Well, that’s not entirely true. Tom Nichols has an essay at the Atlantic that captures a great deal of what I think about Afghanistan, and it written in his inimitable style. I highly recommend it.
In the interest of balance, here’s a craptacularly bad one.
Our involvement in Afghanistan is fraught with emotion, emotion that I have never summoned for the issue. There are a great many people I know who have served in Afghanistan, and their experiences are sometimes quite central to their current view of the matter. Along with these experiences comes a lot of raw emotion. Nobody likes to argue with someone who doesn’t have a dog in the fight, and compared to some for whom this is THE ISSUE, I have no dog. Or I have a small, under-the-airplane-seat-in-front-of-me-sized dog.
Like a good bit of the country, I was transfixed by images of bearded SOF riding horses in the early days of our time there, but after a while, the war in Afghanistan and then in Iraq evolved into military engagements that were not particularly interesting to me, and to the extent that I did pay attention to them, it was over my perception that the “War on Terror” was sapping resources the Navy needed.
Besides, from the beginning, my view was that while there were a GREAT many mistakes made by both politicians and military during this war, the war itself was the kind of thing that great powers do, and I believed that I lived in a country where this was understood. We began by destroying a terrorist organization, and then we worked to create conditions where that organization could not return while helping to introduce moderate political reform. For much of the 20 years, those were the conditions that have existed. Bret Stephens put it well in a column this week (another worth reading): "
Yes, because our inability to help everyone, everywhere doesn’t relieve us of the obligation to help someone, somewhere — and because America’s power and reputation in the world are also functions of being a beacon of confidence and hope.
For whatever reason (ignorance, hubris, arrogance), I thought my fellow agreed with this. As time went on though, I realized that they didn’t. Over time, an American public who (as Tom Nichols above) sacrificed virtually nothing came to view the fact that no new 9-11’s have happened since the old 9-11 as not worth it anymore. Although the mission grew to far more than just anti-terrorism, it is hard to argue with the continuing effectiveness of this initial, central, objective.
And although the campaigns and operations in Afghanistan over the past two decades have not been of interest to me, I have remained a foreign policy primacist, which Wikipedia tells us is:
Primacy holds that only a preponderance of U.S. power ensures peace. As a result, it advocates that the United States pursue ultimate hegemony and dominate the international system economically, politically and militarily, rejecting any return to bipolarity or multipolarity and preventing the emergence of any peer competitor. Therefore, its proponents argue that U.S. foreign policy should focus on maintaining U.S. power and preventing any other power from becoming a serious challenger to the United States.
To me, this means that we are actively engaged in the world in a leadership capacity, that we occasionally have to put a bit of stick about, and that sometimes our interests dictate that the best we can do is act like a hockey referee and get between two (or more) sets of combatants. That’s essentially what the Afghanistan mission had become, but over time and in bi-partisan fashion, Obama, Trump, and Biden all gave the people what they wanted, and made our footprint (and capacity) in Afghanistan smaller and smaller—because that’s what the American public overwhelmingly wanted.
That’s something to be remembered. Bryan McGrath’s view on Afghanistan is a minority view. Three straight Presidents have been elected saying that they want to end our involvement in Afghanistan (although Obama wanted to have us believe that Afghanistan was the “good” war (not Iraq), he had no real plan or interest in creating one). The last one made a deal with the devil to bring it about, and the present one didn’t have the sense to walk away from it.
So now we are watching Afghanistan descend once again into Islamic fundamentalist hell. Joe Biden MUST take his share of blame because he is the President and our forces were responding to his orders and the policies of his government. Donald Trump MUST take his share for his shallow, adolescent “forever wars” bullshit that led to his agreement with the Taliban.
Barack Obama MUST take his share of blame because he started the Presidential campaign practice of turning something the American public didn’t care much about into something he wanted them to care about to his political advantage.
Presidents need to lead. We should have had Presidents on television looking into the camera and saying “I’m sorry, but we need to be in Afghanistan because we don’t want future terror attacks aided and abetted by that country, because we have made a commitment to a people who trust us, and because when a great nation breaks its commitments it becomes instantaneously less great and less trustworthy.” But we didn’t hear these words. We heard constant talk of cutting troop levels, of figuring out how to get out, of doing everything we could to walk away. We have had Presidents who followed; they did not lead.
President Biden gave the order and the military carried it out. Now we are watching the results play out on the evening news, but the result I fear more than anything else is the continued diminishment in our standing in the world. Not a great thing as we prattle on about renewed great power competition.
I want to end this discourse on Afghanistan by wondering aloud about the “forever wars” crowd, the kind of people who find the National Interest article linked to above to be just their cup of tea.
I skate out onto this very thin ice, knowing that what I’m conjecturing about here is going to piss some people off. But here goes. Have there been any studies that attempt to correlate religious practice/faith with support for remaining in Afghanistan? I ask this because as I think about this issue—and any issue where the U.S. turns its back on commitments so blatantly, so publicly—I find myself wondering how anyone who believes that there are consequences in the next world for how we act in this world, can honestly look at what is happening in Afghanistan and say that withdrawal is the best course of action for the U.S.? I see no inconsistency in holding this view if you believe there is no afterlife and there are no such consequences.
Driving East Cross-Country
As I write this section, I am in Youngstown, Ohio, having left Coralville, Iowa this morning at 0415. I essentially broke the trip down into four 600 mile legs, and a fifth 400 mile leg—which is tomorrow (back to Easton).
I have been getting underway early each day and going to sleep early. My theory was that the very early morning hours would be great for driving, and that I could make a great deal of ground up before the traffic begins to build. The flaws in my plan quickly became manifest. First, both day 1 (leaving Sacramento) and day 2 (Salt Lake City), this early morning drive was on curvy mountain highways, and so the drives weren’t very enjoyable at all. Day 3 and 4 both featured large portions of the early drive on roads under construction, this morning with the added bonus of cutting down to a two-lane highway one in each direction. My kingdom for a three lane superhighway and four hours of open road.
Seriously…a good portion of this trip will have been on I-80. I’d guess that there is road construction on at least 5% of the highway.
If I had to do this again, I’d have done a better job with the math and just done four 700 mile days. Two excuses for not doing this. First, lazy, in that the AAA site I planned this on would only allow me 600 miles a day (there are others that allow for more driving). Second, I haven’t made a cross country trip in this short of time since my 2001 trip east (made it from San Dog to Arlington in three driving days—baller) when I was a robust 36 years old, and I figured I’d be somewhat less up to the rigors of long drives. I was wrong. Maybe I’m just a lot better at sitting around on my fat ass.