Lieutenant General (three-star) H. R. McMaster, former national security advisor to Donald Trump, among other crimes, has been all over the airwaves recently, denouncing (of course) President Biden for having the courage to pull the plug on a 20-year farce—albeit one written in the blood of the innocents—known as the Afghan “War”—one of the very worst, and certainly most prolonged of many military disasters the United States has insisted on inflicting on both itself and the hapless inhabitants of those nations so unfortunate enough as to be recipients of our beneficent wrath. Appearing on Meet the Press several weeks ago and speaking with host Chuck Todd, McMaster had this to say:
“And of course, what’s sad about it is this war ended in self-defeat, Chuck. I mean we had a sustainable effort in place several years ago, that if we had sustained it, we could have prevented what’s happening now. But instead, what we did, Chuck, is actually we surrendered to a jihadist organization and assumed that there would be no consequences for that. And we’re seeing the consequences today.”
Uh, well if we had a “sustainable effort” in place several years ago, H.R., why didn’t we, you know, just leave then? Because when H.R. says “sustainable effort” he doesn’t mean an Afghan government that could, you know, sustain itself, he means an unending program of U.S. occupation that would bankroll and defend, not a Potemkin village but a Potemkin country for, you know, the cost of an aircraft carrier or two, or a dozen F-35’s,1 every year, for forever. Because, hey, how come us Army guys don’t get to spend money like those Navy and Air Force guys? It’s just not fair!
A lot of people deserve a lot of blame for our humiliating departure from Afghanistan, but surely the U. S. military deserves a good 90%. Yes, all military commanders counseled against leaving, but not because they were afraid that the existing (supposedly) Afghan government would collapse almost immediately, but because they just didn’t want to leave, period. The simple fact is, the U. S. military intellectual complex had created a “government” in Afganistanthat had no foundation in the country that it supposedly governed, one that was entirely dependent on Uncle Sam’s bankroll and military forces for its existence, and didn’t even know it.
The War in Afghanistan has been a truly remarkable farce n’ fraud, or fraud n’ farce. The initial invasion, undertaken to punish the Taliban for having allowed Osama bin Ladin to function in its territory, and to capture him and the rest of the al-Qaeda leadership, soon fizzled, because what George Bush and the rest of his cronies really wanted to do was take over the entire Middle East, establishing the U. S. as the dominant military presence in the region, assuring both the security of Israel and U. S. control of the world oil price and supply. Despite supposed frustration over the failure to catch bin Ladin at the caves of Tora Bora, or Bora Tora, or some such, the Bush administration really didn’t want to capture bin Ladin, which would imply that the “War on Terror” was over, when, as far as the Bushies were concerned, it was just getting started, for the destruction of the Twin Towers, terrible as it was, was simply the excuse the Bush administration needed to invade Iraq, a nation that had not harmed the U. S. and had no intention of doing so.
Instead of simply punishing the Taliban government, the Bush administration decided they would replace it with a stable, non-threatening regime, similar to what was being done in Iraq (in theory), though with much less attention being paid, since Afghanistan was far less strategically located. One can wonder if this was anything more than simple sop to those military commanders so unfortunate enough as to be stuck in Afghanistan instead of Iraq, where guys were making rank.
Unfortunately, there were some who insisted on “believing” in Afghanistan, most particularly Bush’s secretary of defense, Robert Gates,2 who at the time was the recipient of pretty intense bipartisan respect and praise. It was an unfortunate no-brainer for metrosexual Barack Obama to protect, well, his rear by having Gates continue as SecDef, so Barack wouldn’t have to waste time thinking about Afghanistan himself. Barack had, even more unfortunately, made sounds about Afghanistan being the “good war”, as though he were afraid the military would kill him if he took both their toys away from them at the same time.
With all this stacked against him, there wasn’t much chance that Obama would make a “smart” decision about Afghanistan, and, of course, the military was anxious to make sure that he didn’t even get the chance to. Early in the Obama administration, Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal filed a 66-page report on Afghanistan with Gates. Within days, the report was “mysteriously” leaked to everyone’s favorite Establishment mouthpiece, the WashPost’s Bob Woodward, who promptly wrote it up, with the following breathless lead:
The top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan warns in an urgent, confidential assessment of the war that he needs more forces within the next year and bluntly states that without them, the eight-year conflict “will likely result in failure,” according to a copy of the 66-page document obtained by The Washington Post.
