27 Aug Three Years Gone
This week, various people are commemorating the third anniversary of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan in various ways. President Trump is chiding Vice President Kamala Harris and (nominal) President Biden for their recklessness. Harris and Biden are pretending that nothing happened, and even if it did, so what? The families of the 13 service members who died during the ill-conceived and hasty retreat are mourning their loved ones. And of course, the Taliban – the greatest beneficiaries of the withdrawal – are doing what the Taliban does:
New Taliban laws that prohibit women from speaking or showing their faces outside their homes have been condemned by the UN and met with horror by human rights groups.
The Taliban published a host of new “vice and virtue” laws last week, approved by their supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, which state that women must completely veil their bodies – including their faces – in thick clothing at all times in public to avoid leading men into temptation and vice.
Women’s voices are also deemed to be potential instruments of vice and so will not be allowed to be heard in public under the new restrictions. Women must also not be heard singing or reading aloud, even from inside their houses.
Like President Trump, I’m perfectly happy to blame Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. That was a catastrophe of historic proportion.
At the same time, however, I am UNwilling to blame Biden and Harris for much more than the withdrawal. The simple fact of the matter is that American policy in Afghanistan was an unmitigated disaster for years before the bugout. In any sensible world, the war would have ended long before August 2021. Indeed, in any sensible world, American policy in Afghanistan would have been considerably different and considerably more focused on an exit from the country. In any sensible world, it never would have run for almost exactly two decades.
Whether President Trump and his fans are willing to admit it, the blame for the American disaster falls primarily on the shoulders of six men and one woman: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Mike Pence, and Kamala Harris. To be sure, it falls far more heavily on some shoulders than others (Bush’s and Cheney’s vs. Trump’s and Pence’s, for example). Still, all those people served in administrations that either did nothing or did something stupid about bringing a close to the war. And all of them deserve some blame for that.
While it’s inarguable that the war in Afghanistan had to end sometime, the conduct of the war, its end, and its ultimate effect on the country and its people are made even more tragic by at least two additional, infrequently discussed considerations.
The first of these is the fact that the whole mess was predictable, almost from Day One. As soon as American forces entered Kabul, only to find that Mullah Mohammed Omar and Osama bin Laden were long gone, and as soon as the Bush folks decided as a result that the essential goal of the war was to build a “new” Afghan democracy of some sort, it became utterly predictable that the entire endeavor would, in the end, constitute a terrible waste of time, treasure, and lives. In fact, the inimitable Mark Steyn DID predict it, with eerie accuracy, almost an entire decade before the disastrous withdrawal took place:
Six weeks after the last NATO soldier leaves Afghanistan, it will be as if we were never there. Before the election in 2010, the New York Post carried a picture of women registering to vote in Herat, all in identical top-to-toe bright blue burkas, just as they would have looked on Sept. 10, 2001. We came, we saw, we left no trace. America’s longest war will leave nothing behind.
When he wrote those words, Steyn’s assessment seemed, perhaps, overly pessimistic. In reality, they turned out the opposite. It took fewer than six weeks to erase nearly all remnants of the American presence. More to the point, what wasn’t erased – what we did, in fact, leave behind – were billions of dollars of sophisticated weapons and munitions that have made the Taliban far stronger than ever before and, as a consequence, far less likely to be unseated from power a second time.
In some ways, the American occupation actually made the Taliban’s return to power inevitable. As history shows, the Taliban’s original rise to power was predicated in large part on its aggressive, violent, and much-welcomed response to the pederasty that had become ubiquitous among Afghanistan’s post-Soviet-occupation warlords. As we have noted in these pages far more times than we can count, in the name of sensitivity to “indigenous culture,” the American occupation forces enabled the return of the same grotesque abuse of power. And sadly, that was but the tip of the proverbial iceberg of practices enabled by the occupation forces in the vain attempt to be seen as anything but occupation forces. What did we expect was going to happen?
The second exacerbating complication to arise from the disastrous nation-building effort in Afghanistan is that the policy underlying it remains the official policy of the American political establishment. Those who oppose “spreading democracy” (or whatever pleasant-sounding colloquialism the policy is called these days) are deemed crackpots, isolationists, or even “Putin apologists.” Sometimes, these accusations are justified. More times than not, however, they are simply evidence that the foreign policy establishment still believes what it believed in 2001 and has never given serious thought to addressing policies that vary from the accepted paradigm, much less the people who object to that paradigm. Ad hominem is, therefore, all they have.
We’re now nearly a quarter of the way through the 21st Century, and the official American policy for dealing with foreign entanglements is still “occupation and democratization,” despite the repeated manifest failures of that policy to yield anything but death, destruction, and failure.
Although we were, at one point in our professional lives, considered Wall Street “analysts,” The Political Forum/TPFI has never, ever offered anything that might be vaguely misconstrued as financial advice. Nevertheless, we have a near-sure-thing for you.** If you ever find a way to do so, you should pull all of your money out of the markets and bet on this: if the war between Ukraine and Russia and/or the war between Israel and the various Iranian-terrorist-proxies end with an “international” plan to install a “global” peacekeeping force to “maintain order” in some territory or another, American troops and diplomats will lead that force, will insist on controlling that force, will talk endlessly about elections and “self-determination,” will stay longer than representatives from any other country (save, perhaps, Great Britain), and will eventually leave with their tails between their legs.
As stupid as that sounds, that’s all we’ve got.
It’s funny, this country spent decades after Vietnam trying to figure out what went wrong, trying to “learn the lessons” of that war. Every Tom, Dick, and Francis Ford Coppola analyzed that disaster, trying to understand what happened and why. No one – at least no one considered respectable by the ruling class – has done the same for Afghanistan…or Iraq, for that matter. It’s bizarre, but it’s also likely to lead to more, similarly catastrophic episodes in American history.
**Please note that this is NOT actual financial advice. It is merely an indulgence in a bit of poetic license to emphasize how likely the American ruling class is to repeat its past mistakes.
