Monthly Archives: August 2021

By Michael F. Duggan

“What set the Afghanistan war apart was not that it was the longest war in U.S. History but that it was more quickly forgotten than any other conflict in which the United States had ever participated.  As if by agreement, the American people and their government erased the Afghanistan experience from memory even before the bloodletting had ended.”

-Andrew Bacevich, America’s War for the Greater Middle East, 2016

The metaphors for it are clichés: blood in the water, a feeding frenzy.  Those participating in it are variously sharks and vultures or else armchair generals and Monday morning quarterbacks.  When politicians of both parties and reporters of all stripes pile on en masse, it is because they sense vulnerability in a president and his policy.  And there is nothing more insufferable than the sanctimony and superiority of people, many of whom could not have cared less about Afghanistan for the past twenty years, suddenly becoming exasperated over an inevitable ending.

Where have they been up to now?  I am no expert on Afghanistan—I have never been there and I do not speak Dari or Pashto—and yet it was clear to me that the United States and its allies began losing when the mission shifted from payback for the September 11 attacks to nation building.  In military terms, its fate was sealed when U.S. strategy moved from counterterrorism to counterinsurgency (COIN).  To put it bluntly, it was lost when the U.S. put its commitment and money into the hands of warlords and corrupt middlemen.  To Afghans, Americans are infidels and invaders, occupiers and outsiders, and nothing—no “hearts and minds” campaign—will ever change these perceptions.  A majority of Afghans would never accept the rule of such people or those who cooperate with them.  Why were these rather obvious facts not reported by the same corporate media journalists who are now so conspicuously aghast?  

Sure, we saw David Muir go to Afghanistan a couple of years ago in pompadour and a tight black tee shirt and uncritically report the official line about the looming “endgame” there.  We saw courageous network careerists inserting themselves into stories with impressively dangerous backdrops while reporting conventionalist clichés and showing little actual understanding of the nation or its history.  But where was the coverage of how the Taliban had been increasingly dominating the countryside for years?  Where was the broader context of the Afghanistan war in relation to the India-Pakistan struggle for Kashmir?  Where were the stories of Pakistani support for the Taliban, the sanctuaries in Pakistan and its permeable 1,616-mile long border with Afghanistan?  Where were the stories of Afghan warlords taking American aid?  The American people had long forgotten about Afghanistan because the American media had mostly forgotten it and knew precious little about it from the start.

There is a lot of talk these days about “how this could have been done in a more orderly way,” but what are these controlled and regulated roads not taken?  How do you pull forces out of a nation whose government has already fled and whose army has laid down its arms?  Two of the more vexing narratives making the rounds are those of David Axelrod and Chuck Todd.  Axelrod observes that Biden’s zeal to pull out of Afghanistan got too far ahead of the program that he had already pushed back months beyond the original deadline in May.  Presumably Mr. Alexrod would have preferred a more drawn-out collapse and the protracted fighting that would have gone along with it.  Todd is baffled over why the U.S. withdrew most of its ground forces before its diplomatic staff and civilians.  I suppose that he would have preferred U.S. forces to engage in a fighting retreat once it became obvious that we were leaving , and this with no in-country diplomats to talk to the other side.

David Brooks recently made an ex post facto “light at the end of the the tunnel”/”we were turning a corner” argument worthy of Lyndon Johnson or Walt Rostow. The idea is that because al-Qaeda and the Taliban had a 13% favorable rating among Muslims in eleven nations suveyed by the Pew Research Center eight years ago (and because of related numbers on the decline of Islamist terrorism and the unpopularity of fundamentalist rule), it is possible that a modern, liberalizing Afghanistan was in the offing if “we” had only stuck it out a little while longer.¹ “I thought we”—presumably the 1% of Americans who actually do the fighting these days and which do not include David Brooks—”had achieved some level of stability, and we could manage the problem.” Pretty to think so. Mr. Brooks would do well to ask why the Taliban was winning the war outside of the cities in the years after this 2013 poll was taken. Rebel forces without popular support don’t win insurgencies against powerful occupiers and their domestic allies. A more relevant statistic would be the percentage of rural Afghans who approve of, or are willing to play ball with the Taliban.

To be frank, I had little use for pre-presidential Joe Biden.  I thought he was just another cynical and unprincipled politician—a middle-of-the-pack mediocrity that seemed to embody so much of what was wrong with his party for the past half-century.  As president however, I like his ambitious domestic programs, his focus on the pandemic, and his declarative tone.  As far as I can tell, he is the first president since John Kennedy to constructively buck his military advisors over a major policy decision.  Having the guts to do that by itself should garner kudos and historical notice.  He promised to get the United States out of Afghanistan and he did that.  What the nation needs now is presidential leadership to tell the truth about a war that was lost many years ago and not a mea culpa that would be cynicially exploited by others for political gain.  Being right he needs to tough it out and to be the leader that he appears to be.

