed, evacuations are proceeding, and, frankly, it’s in the Taliban’s self-interest to let us do what we need to do – rather than give us a fresh reason to stay and (in Biden’s words) “defend our people with devastating force.”

There’s also a school of thought (I am being ironic about thought) that what’s happening in Afghanistan will doom Biden’s party in the 2022 midterm elections. That’s the cheapest clickbait of all. As the screenwriter William Goldman once quipped about Hollywood, “Nobody knows anything.” Afghanistan has always been a third-tier voting issue, and anyone today who believes that Afghanistan will be dominating the headlines 15 months hence – surpassing the domestic economy and (yikes) perhaps the pandemic – would be well advised to take a breath. So should we all.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, September 15, 2021

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