The cost of stupidity

After Donald Trump negotiated our unforced surrender in Afghanistan and Joe Biden delayed implementing it a bit and then carried it out, the idiocy of getting out of Afghanistan has been made clear by the attacks at the Kabul airport yesterday, the bloodiest day since 2011 in our longest but least-bloody war.

Former Defense Secretary and CIA Director Leon Panetta put it bluntly: “Now we’re going to have to go back in and get ISIS.”

This isn’t hard. We’ve left twice the troops we’d need in Afghanistan as a permanent garrison in Korea for SEVENTY YEARS. If anything, stopping ISIS and al-Qaeda is even more important to our security. The only thing that has changed is that pulling the rug out from under the Afghan government and driving the Afghan army into despairing dissolution will now make it harder and bloodier to get back to where we were a couple of years ago.

Trump would have ignored reality and claimed that everything was fine and that he’d done the right thing no matter what the consequences turned out to be. We will now see whether Joe Biden suffered a temporary lapse of judgment in following through on the Trump surrender, and will recognize the mistake and do what our national security and common sense requires despite the isolationist mentality that has seized the nation. If not, the crisis of clueless bad judgment we thought had ended with the defeat of Donald Trump may well continue through another adminstration.

If we’d kept the American people better informed about the fact that in the 48 hours preceding yesterday’s attack we’d lost more American lives to COVID-19 than we had in the entire twenty years of the war in Afghanistan, I have a hunch that public opinion might have taken a different turn. If we stopped to reflect on the consequences of having nowhere at all in the region to use as a base for our own operations against al-Qaeda. ISIS, and their Taliban buddies, yesterday’s tragedy, the ongoing agony of the Afghan people, and the self-inflicted body blow we’ve taken not only to our prestige but to our credibility all over the world due to this bi-partisan blunder could have been avoided.

It’s too late now to save the lives of those who have died due to the combined stupidity of the Trump and Biden bugout obsession. But it’s not too late to stop things from getting worse.

Joe Biden needs to do what Donald Trump could never bring himself to do about anything: admit that he was wrong, bite the bullet, accept responsibilty like a man, and protect our country.

ADDENDUM: Apparently that isn’t going to happen. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says that the military advised President Biden to keep 250,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, a number which might have been enough in a support role to prevent the dissolution of the Afghan army and keep the Taliban and al Quaeda out of power. Mr. Biden denies that.

I see no reason for Gen. Miley to lie. Did the president misunderstand the advice he was given? Did it somehow not sink in? Did he forget it somehow? I’d prefer to think that he isn’t simply doing a Trump and substituting a reality he’d prefer for what actually happened. Even if the malicious claims that the Commander-in-Chief is in his dotage are true, a senile Joe Biden is still more competent than Donald Trump was on his best day. But even so, I’m beginning to about how much of an improvement the foreign policy of the new administration is going to be over the comedy act that preceded it. And I really wish that we had a viable alternative.

That’s the really scary part. Since 2016, we haven’t had a realistic and responsible alternative to the Democrats. The Republicans just aren’t a rational option, and I don’t expect them to become one any time soon. And that puts our nation- and the world, which depends on it far more than contemporary isolationists would like to think- in a difficult bind.

If I lived in Ukraine, Estonia, or Taiwan right now…

…I would be very, very nervous.

The United States has a military second to none. Nobody is even close. No country in the world could defeat us- if we had the will to defeat them instead.

It would be difficult right now to make the case that we could summon the will to much of anything. Two consecutive administrations, one of each party, has been naive enough to believe that the Taliban and al-Qaeda are not two sides of the same coin, and that the fall of Afghanistan would not give them once again an entire nation to use as a training and staging-ground from which to attack us. Yes, al-Qaeda is active elsewhere. But since the invasion of Afghanistan they haven’t had a whole country to play with. Today, they have Afghanistan back again.