The fact that the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan has been ugly is a responsibility that should fall on the shoulders of those who began this mostly forgotten war, those who enabled it for almost two decades, those who escalated the conflict, and those who lied or kept silent about the failure of policy there.  It is also the responsibility of so many talking heads who had forgotten the war (or never really cared about it) and who are now so indignant.  Perhaps next time the U.S. will opt for a more orderly kind of chaos, whatever that means. Or better yet, perhaps the United States will not get involved in unnecessary wars of choice in the first place.

Note

1. See the PBS News Hour, August 27, 2021. See also David Brooks, “This is how Theocracy Shrivels,” August 27, 2021, The New York Times. https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2013/09/10/muslim-publics-share-concerns-about-extremist-groups/

By Michael F. Duggan

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” -Albert Einstein                    

I’ve seen this play before.  We all have.  We saw it play out in Saigon in 1975 and we saw the Soviet production in Afghanistan a generation ago.  It has run its course in Afghanistan so many times that it has become reminiscent of Nietzsche’s cosmological theory of eternal recurrence, the idea that history repeats itself forever.  It is a tragic rerun of an inability to learn historical lessons and to apply them to policy.

The details vary greatly, but we all know the plot: after a long, indecisive, asymmetrical conflict, the occupying power tires and decides to leave the fight.  It starts to withdraw its troops.  The opposition goes on the offensive—fills the void as it opens—and provinces and cities fall more quickly than expected.  Caught off guard, the major power announces the withdrawn of diplomatic personnel.  The country falls to the enemy causing a refugee crisis.   

If you watched the news in recent weeks you might have seen an uneasy correspondent reporting on the mounting Taliban victories—the capture of twelve provincial capitals and other cities.  We have seen the maps and the increasing percentage of the nation under Taliban control.  The collapse is occurring faster than expected (but presumably it was expected).  With the fall of Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second largest city, the sense of urgency has turned to panic. 

The dismay of the reporters is reflective of a mindset of delusion, avoidance, and a lack of real understanding.  It is cognitive dissonance forced by harsh, undeniable evidence.  They still do not realize that the war in Afghanistan was lost the day the United States mission shifted from payback for the September 11 attacks to long term nation building (and to be fair, the U.S. military accomplished its initial mission many years ago).  Like all tragedies, the outcome has been inevitable from the start.  The Taliban’s offensive may be ahead of schedule, but nobody should be surprised by the results.

Name an outside invader that “won” a war in Afghanistan.  The educated reader may point to the Arab invasions of the Middle Ages, and they would be right in that they succeeded in bringing Islam to the region.  Other local powers like the Persians might have had some marginal influence. But in general, the primary historical lesson of Afghanistan is that a powerful invader can only win in the short term and will be ground down over time.  Eventual defeat is inevitable and the less local the power is, the less likely the possibility of any success. 

The Greeks under Alexander won in the short term, but there are no Greeks there today (some Greek troops participated in Operation Enduring Freedom under the auspices of NATO).  The same can be said of the Mongols—the greatest imperial juggernauts in history.  They won in the short term but lost over the long run (is it a coincidence that they also lost in Vietnam and near Syria at Ain Jalut?).  The British fought three wars there.  It was the chessboard of the British-Russian Great Game of the nineteenth-century. And of course there was the Soviet war of 1979-1989.  

What was the U.S. trying to do in Afghanistan?  One hears a lot of talk about democracy, liberalism, and women’s rights even though there is no tradition of these things there.  These are the products of modern Western sensibilities, they are not the values of the Hindu Kush.  The countryside is dominated by fundamentalist Islam and the social structure is clannish and local and not universalist.  It is a non-reformed theocracy. Therefore it should have been clear to anybody with even a cursory understanding of history that a modern, liberalized Afghanistan was a pipe dream.  To echo a line from the Louise Bryant character in the movie Reds: Women’s rights in Afghanistan?  When? Just after Christmas?    

All of this should have been obvious from the start.  And yet another generation of the best and brightest had no such understanding and not only got the United States into a war there, but kept it engaged for twenty years.  As a result, a failed policy has once again had to run its course like an illness long after failure was apparent.  Once again the United States will lose an undeclared war in a region it made no real effort to understand.  Once again, the U.S. did not apply relevant historical lessons. Once again the U.S. will abandon allies once failure has become too obvious even for the true believers to deny.  Once again there will be a desperate refugee crisis and some of those who helped the American cause will seek refuge in the United States.  Once again ideology has proven to be a catastrophic basis for policy, and the blame for current events lies not in those pulling U.S. fores out of Afghanistan, but rather those who put them there and kept them there for nearly two decades. It is certainly not the fault of the U.S. service members who served and sacrificed there. They were given an impossible task.  

