15 & 19 August 2021
Afghanistan always was going to be ruled by the Taliban
after our departure from that land outside Christendom
Note. I started writing this yesterday. The collapse of the Afghan government occurred so rapidly I would revise my essay, check the latest news, revise my essay again, and repeat the cycle over the next 24 hours. I think what I’ve written is reasonably up to date, but at some point it becomes necessary to stop writing and to publish what one has written
Our sons and daughters are coming home from Afghanistan, now controlled by the Taliban following the predictable collapse of our puppet government there. The president of that fallen government, Ashraf Ghani, a politician as popular as a pig in a perfume parlour, flew to Tajikistan, where his hindquarters remain within reach of the Taliban. He won’t stay there long. He and his cronies will hightail it to places Taliban assassins are not likely to go.
Update, 19 August. Reports he had skedaddled to Tajikistan were wrong. Ghani flew to the United Arab Emirates, which I suspect is just a stopping point. He could take up residence in the United States, where he was an exchange student during the 1966-1967 school year, and where he earned his doctorate at Columbia in 1982. His Wikipedia biography is worth reading.
No student of history should be surprised by these events or by the speed with which they occurred. Governments propped up by foreign forces collapse with stunning swiftness when the foreign forces leave. That our government was caught by surprise underscores our tragic ability to read history, yet not understand it.
Afghanistan, not a nation in any western sense, is best described as a buffer zone comprising territories controlled by always for sale or rent warlords who change allegiances at the drop of a coin. There’s never been a honest, unifying central government with the power to control the territories. It’s a brigand culture based on fundamentalist Islam. No nation — not the United Kingdom, not the Soviet Union, not the United States — has conquered Afghanistan. None will.
Our initial mission was to punish the Taliban for aiding Al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden, the thugs responsible for the 9/11 attacks, and to convince the Taliban that additional attacks on our homeland would invite a rain of death from the sky. Initially, our invasion was a raid in force, an incursion never intended to be a 20-year occupation and civic puppeteering gig.
We should have come home after cudgeling the Taliban and Al-Qaeda — but we stayed because security analysts who learned nothing from Christendom's centuries of failed attempts to conquer Islamic lands and convert them to secular democracies, reckoned that an Afghanistan rebuilt on the American model would be less likely to export terrorism.
Believing we could do that was the hubris of those who refuse to learn from history. A nation’s political structure and civic culture cannot be imposed at gunpoint. They must develop organically, from within, over decades, perhaps centuries. Our withdrawal allows that organic process to begin. It will be lengthy, bloody, especially hard on women. One shudders at what likely will happen — which is why some, especially Republicans and military veterans, now argue that we should leave a residual force in Afghanistan to keep the radicals in check (a daft argument that assumes the Taliban would welcome any size of American military presence).
Understandably, the nation building interventionists are not ready to abandon this fantasy. Nor can they resist the temptation to take cheap shots at Biden for not forcing the Taliban to play nice. At the Washington Post, James Downie cut to the heart of the matter:
…voices who swore by this failed approach tell us that we just need to stay a little longer, that a mission with no consistent definition of victory, no record of success and no public support is nevertheless vital to sustain. These voices will argue — indeed, they have argued for the better part of the past 20 years — that leaving Afghanistan is a failure of will. But history is littered with occupations that turned into quagmires that turned into disasters. Afghanistan alone has been the doom of the British, Soviet and now American empires.
Those interventionist politicians and establishment voices will also point to the very real dangers posed by the Taliban’s success. The country may once again become a haven for terrorists, they’ll argue. They’ll point to the rising standard of living, and the growth in education and human rights for Afghan women. They’ll ask how can we leave millions of Afghans, especially women, in danger.
Yet those dangers exist because, despite 20 years, billions of dollars, and 45,000 members of the Afghan military and police forces dead, along with more than 2,300 U.S. service members killed, the Afghan government, the United States and their allies never could create a stable, functioning state. And it has been clear for some time that such a task is impossible. Whatever the interventionists will argue, two decades of “nation-building” and counterinsurgency have been defined by corruption, incompetence and self-delusion. As we have seen in recent days, confronting that truth was always going to be ugly. But that doesn’t make it any less true.
Joe Biden recognizes it makes no sense to send more of America’s sons and daughters to bloody, agonizing, and unnecessary, deaths in a land that hates us and loves fighting each other. Biden’sd enemies will object. Americans who fought there, and their families and some friends, unable to admit we cannot win, will lament that not continuing the fight means our casualties were in vain, a bitter sentiment that could poison our civic discourse as long as the “we could have won” defenders of the Vietnam War has poisoned discussions of what is in our enlightened self-interest.
Don’t curse President Biden. Thank him for having the wisdom and courage to bring our people home from a place they stayed far too long for any good they did.