…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.
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