There is no “Taliban 2.0,” They remain the same brutal outfit we kicked out of power twenty years ago. For all their talk of moderation, we will hear about the mass executions and atrocities again very soon. The Trump administation was naive and feckless and just plain clueless enough to think they could negotiate a deal with them and that they would keep their word. Mike Pompeo and company were so deluded that they even suggested that the Taliban would keep al-Qaeda in line and even fight them if necessary to keep them from using Afghanistan as a base again. But they’ve been using the Taliban-controled areas of Afghanistan as training bases for quite a while. The only reason the Taliban’s alter ego has not been launching terrorist attacks on the West of late is that they’ve been concentrating all their resources on defeating us in Afghanistan. Well, now they have.

The discussion below is between three journalists with extensive experience both in military matters and in counter-terrorism. Tom Jocelyn in particular has forgotten more about Aftghanistan than it would appear a great many of those who have been fashioning our foreign policy and military strategy ever knew. David French is a veteran of the war in Iraq as well as one of the sharpest political columnists we have. Steve Hayes, too, has been covering this stuff for a very long time. You are about to learn things we should have been hearing from the last three presidents. Instead, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden have each focused their attention on assuring that this day would come, and that there was no way that it could be prevented. Ever since George W. Bush, the government of the United States has made it clear that its number one objective in Afghanistan was getting out. The objective of the Taliban, on the other hand, was always winning.

Not on a negotiated settlement. Not on power sharing. On winning.

I’ve written before about North Vietnamese Col. Bo Tin’s observation that his government and the Viet Cong planned all along to simply wait the Americans out, because democracies lack the will to stay in a long fight until the end. One of the most interesting parts of the discussion below is French’s explanation of why the Afghan army- and the South Vietnamese army, too- fell apart so completely and so suddenly. President Biden’s insulting statement that it “refused to fight” ignored the 66,000 casualties it had just taken before the collapse.

As French points out, something changes when the United States enters a war. The side we support knows that we’re the toughest kid on the block. They know that are soldiers are trained professionals, let at least in theory by competent officers. They know that they’ll have American air support on their side. The entire dynamic of a war changes. America’s allies believe that because we’re fighting beside them, they can win.

That belief is diminished when it becomes clear, as it did in both Vietnam and Afghanistan, that we aren’t fighting to win, but rather that our objective is simply to get out. As happened with the South Korean army in the face of the Chinese invasion during the Korean War and with the South Vietnamese army a couple of decades later, any army ceases to be an effective fighting force when it ceases to believe that it can and will win. American troops were able to step into the breach and turn the tide in Korea. The ROK army was able to believe again that with us at their side, they could win. The Chinese and the North Koreans were driven back. The war ended in, at worst, a draw.

Not so in Vietnam. Not so in Afghanistan. In neither case was it any secret that the United States was looking for a convenient exit, not for victory. In neither case did this reassure our ally. And there comes a point, as it did just before the fall of Saigon and again just before the fall of Kabul, that it sinks in that we don’t have their backs, that they are on their own, that we’re going to abandon them. And the lose the thing that motivates soldiers, the thing that the very intervention of the mightiest nation on Earth first gave them: hope. And when they lose that, the army collapses. It melts away. And it can all happen in a matter of days.

We remain the mightest nation on the planet. Nobody can match our power, or even come close. But even might as massive as ours is useless without will. And it has been decades since not only the world but thoughtful Americans have had such good reason to doubt America’s will.

We don’t even know how many Americans are in Afghanistan right now. We have told them to go to the airport in Kabul. We have also told them that we cannot guarantee their safety on the trip. And there are Taliban checkpoints everywhere that they will have to get through. Some won’t. And in coming days or weeks or, at most, months, the Taliban will be taking American hostages, and threatening to behead them if we don’t make humiliating concessions.

Having won the war, humiliating the United States will be their next objective. We don’t know yet when the next 9/11 will be attempted.