What are the lessons of the U.S. adventure in Afghanistan?  The first is that democracy and a system of rights necessarily exist within a cultural-historical frame and are not fungible.  They must emerge from inside a nation.  The second lesson is to never get involved in an insurgency where the insurgents have popular support and moral legitimacy with the locals (it is a good rule to avoid insurgencies altogether if there is no vital interest at stake).  The vast majority of the world’s problems are not amenable to military solutions.  It is also wise to avoid imperialist endeavors like nation building (for a fuller list of realist lessons, see the March 20, 2021 posting on this blog titled “Realism: a Distillation”). The fact is that, although it may be repugnant to Western values, the Taliban has more organic legitimacy in Afghanistan than any system imposed by outsiders.  We may not like what they stand for, but it is clearly their country.   

Questions remain: why didn’t Americans seem to care that their nation is about to lose another war for so long?  Why are they not more upset about the trillion or more dollars and the thousands of lives spent there (and where did the money go?)?  I suspect that the answer to these questions is that too small a percentage of Americans actually fight our wars these days—that there is too little shared sacrifice—for most of them to care if other people’s children die killing people who don’t look like them while spending their own children’s inheritance.  If this is true, it obviously does not speak well of us.

Why did a U.S.-trained army melt away before what now seems to be an inexorable foe (we shouldn’t be to hard on the Afghanistan army; if the most powerful military in the world could not decisively defeat the Taliban over a period of 20 years, what chance did they have?)?  

Although no good options remain for the United States in Afghanistan—and having no good options is the defining characteristic of a failed policy; the only thing worse than leaving this way would be to stay—it still has responsibilities there. The United States must use its Air Mobility Command to provide safe passage for those in Afghanistan who mortgaged their future on U.S. success and who may be treated as collaborators by the new regime. The only option at this point would be to get our local allies out of the country. We should not be thinking of possible outcomes in terms of V-E Day or V-J Day, but rather of Dunkirk, Operation Frequent Wind, and Operation Eagle Pull.

Americans embrace the solemnity of Veterans Day. We are moved by the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. But many Americans have a profound apathy when it comes to policy decisions that put our fighting men and women in harm’s way.  It is the Great Disconnect. As with the Vietnam War, many of the advocates and boosters of the U.S. post-2001 Afghanistan policy remain politically unscathed or have thrived while opponents of the war were marginalized.  How long can a nation whose people care so little about costly, ill-conceived policies and which rewards policy makers who have been so tragically wrong survive?  How long can a nation that rewards wrongheadedness and failure last? Will anybody be held accountable for this historical failure? Curiously, many American liberals have been quiet about their nation’s wars of choice.  Indeed many politicians and policy-makers considered to be progressives have been among the greatest hawks and interventionists over the past two decades.

The government in Kabul may hold out for a while with the help of U.S. air support and drone strikes, a shrinking island in a Taliban sea.*  The situation is reminiscent of that in Vietnam in the months before the communist victory and Nixon’s promises to reintroduce B-52 strikes if the North invaded the South.  But as every infantryman knows, you cannot win a war with air power alone.  And so we must accept that we have lost another war. This is what comes of nation building.

We all know the plot, the course of events now playing out in Afghanistan.  The only question is whether or not American involvement will end with a photo of helicopters plucking people from a rooftop.

*This article was written before the fall of the Afghan government.

Book Review

By Michael F. Duggan

Patrick Cockburn, War in the Age of Trump, the Defeat of ISIS, the Fall of the Kurds, the Conflict with Iran (Verso, London, New York). 311 pages. $29.95

From the first paragraph it is clear why Patrick Cockburn is widely regarded to be the greatest correspondent covering the Middle East.  His on-the-ground fluency with the details, the groups and players and their relative interests is superlative as is his grasp of the big picture.  When reading Cockburn, you become self-conscious of just how little you know about what is really going on there.  It also underscores just how bad the coverage of the region is by the corporate media.

Cockburn [KOH-burn] comes from a family of celebrated Anglo-Irish aristocrats that included Sir George Cockburn, the British admiral who was created Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath for burning Washington D.C. in August 1814.  His father was the communist journalist, novelist, and Spanish Civil War correspondent, Claude Cockburn.  His brothers are the late gonzo mainstay of the left and editor of CounterPunch, Alexander Cockburn (A Colossal Wreck), and Harper’s Magazine editor, Andrew Cockburn.  His niece is the actress, Olivia Wilde. 

