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 Caught off guard, the major power announces the withdrawn of diplomatic personnel.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.