Certainly at this point it’s nearly hopeless to think that most of the Afghans who have put their lives on the line for us- the soldiers, the translators, the cooks, the secretaries, the teachers, the clerks- will be saved. Some will. But President Biden has shamefully disclaimed any American obligation to them. The Trump administration thought it could negotiate a peace with monsters who have no honor and whose word was worthless; the Biden administration could have denounced the betrayal, and if it exited at all done so in a deliberate, orderly fashion. Instead, the incompetence of two consecutive American administrations- arguably three- has doomed the people who risked everything to be our friends, and innocent people all over Afghanistan.

By the way, it’s no coincidence that the final Taliban offensive began on May 1. That, after all, was the day President Trump had set for our exit as part of a “negotiated settlement.” Today he praised the Taliban and their courage, claiming-falsely- that they’d been around for “thousands of years.” The plan has been to humilate the United States all along, and their goal was advanced by the fact that they were negotiating with a fool, a sucker.

Already the Chinese state media are tormenting the Taiwanese with the message, “You put your faith in the Americans. Are you watching what’s happening in Afghanistan?” American prestige is not all that has taken a beating from this. Our credibility is at an all-time low. The European Union seems to share in the impression that we have been building all over the world for decades that America simply cannot be trusted, that our word is no good, and that we will always betray our friends. Several European leaders have spoken of the need to make their security arrangements without depending on us. The process of alienating our allies, begun and earnestly pursued by the Trump administration, seems to have been vastly advanced by the Biden administration, and the hope of its friends that the comic-opera incompetence of the Trump administration had been replaced by something better and wiser has been deeply shaken.

No power on Earth can match the military might of the United States. Russia, China, and bad actors all over the globe are given pause by that power, and hesitate to provoke us because they only suspect, and are not entirely sure, that we lack the will to use it and to press our cause to final victory.

They are considerably surer tonight. No, I would not want to be a citizen of Estonia or Ukraine or Taiwan tonight. The realization that melted the hearts of they Afghan army is nagging them. Once again, we have proven to the world that while we have the might to keep our committments, we lack the will, and will always let our allies down. And it’s only a matter of time until Russia or China decide to take the risk and put that theory to the test.

Dispatch Live: Afghanistan from The Dispatch on Vimeo.

THE ONION is eerily prophetic

It’s not often that The Onion accurately predicts a news story. But there’s a first time for everything.

The United States is literally sneaking out of Afghanistan in the middle of the night.. Our forces abandoned Bagham Air Force Base, a major hub of our operations in that country, under cover of darkness and without telling our Afghan allies that they were going to do it. They left behind huge caches of supplies and equipment, supposedly for the Afghans- who eventually found out that the Americans had left through the grapevine, shrugged, and moved in. But the Afghan army will have to make do with what the looters left for them.

The Biden administration’s Afghan policy seems to be identical to that of the Trump administration’s: get out of Dodge just as fast as our legs will carry us; do not pass go, do not collect $200. Our armed forces can’t be blamed, of course; they take orders from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But our latest abandonment of our allies- something that is becoming a regular part of American foreign policy, and understandably causing them to conclude that the U.S. can’t be relied upon- is in some respects making the fall of Saigon look like the Alamo by comparison.

At least in Vietnam our final withdrawal came because we had lost the war and the enemy was attacking our ally’s capital city. But in the case of Afghanistan, we’ve yawned, stretched our arms, said “I’m tired and I’m going home,” and are in the process of letting the enemy win. Few doubt that they will- and given Taliban gains since we began a withdrawal that is now 90% complete, it will probably be rather quickly.

True, we have been fighting this “forever war” for twenty years. True, it’s been very expensive. But it’s cost us fewer than three thousand lives. By comparison, Vietnam cost us 57,000.

Contrary to what many people have claimed down through the years, it was not the great North Vietnamese Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, the architect of Communist victories over both France and the United States, who was the source of the statement below. It was North Vietnamese Col. Bui Tin, who made it in a 1995 interview with the Wall Street Journal. But it’s hard to miss their significance both for our involvement in Afghanistan and in the future:

Q: How did Hanoi intend to defeat the Americans?

