There are dozens if not hundreds of issues of political consequence that I’d not find any utility to comment on. It’s not that they aren’t important, it’s this: if I comment on something and neither my potential readers nor I can do a damn thing about it, then why talk about it? Consequently, my topics tend to hit closer to home in some way. Afghanistan is about as far out as one could get from a close-to-home topic. We’re pulling out our troops, a measure planned by Trump and enacted by Biden; a rare moment of accidental agreement, and yet, fraught with angst by many that hoped we’d stay indefinitely. Foreign policy matters, and in order to get it right, or at least less catastrophically wrong, we need to have our head screwed on straight. I have yet to see a perspective, even among conservatives, that accurately or realistically portrays our involvement and exit from Afghanistan. This is important, read on.
It actually isn’t hard. George Bush went into Afghanistan on the heels of 9/11 to search out bin Laden, the mastermind of that terrible day. We almost got him there, but he fled. We stayed in Afghanistan to keep the Taliban from hosting terrorist training camps – but that was a long time ago. Since then, terrorist training has set up and moved all over the globe, many times over. They’re mobile. Occupying a country is far less mobile, expensive, and ultimately futile. In the meantime, due to mission creep, we decided to ‘civilize’ Afghanistan. Ultimately, George Bush and the neocons dreamed of a western-friendly democracy that would beg us to stay involved forever. That goal had nothing to do with why we went there to begin with. But what about the women and children of Afghanistan? The Taliban are brutal to their own. It’s unfortunate, but a majority of nations don’t conform to our ideas of social order. Furthermore, we progressively have less of our own social order figured out as we go, we have less sound ideology to export than at any time in our history.
We made a mistake staying in Afghanistan. We could have pulled out a long time ago; we should have pulled out far differently than we are. If we wanted a permanent base of operations, like a Guantanamo Bay, we could have set that up and gradually faded away from the rest of the country, ceding what is, essentially, the rightful sovereignty of Afghanistan to its own people and processes. The final proof is in the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. We would never tolerate a day of the same civil imposition on our soil as we did to Afghanistan (and dozens of other nations). In the ethics of the military and war, there are times that justify extraordinary imposition. We lost that mandate in little more than a year or two of occupation in Afghanistan. After that, our will should have been carried out either by our state department – not the military – and for our social concerns, by NGOs and missionaries who believe it or not, actually have a long tradition of patiently influencing oppressive cultures.
Liberals and conservatives seem to be presently united in getting the post-mortem on Afghanistan incorrect. They talk as if we really did have a mandate until the present. It’s as if they forgot our entire history there. They forgot the connection to George W. Bush who is hardly beloved by any camp right now. They forgot that bin Laden was shot dead well away from Afghanistan.
Our exit from Afghanistan has been conceived and executed in the worst possible way, guaranteed to be construed as a defeat. This did not have to be, any more than our presence was construed as essential. We had an obligation to protect our human assets there or to grant them asylum, even if our mission there was flawed. We could have and should have quietly withdrawn over the past one to two years, without fanfare. As already mentioned, we could have kept an outpost if deemed a strategic need, without being construed as any form of imperialism. Our own ‘nation building’ cadre are failures that badly miscalculated the stability of the government left in Afghanistan. They should be fired, now, before they screw up the next ‘nation building’ fiasco.
We’ve not seen nor heard the last of our failure in Afghanistan. We created a goal that was guaranteed to fail, that much is agreed on by many. Back here at home: choose carefully whom you vote into office. There’s been only one president in recent memory who was dedicated to demonstrably avoiding new foreign entanglements, and his initials are Donald Trump. The $trillions dumped in failed campaigns, the sons and daughters lost on that soil, the weakening of our ongoing influence in the world – especially next to China – these are of great consequence now. It matters to all of us.