Failure and amnesia regarding Afghanistan

The United States' bumbling, stumbling withdrawal from Kabul in the wake of the Afghan government's house-of-cards-like collapse seems to have awakened the American public, at least momentarily, from its 20 year nap regarding our involvement in Afghanistan.

Fortunately, some observers have been keeping an eye on what we've done and what we've failed to do in Afghanistan over the last two decades.  Now they're weighing in with some perspective.  Can we stay awake long enough to learn any lessons?

Events in Afghanistan rarely have registered on Americans' collective radar since the devastating 9/11 attacks during George W Bush's first term.  Our armed forces swiftly toppled the Taliban regime and drove Osama bin Laden into hiding.  That initial military success gave Americans a sense that all was well in that part of the world.  Before long, the Bush Administration's foolish decision to invade Iraq mostly crowded Afghanistan out of our collective consciousness.   

Our inattention span stretched over many years.  Syndicated columnist Steve Chapman tweeted earlier this week, "As a journalist I can report that nothing I've written about in the past decade has gotten less readership or response than columns about Afghanistan."

In a recent column, Chapman provided us with some historical perspective and an important lesson:

In the 1980s, liberals depicted President Ronald Reagan as a trigger-happy warmonger. But his two terms stand out as a time when the United States, haunted by Vietnam, largely rejected direct military intervention abroad. He did dispatch Marines to Beirut as part of a peacekeeping force — but when a terrorist attack killed 241 American service members, he quickly withdrew our forces.

Reagan’s Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger laid out a set of principles for deciding when to go to war. He argued that “vital national interests” must be at stake and that we must have clear objectives and the means to attain them.

By 1992, the “Weinberger Doctrine” was incorporated into the “Powell Doctrine” by Gen. Colin Powell, who served President George H.W. Bush as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Among his contributions was the rule that we have “a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement.”

This approach didn’t mean the U.S. would never go to war: We did so in 1983 in Grenada to topple a Marxist government and rescue American students. We did so in 1989 in Panama to remove a dictator blamed for drug trafficking. Most notably, we did so in 1991 to evict Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait.

Whether these wars were wise and necessary is subject to debate. But in each case, we did what we set out to do and got out.

Obviously, in Afghanistan (and also Iraq), we didn't remember the lessons of Vietnam which were incorporated into the Powell Doctrine:

It has been clear for years that our efforts in Afghanistan were not working. But three presidents chose to prolong our involvement rather than admit futility.

What we learned when President Joe Biden refused to continue the war is that our failure exceeded our worst assumptions. We didn’t know what was really going on in Afghanistan, and we didn’t know we didn’t know. We were clueless in Kabul.

In a scathing article, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat expands on the fruitlessness of two decades in Afghanistan:

My cynicism consisted of the belief that the American effort to forge a decent Afghan political settlement failed definitively during Barack Obama’s first term in office, when a surge of U.S. forces blunted but did not reverse the Taliban’s recovery. This failure was then buried under a Vietnam-esque blizzard of official deceptions and bureaucratic lies, which covered over a shift in American priorities from the pursuit of victory to the management of stalemate, with the American presence insulated from casualties in the hopes that it could be sustained indefinitely.

Under this strategic vision — to use the word “strategic” generously — there would be no prospect of victory, no end to corruption among our allies and collateral damage from our airstrikes, no clear reason to be in Afghanistan, as opposed to any other failing state or potential terror haven, except for the sunk cost that we were there already. But if American casualty rates stayed low enough, the public would accept it, the Pentagon budget would pay for it, and nobody would have to preside over anything so humiliating as defeat.

In one way, my cynicism went too far. I guessed that the military and the national-security bureaucracy would be able to frustrate the desire of every incoming U.S. president to declare an endless-seeming conflict over, and I was wrong. Something like that happened with Obama and Donald Trump in their first years in office, but it didn’t happen with Joe Biden. He promised withdrawal, and — however shambolically — we have now actually withdrawn.

But in every other way the withdrawal has made the case for an even deeper cynicism — about America’s capacities as a superpower, our mission in Afghanistan and the class of generals, officials, experts and politicos who sustained its generational extension.

How fruitless were our efforts and expenditures in Afghanistan?

Only recently the view that without U.S. troops the American-backed government in Kabul would be doomed to the same fate as the Soviet-backed government some 30 years ago seemed like hardheaded realism. Now such “realism” has been proven to be wildly over-optimistic. Without Soviet troops, the Moscow-backed government actually held out for several years before the mujihadeen reached Kabul. Whereas our $2,000,000,000,000 built a regime that fell to the Taliban before American troops could even finish their retreat.

Before this summer, in other words, it was possible to read all the grim inspector general reports and document dumps on Afghanistan, count yourself a cynic about the war effort and still imagine that America got something for all that spending, no matter how much was spent on Potemkin installations or siphoned off by pederast warlords or recirculated to Northern Virginia contractors.

Now, though, we know that in terms of actual staying power, all our nation-building efforts couldn’t even match what the Soviet Union managed in its dotage.

Douthat lists a number of delusions and fallacies (which he characterizes as "self-deceiving, dubious or risible")  that sustained the Afghanistan operation: that the casualty counts were low; that we were building an Afghan nation which would be a bastion of Western liberal values; that our presence in Afghanistan was comparable to our post-war presence in Germany or Korea.  He concludes:

All these arguments are connected to a set of moods that flourished after 9/11: a mix of cable-news-encouraged overconfidence in American military capacities, naïve World War II nostalgia and crusading humanitarianism in its liberal and neoconservative forms. Like most Americans, I shared in those moods once; after so many years of failure, I cannot imagine indulging in them now. But it’s clear from the past few weeks that they retain an intense subterranean appeal in the American elite, waiting only for the right circumstances to resurface ...

Again, Biden deserves plenty of criticism. But like the Trump administration in its wiser moments, he is trying to disentangle America from a set of failed policies that many of his loudest critics long supported.

Our botched withdrawal is the punctuation mark on a general catastrophe, a failure so broad that it should demand purges in the Pentagon, the shamed retirement of innumerable hawkish talking heads, the razing of various NGOs and international-studies programs and the dissolution of countless consultancies and military contractors.

It's difficult to imagine that the implications of this colossal failure will be relegated to 100+ Americans left behind(!)  Our enemies surely are taking our arrogance, foolishness and plain incompetence and weakness into account.  

To propose an analogy: Pope Francis's papacy has brought into sharp relief an institutional Catholic church badly in need of reform from misgovernance, corruption, decadence, arrogance, sinfulness and a leadership disconnected from reality in many ways.  Afghanistan now is doing the same for the experiment known as the United States of America.  I fear that, as bad as the situation appears now for the Catholic church, it is even worse for the United States, because it appears to me that the rot goes deeper.  How can we recover wisdom, humility, prudence, resolve, clear moral vision, and the other virtues in such short supply?  

Do you have any confidence that Americans will wake up in time to put out the fire?