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
- 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/