Well, I suppose the fall of Kabul requires some sort of commentary, although I think the reason Joe Biden could get away with letting things collapse as quickly as they did and blame the Afghanistan government because they “gave up” is because the average American doesn’t care what happens there any more than he does.
I can give Biden a certain amount of credit in acknowledging, better than his President Barack Obama ever did, that the Afghanistan occupation was a Bush boondoggle that wasn’t doing us any good, especially after Bush divided our focus by taking Iraq. And as much as I hate Donald Trump, even he had the sense to want to get out. I could only blame Trump for two things: Not actually getting out, and then blaming Biden for actually carrying out the withdrawal plan that he initiated.
And of course all the liberal partisans like MSDNC are playing up the point that Viceroy Trump was the guy who first had the idea to negotiate with the Taliban directly AT Camp David (which his advisers got him to fall back on) and did make an agreement, bypassing the Kabul government, that released 5000 prisoners who ended up going back to fight for the Taliban. But what do you expect? Blaming other people for what he did and taking credit for what he didn’t do is Trump’s thing. I’m just wondering why Trump was so desperate to stay in the White House knowing that he had already planned to pull out of Afghanistan and would therefore get blamed if Kabul fell while he was in charge. But then again, he IS senile.
But that’s what happens when you’re the president. You get blamed for anything that goes wrong on your watch, just as you get the credit for what goes right even if you really had nothing to do with it. And of course, Biden knows this. Neither Trump nor (frankly) Obama wanted to make a difficult decision, because they knew they would get blamed for exactly what’s happening now: the country falling apart without American forces because Afghans would not fight back no matter how much hardware we gave them, and religious fundamentalists marching into towns, rounding up dissidents and telling women they can’t go outside the home. (Republicans only object to religious fundamentalists rounding up dissidents and oppressing women when said fundamentalists wear beards and don’t worship Jesus.)
Again I can at least give Biden respect for knowing to cut bait even knowing that he’d be the one to get blamed for something that everyone knew had to happen anyway. But then I think he’s willing to take the lumps because everyone, including the superficially pro-military Republican Party, knows this had to happen anyway.
And it comes down to one point Biden made in his Monday speech: “American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.”
It reminded me of a time when, after getting taken advantage of too many times by professional drug addicts, I dealt with another friend who was not a narcotics addict but was still doing everything he could to destroy his own life while still relying on me for material support and the enabling of his bad habits. At one point, I told him, “you can’t expect other people to care about your life more than you do.”
The Afghanistan, uh, project was something that Americans, or rather the foreign-policy “blob” always cared about more than the Afghan population at large. However much benefit Westernizing the cities had and however much it helped to give girls opportunity for education, this was really more a side benefit for the occupation and not really of benefit to the population at large, at least not enough to get them to support the Western-backed government.
If you’ve ever worked in a call center and have ever tried to show a senior citizen how to sign up for an Internet account over the phone, then you know why we needed 20 years to get Afghanistan out of the Dark Ages and it still didn’t work.
Plus which, it’s not like that’s necessarily a good idea. Both conservative imperialists and liberal technocrats thought they could take an ancient culture and fit it into our way of doing things as if that was the only valid system. It by and large bypassed the way people had been doing things for ages and so all those technical and financial advantages didn’t help against an enemy that knew the terrain.
In an article just out for The Atlantic, a former Pentagon official recounts how he visited Kabul in 2017 and the delegation had to travel by helicopter instead of by road: “As we flew over Kabul, I realized that the Afghan security forces, backed by thousands of U.S. personnel, could not even secure the heart of Afghanistan’s capital.” Monday on The Rachel Maddow Show, Maddow played the tape of when she and Richard Engel were touring Kabul 11 years ago – so, only halfway into the occupation – and observed a walled neighborhood built from scratch that wasn’t there before 9-11, and noted how the locals derided the architecture as “narcopalaces”, “gangster chic, big, garish, gigantic, rococo” places designed to look very, very rich. And she said: “I feel like it taught me something that you can only sort of experience by being there… if you do churn billions of dollars a month, every month, into the economy of one of the world’s poorest countries, and you do that month in and month out for a whole year, and you do that month in and month out for a second year… ultimately you do billions of dollars a month, for 20 solid years, if you do that and at the end of 20 solid years of investment, it’s still one of the poorest countries on Earth? There’s a problem.”
In one of the more glaring examples of US incompetence and carelessness during the “planned” withdrawal, we pulled out of the Bagram air base without telling the locals. “The U.S. left Afghanistan’s Bagram Airfield after nearly 20 years by shutting off the electricity and slipping away in the night without notifying the base’s new Afghan commander, who discovered the Americans’ departure more than two hours after they left, Afghan military officials said. … Before the Afghan army could take control of the airfield about an hour’s drive from the Afghan capital Kabul, it was invaded by a small army of looters, who ransacked barrack after barrack and rummaged through giant storage tents before being evicted, according to Afghan military officials.
“… The big ticket items left behind include thousands of civilian vehicles, many of them without keys to start them, and hundreds of armored vehicles. Kohistani said the U.S. also left behind small weapons and the ammunition for them, but the departing troops took heavy weapons with them. Ammunition for weapons not being left behind for the Afghan military was blown up before they left.
“Afghan soldiers who wandered Monday throughout the base that had once seen as many as 100,000 U.S. troops were deeply critical of how the U.S. left Bagram, leaving in the night without telling the Afghan soldiers tasked with patrolling the perimeter.
“In one night, they lost all the goodwill of 20 years by leaving the way they did, in the night, without telling the Afghan soldiers who were outside patrolling the area,” said Afghan soldier Naematullah, who asked that only his one name be used.”
It’s of a piece with our whole approach to the military in a foreign base, where everything is set up to the benefit of an outside infrastructure without any coordination with the locals, based on the ultratech that the US military has become addicted to, and therefore unusable by the local military that doesn’t have access to our support structure, to the extent that we gave a damn about that in the first place. Which meant that once deprived of that outside technical support system the Afghan military had no resources, because there was no thought in asking the locals how they would fight the war, and therefore no advantage to having greater numbers than the Taliban (in theory) and the same knowledge of the terrain. This was not a great arrangement for the Afghans or the Americans on the ground, but it was great for our military-industrial complex, and that’s all that matters.
You would think – you would think – that after so many historical examples like Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh using a poor but highly motivated army to deliver a strategic defeat to forces that figuratively had all the money in the world but weren’t having any of that trickling down to them, that the United States would have learned that the top-down approach doesn’t work. But if we cared about anything other than the top, things wouldn’t be like this.
Nobody learns anything because nobody has to. The US isn’t going to do either the moral nor the practical thing. That’s not what this government does. The government just sets up a gravy train for connected people and keeps it going regardless of whether it fulfills the alleged goal, and no matter how many times we find that it isn’t working out, we keep it going as long as there’s enough money to do so. But then one day you may not have enough money to do so, as both the British and the Russians found out.
I am mainly reminded of the lesson learned by the computer at the end of Wargames: “The only way to win is not to play.”