A: By fighting a long war which would break their will to help South Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh said, “We don’t need to win military victories, we only need to hit them until they give up and get out.”

Bui goes on to explain that given the roles dissent and protest play in democracies, they cannot win protracted wars. Even though Bui doesn’t say so, that isn’t necessarily the case when everyone can clearly see that their own immediate welfare and that of the nation are on the line. But when the war is on the other side of the globe, and it’s hard to see the immediate consequences of failing to prevail, when a war begins to drag on and on- even if, as in Afghanistan, casualties have been minimal- the citizens of democracies tire of them. And in the long run, democracies will never be able to summon the will to see a lengthly foreign war to a successful conclusion unless the nation itself would be put in immediate danger if it failed to do so.

That, ultimately, was the lesson of Vietnam. We can win short, decisive conflicts. But in a war like Vietnam or even one like Afghanistan, in which casualties have been light, it is a built-in weakness of countries in which the people finally call the shots that unless there are obvious and fairly immediate consequences to losing, democracies simply cannot and will not stay the course..

That is a fact of life history has taught us at a considerable cost in lives and treasure. Both Donald Trump-style isolationists and George H.W. Bush and Lyndon Johnson-style internationalists should take it as a fundamental law of nature and govern their policies accordingly.

We forget that we went to war in Afghanistan originally because the Taliban was sheltering Osama bin Laden and al Queda in Afghanistan. The war was enormously popular in the United States at the time, and jolly well should have been. We kicked the Taliban out. The trouble is that Afghanistan, like Iraq, is an ancient and relatively undeveloped region, rather than a nation in the modern sense. Like Vietnam, and like Iraq, it is essentially an artificial nation cobbled together by outsiders. We defeated the Taliban, and removed them from power. But as in Iraq, we then faced the dilemma of lacking any abiding sense of mutual identity or a generally recognized central authority to install in power in place of our defeated adversary. The “forever war” has been a struggle to prevent the Taliban- which, like the Viet Minh and its successors in Vietnam, was the only truly unified force capable of forming a stable government, from stepping into what amounted to a vaccum and seizing power again.

The rule of the Taliban- a misogynistic outfit of religious fanatics intent on ruling by strict Sharia law- was a nightmare for the people of Afghanistan. It is a nightmare into which they are about to be plunged once more.

An aside: If you haven’t seen the movie Charlie Wilson’s War, based on the book by George Crille III, I highly recommend it. It’s a funny but also an important film, somewhat fictionalized but preserving the essense of what actually happened when a lovable and rather blatantly corrupt congressman combined with a bizarre collection of marginal characters inside and outside the CIA to get the Mujahideen- the Afghans fighting the Russians- Stinger missles and other military support which they could use to repel the invaders. Afghanistan was a far different experience for the Russians than it was for us. It’s misleading to call it the “Russian Vietnam,” as some do; we lost 57,000 soldiers and sailors in Vietnam, whereas the Soviet Union lost only 15,000 (our own loses in Afghanistan total 2,376). But it was enough to convince the Kremlin that the war was unwinnable, and get them to pull out.

The movie ends with a sad postscript about how, having won the trust and friendship of the Afghan people, we squandered them by losing interest and forgetting about Afghanistan. The result was the Taliban coming to power. History, it seems, repeats itself. But I can’t help but wonder what might have happened if our interest in a stable Afghanistan that wasn’t going to be a playground for bad actors had continued. Perhaps the “forever war” might never have been fought at all.

Effective and empathetic foreign aid when possible, and covert operations to support our friends, or even short, decisive military encounters when they are necessary, can and should be undertaken when they’re in our interests, and in the interests of freedom and stability. But not twenty-year wars, even when they result in fewer than 3,000 casualties over that entire period.

