Playing Round 20 of that peculiarly American game, “Who lost Afghanistan?”
Interestingly enough, there is one answer that is never allowed in this discussion. No one ever blames the Afghans themselves. As a result, it’s similar to the old game Americans used to play: “ Who lost Iraq?“
An interesting side note – these games get played more under Democratic Presidents than they do Republican ones – even when the Republican President does the same thing the Democratic one does.
Like my engagements with fans of the teabaggers back in 2009 and 2010 at Lex’s place and various other mil blog cheerleaders of economic cruelty – the baseline pro-war argument vis a vis Afghanistan is very similar to the ones made in the late ’60s and early ’70s. ” Just more time and more troops – that is what is needed to ensure victory.”
And just as surely, there is another unwritten rule of things that are never discussed in this parlor game: You are not allowed to point out the opportunity cost the nation pays for being committed to a war without end. Just as you cannot or they will not acknowledge that the real threats to America got a free pass to surpass the United States because they opted out of playing.
After all, from the Russian and Chinese standpoint – when your number one competitor and opposition is killing themselves economically and militarily – don’t stand in their way.
In the end, every round of this tragic American game of blaming Americans for Afghanistan has the same flawed and incorrectly stated results:
–Obama lost Afghanistan by not committing enough troops. And announcing an end date. ( Never mind that we never actually met an end date)
–“The struggle that will define this century’s arc: radical Islamic terrorism.” The objective was “victory,” requiring the use of “all tools of influence–from diplomacy to economic ties, from intelligence efforts to military action.” (This is almost always followed by cries of The Taliban will be resurgent and wait us out.)
–Leaving Afghanistan will create a haven for terrorists – just like it did in the ’90s. ( Which, of course, begs the question, what did we spend all that money on homeland security for?)
And then there is this rather flawed take:
Now I will give Nichols some credit as he also acknowledges the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” nature of the situation:
However, measured responses and acknowledgment of our failures were by and large, not the rule of the day over in teabaggerville:
Sen. Lindsey Graham shared a similar sentiment, calling the withdrawal “a disaster in the making” and “so irresponsible, it makes the Biden Administration policies at the border look sound.”
Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., whose father was vice president when the war began, called the Sept. 11 deadline “a huge propaganda victory for the Taliban, for al Qaeda.”
“Any withdrawal of forces that is not based on conditions on the ground puts American security at risk,” she said.
The great thing about this rhetoric is that it is reusable. Just change the name, and you heard the same statements in 2009, 2011, 2014. We should have heard it in 2020 when the orange monster announced a withdrawal – but some of the usual suspects above remained curiously quiet.
This is usually the point where I like to mention that if we were going to stay there forever, maybe we should have gone with the “colonial solution” and just conquered the place, making it an American territory. The results would be the same. The war has cost the United States more than $1 trillion, with 2,300 U.S. troops and more than 3,800 American contractors killed and another 20,000 GIs wounded in action, many grievously. And that’s not counting the more than 100,000 members of Afghan security forces and Afghan civilians killed along the way.
For what?
The Afghan war cheerleaders never have a good explanation for that. Stopping terrorism? Building a stable nation? Neither has been accomplished – and probably never will be.
The simple truth is – their effort in Afghanistan was flawed from the start. The key issue was the Bush response to 9-11. 9-11 was a crime, we responded by going to war against a tactic criminals used. Then we aggravated our mistake by invading Iraq. As Andrew Bacevich pointed out last year, the war’s architects had no idea what they were doing:
Critics of U.S. policy in Afghanistan have long made the case that U.S. efforts there are doomed to fail. Senior civilian and military officials have offered a different assessment, regularly issuing optimistic progress reports. At the end of the tunnel, light gleams.
Thanks to a trove of government documents made available today courtesy of The Washington Post, we now know that many of those officials were lying. The lies began during the George W. Bush administration and continued through the administration of Barack Obama. The liars included both senior civilian officials and military officers directly responsible for the war’s conduct.
….indeed, the documents show that from the war’s earliest days, senior U.S. officials such as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld knew that events in Afghanistan were spinning out of control. “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are,” Rumsfeld complained September 2003. Of course, by then for official Washington the Iraq War had eclipsed Afghanistan as a matter of priority interest. There, too, knowing who the bad guys are proved to be a problem.
Perhaps the most damning assessment in the documents that the Post provides comes from retired Army Lieutenant General Doug Lute, who served on the National Security Council during both the Bush and Obama administrations. Lute was commonly referred to as the White House “czar” for Afghanistan. Yet in a 2015 conversation with interviewers, he confessed, “We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”
Robert McNamara is holding on line one.
I suspect, were he actually there and not deceased, he would say the same thing Bacevich did: “a misguided war that drags on inconclusively for more than [19] years is, I submit, a far greater crime.”
And never, ever, will the players in America’s favorite rhetorical parlor game put the blame where it belongs – on the Afghan people themselves. They had more than enough time to fix themselves and their government. They failed at every turn.
And while we stayed stuck in the “graveyard of empires,” – China and Russia got a free pass to advance on the gameboard – especially China, which had no war on terror to pay for and thus could spend its money in other ways.
And were the more important adversary than Al Quaeda in 2001. We got our vengeance for 9-11 and then some.
At the end of the day – for the United States – it is about what is in the United States’ interest. Not what is in the interest of a corrupt and unpopular Afghan government. It’s been 20 years; we gave them more than they deserved. It’s time to leave.
Make no mistake – we can leave:
Only by owning up to the mindless failure of U.S. military efforts since 9/11 does it become possible to restore real choice. Alternatives to an open-ended war waged on the other side of the globe do exist. Contrary to {Ash} Carter’s lame insistence, the United States can leave Afghanistan. Protecting Americans from the relatively modest threat posed by the Taliban or al-Qaida or the Islamic State — or all three combined for that matter — does not require the permanent stationing of U.S. forces in the Islamic world, especially given the evidence that the presence of American troops there serves less to pacify than to provoke.
In the end, it comes down to interests and values. The primary U.S. interest at stake is self-defense, which in this instance can be best achieved by erecting effective barriers against terrorism here at home. And should our values dictate that we attempt to alleviate the suffering of Afghans (and Iraqis), then honesty requires an admission that our efforts have succeeded only in making matters worse. When it comes to philanthropy, military might tends to be of negligible utility.
So let’s get it over with. Come, let’s play the stupid American parlor game.