He is the author of nine books and is the recipient of the Martha Gelhorn Prize, the James Cameron Prize, the Orwell Prize, and too many other awards to list here.  

The book is a collection of essays—a dispatches—from the Middle East from 2016 to 2019.  It covers the war in Syria, the sieges of Mosul and Raqqa, the Turkish offensive against the Kurdish enclave of Afrin, the worsening relations between the United States and Iran, the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani, the abandoning of the Kurds by the United States, “the rise and fall of the de facto Kurdish sates in Iraq and Syria and the final elimination of the self-declared ISIS caliphate, which culminated in death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.” Cockburn also shows how local players are proxies for great powers. He destroys the illusion that the impulsive and erratic polices of the 45th President of the United States in the region—ostensibly flowing from a revitalized “America first” sense of isolationism—were less problematic than those of previous American leaders.  Although each of the book’s ten parts begins with an introduction, each dispatch is a standalone piece grouped by events and the reader jumps into each without additional preparatory context.  The writer assumes the reader to have some fluency with the events he describes.  It is not a book for beginners.

As a friend of mine observed, where the late Robert Fisk was “hot” in his dispatches from the region, Cockburn is cool, analytical, detached.  His writing comes off as neutral—like Hemingway, in a sense—painting a detailed picture by describing events in detail and letting the reader come to his conclusions that are anything but neutral in siding with the truth.  On his approach, he writes:

“As in a previous volume, I look at events from two angles.  One is contemporary description using writings and diaries I produced at the time; the other is retrospective explanation and analysis from the perspective of today.  Both have their advantages: it is important to know how events looked like when they were still happening, but also to see retrospectively ‘how things panned out’ and what was their true significance.”   

On the difficulties of covering wars, he writes:

“War reporting is easy to do but difficult to do well.  It faces many of the difficulties of peacetime reporting, but in a more acute—thought more revealing—form.  No one taking part in an armed conflict has an incentive to tell the whole truth and every reason to say only what benefits their side.  This is true of all journalism, but in times of military conflict, the propaganda effort is at its most intense and is aided by the chaos of war, which hobbles anybody searching for the truth about what is really happening.”

The book covers a lot of ground in detail, but for me a powerful overarching theme is that America’s post-September 11 wars of choice have been especially pernicious in that, after years of death and destruction in already unstable regions, they eventually create no-win choices between cutting one’s losses in defeat or else delaying defeat with continuing losses.  From a policy perspective, the only thing worse than abandoning allies in the never-ending wars of the Middle East, is staying.  The problem is that when the U.S. pulls out of a fight (whether it is in Iraq, the abandonment of the Syrian Kurds, and now the withdrawal from Afghanistan), it necessarily means leaving allies who risked everything.  The result is that the United States has garnered a reputation for being a bad friend.  As Cockburn observes, there is a “saying spreading across the Middle East” that goes: “[n]ever go into a well with an American rope.”  

The book also underscores the apocalyptic dangers of intervening in regions with long histories (and equally long historical memory) and enormous sectarian ethnic and religious complexities at the urging of planners with little or no intimate understanding of the region, simplistic goals, and eschatological ideologies, like neo-conservatism.

As my friend, David Isenbergh observes, a failed policy is one where eventually no good options remain.  Under this criterion, the U.S. withdrawals from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, and the abandoning of the Kurds are paragon examples of policy failure.  In exposing the “no good options” situation of how post-2001 U.S, policies in the region devolved during 2016-19, Cockburn frames the dilemma for those of us who opposed these wars from the start: since withdrawal is a lesser of evils, how do you minimize the leaving of allies in the field, a tidal wave issue now mounting as the U.S. pulls out of Afghanistan.  If there is a point that those favoring withdrawal from the endless wars (e.g. Andrew Bacevich and the Quincy Institute) and Cockburn could agree on, it is not to get into these wars to begin with.

Cockburn is a writer of the first order, but this is not an easy book for the causal reader.  It is so laden with important details that it requires the reader’s full attention.  There is no index and so it is hard to skim (other than to judge from the titles and events of the book’s ten sections).  None of these observations are meant to be a negative criticism, only a cautionary notice of the book’s seriousness. 

Although War in the Age of Trump is a little over 300 pages, its specifics and in-depth regional intimacy make it slow going; to be honest, I am still reading it, taking it on one dispatch at a time.  Anyone who wants to really know the recent history of the Middle East must take Cockburn into consideration.  They must read him, but first they must work their way up to the level of this book. I only hope that I am almost there.