“Decline is a choice!” bellowed the late Charles Krauthammer back in the day, livid (to say the least) that that pantywaist in the White House hadn’t yet bombed the hell out of whomever Charles felt needed such treatment. And his spiritual children, the Trump-battered nextgen neocons at the Dispatch and the Bulwark are continuing to howl. Even Ross “Mr. Both Ways” Douthat, in a pseudo-Gibbonesque, more in sorrow than in anger meditation, The American Empire in Retreat, allows that “you can think, as I do, that it’s a good thing that we finally ended our futile engagement in Afghanistan and still fear some of the possible consequences of the weakness and incompetence exposed in that retreat.”
Here's the thing: The weakness and incompetence “exposed” by our departure was not any weakness or incompetence displayed in our departure, but rather the stunning weakness and incompetence displayed in the spending of $2 trillion, and thousands of American lives, and tens of thousands of Afghan lives—those Afghans about whom the “right” professes to care so greatly—in order to avoid admitting that, well, we didn’t know what the Hell we were doing!—that’s the weakness and incompetence “exposed” by our departure! The Biden administration’s only crime was honesty! As Connecticut senator Chris Murphy explains in this stunningly lucid piece for “Crooked”, Why Biden's Afghanistan Critics Are Dangerously Wrong, America’s departure from a farcically bungled—“farcically bungled” as in “insanely bloody and corrupt”—20-year occupation was bound to provoke a panic by thousands of Afghans:
[H]ow on earth could a few thousand troops and diplomats prevent any nation—let alone a nation of nearly 40 million people—from a descent into pandemonium after its citizens watched their public institutions disappear overnight, their president flee the country, and its 300,000-strong security forces lay down their weapons to a quickly advancing rebel force? This is the most egregious argument of the “execute better” crowd. It’s reasonable to argue the Biden administration should have seen the rapid collapse coming, but they could not have stopped a panicked mass rush on the airport. As one Taliban leader said, “If you hear the Americans are at the airport flying people out, how are you not going to go there?”
Fifty percent of the blame should go to, first, the Bush administration, which refused to accept the Taliban’s surrender mere months after the initial American invasion, on the grounds that the U.S. didn’t “compromise” with “Evil”. Rather than just “declare a victory and go home,” which the Bush people surely could have done at any time during the administration’s eight years in office, they made a radical conversion of the entirety of Afghan society its explicit goal. Anything else would be “failure”.
The other 50 percent should go to the U.S. military, which sandbagged poor Barak Obama as soon as he took office, by leaking a “confidential” report to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates that, surprise, surprise, allowed as how our near eight-year “mission” in Afghanistan was on the verge of collapse absent a massive infusion of both troops and money.1 Obama had already largely boxed himself in by reappointing Gates, a holdover from the Bush administration, to cover his metrosexual ass on all things military,2 so perhaps I should reapportion the blame to 40/10 on this one. At any rate, Obama subsequently let himself be rolled again and again by the military for the full eight years of his two terms, while Trump blustered and flustered for most of his four, until, at the eleventh hour, he finally forced through an actual schedule for departure—due, one suspects, in large part to the fact that the Taliban was increasing its power to the extent that we would be soon driven out whether we wanted to go or not.
Throughout this shameless and shameful farce, no “respectable” voice in Washington—none!—dared point a finger at the organization responsible—the U.S. military. No one asked why, for example, if the increase in U.S. troop strength under Obama, from about 30,000 in 2008 to 100,000 in 2011, failed to do the trick, as it most certainly did, an increase under Donald Trump, raising the U.S. total to 14,000 (not a misprint), would carry the day. Because, of course, the military knew the country would not stand for a real increase, to, say, 75,000, yet also could not admit that they had failed, utterly, over and over again, despite their endless promises and endless lies. They had to have something, a pathetic token, to cover their sorry asses.
And so they continued to lie, over and over again, for decades, and have never been called account for it, even when their record was published for all to see, in what the Washington Post quite sensibly labeled The Afghanistan Papers. Even after publishing that withering indictment, the Post, in its editorial pages, clung unceasingly to the preposterous fiction that, after 20 years of abject failure in our “war” with the Taliban, we shouldn’t have to pay any price for that failure, that the “crime” was not in losing the war, but in admitting that we lost it, and as the ugly price for that failure emerged, the Post unceasingly demanded that Biden somehow “fix” everything, without, you know, without sending 250,000 troops back in.
I confess to being a more than a little gobsmacked by the “outrage” coming from our allies—as if the constant discussion of our departure by both Trump and Biden were simply mere “noise”, intended for the consumption of domestic yokels only, who could be relied upon to be deceived by the old bait and switch for another decade at least. Here’s what our allies should have been surprised at: that after 20 years of effort, the “government” concocted by our great military leaders fell apart in a matter of weeks! Consider that, three decades earlier, the USSR, after struggling for nine years to maintain an indigenous (more or less) communist government in power, finally withdrew its forces in 1989. Yet the Afghan communists remained in power for two years without outside assistance before finally being overthrown! Two years rather than two weeks! Isn’t that what’s truly shocking?