Of course, Woodward didn’t bother to mention that there was 99.999% chance that the report was given to him so that he would run with it and force the president to accept the report’s arguments in toto. Because 1) that was so not important, and 2) if he had mentioned it his source would be infuriated and never give him anything again, and 3) the staunchly interventionist Post wanted to put pressure on Obama to continue this pointless, useless war, as they are demanding that Biden do even today.
Obama gave the military about 90% of what they asked for, but demanded that a timeline be set for withdrawal of U. S. forces in three years, both as a sop to liberals and as a way of pressuring the Afghans to get their act together. That, of course, seriously pissed the military off, and as the deadline approached they began pressuring the administration to continue. Whether there was any chance that Obama would hold them to the deadline is hard to say, but if it ever existed, that chance evaporated with the rise of ISIS and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which made it impossible for Obama to be anything other than the toughest of the tough.
Donald Trump must be given credit for daring to cut, or at least pummel, the Gordian knot of American interventionist hypocrisy and demand, eventually, that the U. S. quit the goddamn place, which he presumably would have done if re-elected. And now Biden bears considerable blame, some of it even due him, mostly for clumsy, evasive statements made when things were falling completely apart, but it is the generals who deserve the real blame, for lying, for manipulating, and for abusing the trust of the American people for a good 15 years and more, all to avoid having to admit they made a mistake, that they were incompetent—that they were grossly incompetent—at their jobs. “Dereliction of Duty” is putting it mildly.
Afterwords
I have been writing/whining about Afghanistan for more than twelve fucking years. Check it out.
Two of my favorite bêtes grises if not bêtes noirs, Den Drezner and Ross Douthat have excellent takes on Afghanistan. It would be “nice” if Ross’s take in particular, becomes the “conventional wisdom” on the subject. For more good thoughts see J.D. Tuccille’s piece for Reason, Americans Cheer Afghan Departure, But Criticize Chaotic Management, along with Ryan Cooper at The Week, The war in Afghanistan has been lost for 2 decades.
For extensive background on the Afghan War, including the fact that the war could have been over in 2001 were it not for Donald Rumsfeld’s hubris, see Spencer Ackerman’s The Taliban Peace Deal Might Have Been Had Many Years and Thousands of Lives Ago in The Daily Beast. At the Washington Post, Carlos Lozada provides even more historical background with 9/11 was a test. The books of the last two decades show how America failed., though to my mind he heavily underemphasizes how the right-wing obsession with “taking out” Saddam, rampant within the Bush administration, and dominant within the entire foreign policy establishment itself, seized on 9/11 to execute a pre-existing agenda to establish a massive, permanent U.S. military presence in the Middle East. This determination was driven entirely by the twin U.S. Middle Eastern obsession, oil and Israel.
1. Since our military leaders know that modern warfare has grown so destructive that there is no conceivable reason why any major power would attack another, they can “safely” waste hundreds of billions of dollars on dysfunctional weapon systems that don’t work, that exist for no purpose other than to spend money, like the F-35 “Flying Turkey”, or the B-21 “bomber”, which, I confidently predict, will lay far more eggs than ordnance, or the U.S. Navy’s $7 billion Zumwalt-class destroyers, which can barely float. as well as its $550 million “Littoral Combat Ship”, armed with the (presumably) deadly “Griffin” missile, delivering a 13-pound warhead with a full 5-mile range. Sadly, the army can’t come up with toys of this caliber. What they really need is a 100-ton “flying tank”.
2. Gates, for whatever reason, was an über hawk when it came to Afghanistan, though I suspect that he had serious guilt feelings about what he had wrought, as it became clearer and clearer to him, though unmentionable to the public, that he had helped greatly to create a bloody morass into which thousands of American lives were poured, for no purpose other than to disguise his own incompetence. In his memoirs, Gates was furiously critical of “Let’s go” Joe Biden for constantly opposing his excellent Afghan adventure, while constantly patting himself on the back for his compassion for all the brave boys he sent “over there”. How he worried about them! How much he cared! Just not enough to admit his mistake and bring them home.