How do you avoid quagmires like Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan, in which we can keep the bad guys out of power only if we stay involved at a level we cannot sustain in the long run? First and foremost, you try to help avoid the circumstances in which they develop. But contrary to the paleocon/Trump/Buchanan/Paul isolationist instinct, we can’t simply shut ourselves within our own borders, behind the ramparts of two oceans, and cry “America First!” World War II proved how badly that works. Throughout history, there has always been a leading world power that has lent stability to world affairs. The Brits played that role for a long time. We are their successors. The alternative is a global power vacuum in which Hitlers arise. The days of “Fortress America” are far in the past. The world has become too small. We are too deeply effected, economically, culturally, and in many other ways by what happens on the otherside of the globe to curl up in a ball and hide.

And above all else, we can be mindful of our limitations. I’m not sure what the answer is when our military presence is or might be the only thing keeping tyrants and monsters from filling power vacuums on the other side of the world. But the Butterfly Effect is real in modern international affairs. It may be very indirectly, but we in the United States will be affected by the impending descent of Afghanistan back into the dark medieval night of Sharia law, misogyny and tyranny. And like it or not, history has cast us in the role the British played for so long, not necessarily as a world-bestriding empire but as a strong anchor for peace and order, a rallying point around which the nations can gather to protect the interests of peace and even civilization. 9/11 is a chilling reminder of what happens when we lose interest in what happens beyond our borders.

Multilateralism is part of the solution, to be sure. But then, our effort in Afghanistan has been multilateral; it’s been a NATO operation. And our NATO allies, too are democracies, subject to the short attention span of their voters.

I suppose the best we can do is to encourage enlightened people and movements non-militarily, and on a limited and even covert scale when military action must be taken, again unless it’s possible to bring overwhelming force to bear to bring about a clear, quick, decisive, limited, and well-defined outcome, as was the case in the First Gulf War.

We dare not run away from our responsibilities in the world because we cannot. The world will not let us. The fruit of any prolonged effort will be bitter indeed; as it is, the damage done to our posture in the world and our relationship with our allies by four years of Trump isolationism will probably take decades to repair. But there are limits, as a practical matter, to what even a democracy as mighty as ours can do. We need to learn those limits, stay within them, always keep a clear and limted goal in mind, and do the best we can. Reality is a harsh mistress, and we have no choice but to obey it. And in our misadventures around the world since the 50s, reality has spoken clearly, and keeps repeating itself, it seems.

We should not mishear it. We dare not respond to Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan by withdrawing from the world, or by failing what we can do to lead the world order in staving off chaos and disaster. If we won’t do it, China will- and the consequences won’t be pretty.

The Biden administration is doing its best to avoid a reprise of the disaster we experienced in the fall of Saigon. But there will be Afghans who have put their lives on the line to be our friends, and who will lose those lives because we have abandoned them. And that is a cause for deep shame.

We have lost only 2,367 lives in Afghanistan. Each of those lives is a universe for the friends and family of the casualties. But those are far fewer losses than we’ve experienced in previous wars. We are not leaving Afghanistan because the cost of staying would be too high. We are leaving, yes, because it seems unlikely given the nature of Afghanistan itself that we can finally prevail, unless perhaps we stay there for 50 or 75 or a hundred years. But fundamentally, we’re leaving because democracies can’t summon the political will to fight protracted wars unless they’re invaded, or in immediate danger of being invaded.

But leaving means that while no life lost in the defense of freedom and decency is ever spent in vain, those 2,367 lives will have been lost in a cause that failed. Perhaps if we’d paid more attention and done our nation-building in peacetime, the war would never have had to be fought and those men and women would still be alive. As it happened, we find ourselves in a situation in which final victory in Afghanistan is probably impossible. Yes, there is a case to be made for getting out before more lives are lost. But while on the whole I’m a supporter of the Biden administration, it ought to be a cause for shame that our withdrawal is not happening more thoughfully and deliberately, over a far longer period. It’s not the MRI’s and DVD’s and ordnance we’re leaving behind that bothers me.

It’s the people.