Our departure from Afghanistan fortuitously coincided with the 20th anniversary of 9/11. A few astute observers remarked on how disproportionate were the lamentations spent, twenty years after, on one day of horror, costing 3,000 lives, compared to the lamentations spent on COVID-19, costing 2,000 times that number of lives, as well as perhaps an equal number of severe illnesses, in many cases inflicting permanent injury on those infected. Equally disproportionate—and this was almost never noticed—was our gigantic response to 9/11, gigantic both in its size and in its incompetence, a response that brought death and destruction not to thousands but to millions, suffering that has gone almost unnoticed—and certainly unmourned—by those responsible. Americans have scarcely begun to make a reckoning with the extent of the failure of our “War on Terror”. “Why do we hate the past?” asked William Dean Howells. “Because it’s so goddamned embarrassing,” replied Mark Twain.
Afterwords
In his meditation on our “retreat” from Afghanistan, Ross Douthat rumbles on quite a bit in the following manner:
As someone swiftly pointed out on Twitter, the hangar scene had a strong end-of-the-Roman Empire vibe, with the Taliban fighters standing for the Visigoths or Vandals who adopted bits and pieces of Roman culture even as they overthrew the empire. For a moment it offered a glimpse of what a world after the American imperium might look like: Not the disappearance of all our pomps and works, any more than Roman culture suddenly disappeared in 476 A.D., but a world of people confusedly playacting American-ness in the ruins of our major exports, the military base and the shopping mall.
But the glimpse provided in the video isn’t necessarily a foretaste of true imperial collapse. In other ways, our failure in Afghanistan more closely resembles Roman failures that took place far from Rome itself — the defeats that Roman generals suffered in the Mesopotamian deserts or the German forests, when the empire’s reach outstripped its grasp.
Or at least that’s how I suspect it will be seen in the cold light of hindsight, when some future Edward Gibbon sets out to tell the story of the American imperium in full.
But here’s the thing: Neither Vietnam nor Afghanistan were ever part of our “imperium” in the first place. We never owned them, we never conquered them. They were utterly irrelevant to the security or the prosperity of the United States. Both enterprises—the establishment of stable, self-sufficient, pro-American regimes literally on the other side of the earth—were undertaken in a fit of hubris—the notion, really, that the United States could not rest until the entire world behaved in a manner to our liking.
Our failure in Vietnam was a prelude, not to greater and greater disasters, but staggering successes, as we saw the collapse of revolutionary socialism take place in scarcely more than a decade, to the amazement of all the “experts”, who, of course, had expected to spend the rest of their lives continuing to play the role of well-paid Cassandras, sitting in front of TV cameras and sternly warning of imminent disaster until they were safely into retirement age.3
The communist monster toppled largely as a result of its own stunning incompetence, though with some shrewdly opportunistic assistance from Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who, unlike their stumbling would-be imitators, had a sense of proportion. There is no reason to believe that the United States, presuming that we are ever capable of regaining a sense of proportion, cannot continue more or less than we have for the indefinite future. Certainly, within the next century the center of civilization will shift to the East, ultimately through the sheer weight of population, but at this point it is utterly unclear how that will occur. China is currently well in the lead, but may ultimately succeed in shooting itself not in the foot but the head if its obsession with centralized control does not reverse itself within the next 20 years. The point is, the true moral of Afghanistan is that we never should have attempted to make it part of our “empire” in the first place, not that we never should have left.
1. The Obama administration set the record for jailing journalists for violating the 1917 Espionage Act, yet unaccountably gave leakmeister Bob Woodward a pass on this one, almost as if the criminal law only applies to little people.
2. It is, frankly, pathetic that Obama didn’t know how to pronounce “corps”. Was he from Hawaii or, you know, West Virginia?
3. The communist victory in Vietnam, while a great tragedy for the Vietmanese people, was, shockingly, a great boon to the U.S., and a great burden to the U.S.S.R. Despite endless prophecies of toppling dominoes, urged by the tongue of every foreign policy “expert“ alive, the newly triumphant North Vietnamese army had zero interest in engaging in any wars of aggression. The “third largest army in the world”, as terrified conservatives liked to call it, engaged in a grand total of two wars, one against Communist Cambodia, and the other against Communist China. The People’s Republic of Vietnam proved to be nothing more (or less) than a massive millstone around the Soviet Union’s neck, requiring subsidies of 40 billion rubles a year before the U.S.S.R. finally ground to a halt. See Serghii Plokhy’s The Last Empire for details on the immense burden the dysfunctional Soviet “Empire” placed on the U.S.S.R.
Great point on Woodward, a big people