I’m generally not a huge fan of the National Review, but, well, I’m in an excitable mood these days, ready to let out a mighty cheer of affirmation at the drop of a hat, really, and the folks at NR dropped a lot more than that when they published an absolutely sensational piece by one Michael Brendan Dougherty, to wit, The $90 Billion Question, which asks, and answers, the question “Why did the Afghan National Army collapse almost instantly, despite nearly two decades of training and $90 billion in cash from the American people?”
To get us the answer, Mike reads through Collapse of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces: An Assessment of the Factors That Led to Its Demise, prepared by “SIGSAR” (Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction) and here is some of what he has to say:
Failure has a thousand authors. A cursory reading of the latest report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) has led people to conclude that the full collapse of Afghanistan into the hands of the Taliban is the fault of Donald Trump, with a little assistance from Joe Biden. This is the independent reporting body empowered by Congress to get the story straight. Foreign Policy summed up the top-line finding: “Former President Donald Trump’s bilateral deal with the Taliban, and President Joe Biden’s decision to stick to it, caused the disintegration of Afghanistan’s security forces.”
Well, you can set Foreign Policy gal Lynne O’Donnell and SIGAR as my new least favorite Blob mouthpieces. I’ll let Mike do a little more talking.
Scapegoating the presidents suits the Pentagon, the State Department, the congressional committees, and the vast industry of military contractors perfectly. All of these bodies would prefer that American foreign policy be conducted without the annoying input of presidents. Why? Because the president has a political attachment, via democratic elections, to the true enemy of the foreign-policy establishment, the American people.
Here is what SIGAR itself has to say about what is supposedly all Trump and Biden’s fault:
After 20 years of training and development, the ANDSF [Afghan National Defense and Security Forces] never became a cohesive, substantive force capable of operating on its own. The U.S. and Afghan governments share in the blame. Neither side appeared to have the political commitment to doing what it would take to address the challenges, including devoting the time and resources necessary to develop a professional ANDSF, a multi-generational process. In essence, U.S. and Afghan efforts to cultivate an effective and sustainable security sector were likely to fail from the beginning. The February 2020 decision to commit to a rapid U.S. military withdrawal sealed the ANDSF’s fate.
In other words, what we should have done is stay another 20 years—because, you know, these multi-generational processes take awhile—and do everything right this time, and then leave!
My only complaint here is not with Mike but rather his headline writer, because the head should be “The $2 Trillion Question”—the true price tag of this mind-numbing debacle.
Afterwords
I have complained, most venomously, on the Afghan Horror for 14 years, as long as I’ve been running this blog, perhaps most extensively here. Back in 2019, the New York Times asked itself What Did the U.S. Get for $2 Trillion in Afghanistan?. The answer: more howling, and more hypocrisy, from the military intellectual complex who only wish that wars, like the Brook, could go on forever.
