What is happening right now in Afghanistan is horrifying. It’s awful. Tens of thousands of people will be slaughtered, the women and children of the area will be sent backwards in history hundreds of years, chaos and brutality and backwards ass theology will rule the day, and it will be awful for a long time to come. And it was all entirely predictable and completely inevitable:
Taliban fighters captured the major city of Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan on Saturday, sending Afghan forces fleeing, and drew closer to Kabul as Western countries scrambled to evacuate their citizens from the capital.
It was the latest important victory for the hardline militants, who have swept through the country in recent weeks as U.S.-led forces withdrew. Kabul and Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan, are now the only big cities not in Taliban hands.
U.S. President Joe Biden said on Saturday he was authorizing the deployment of 5,000 troops to help evacuate citizens and ensure an “orderly and safe” drawdown of U.S. military personnel. A U.S. defence official said that included 1,000 newly approved troops from the 82nd Airborne Division.
We’ll see a lot of blame thrown at Joe Biden over the next couple of months, and no doubt right-wingers will blame him for “losing” Afghanistan, but most of it is bullshit. Are there some things that could possibly have been done better? Sure. Much of the bitching by our warrior class is focused on the timing of the withdrawal (often ignoring the fact that it was Trump who set the original date), saying we should have waited until the winter when the majority of the Taliban will be at home and it won’t be “the fighting season,” the name for what you and I know as summer and fall. And I suppose he could have. And then we would be reading all of these headlines next spring and summer instead of right now. That’s the thing about delaying the inevitable, it is, in fact, just a delay. This was going to happen no matter when we left and there is nothing anyone can say that will convince me otherwise.
Just like every other empire that before us tried to go in and “fix” things in Afghanistan, we have cut and run and will get to live through the ignominy of gruesome pictures of fallen innocents and backwards goatherders driving around in our HMMW’s and other abandoned equipment, and we’ll hear about the damage to America’s image and reputation, and what not, but this was baked in from the moment we decided to go there and stay in the first place after failing to do the one thing we set out to do.
There is a reason terms like “mission creep” exist. There is a reason when I was a young E-3 my tank commander and Troop CO gave me reading lists, and included on those lists were books like Bernard Fall’s Street Without Joy and A Bright Shining Lie and All Quiet on the Western Front and About Face and so many others that sit on my bookshelf to this day. There were lessons to be learned. And we didn’t learn them, myself included. I will grapple with my own culpability the rest of my life.
And I know that my seeming nonchalant writing here about this can seem smarmy and irritating, and I hope that is not what you are taking from this. It’s horrible. I feel terrible for all those innocents. I feel terrible for all our guys who served there and are dealing with trauma and injuries, barely getting their lives back together finally, only to turn on the tv, stare at the horrible images unfolding while glancing at the scarred stumps where their legs and arms used to be, realizing everything they gave everything for has turned out to be nothing.
But while this horror is occurring right now, we can still take advantage of the opportunity to learn this lesson once more. Maybe this will save us a couple generations of needless military adventurism, like Vietnam did before we went and fucked up our memories in Gulf War I and thought war was easy again. Stop listening to the war pigs. Ignore them. Stop listening to the Kagans and Ledeens and the Cheneys and the Kristols and the Tom Cottons and the Friedmans and that one curly hair young twat name Michael something or other who was all over the tv in the late aughts. Don’t let this happen again.
The only people who benefited from the last twenty years were Haliburton and Lockheed Martin.
Honus
A Bright Shining Lie is a great book. And Sheehan wrote it while living in West Virginia.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
O’Hanlon?
John Cole
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: That’s the fucker.
Honus
Also, I have been through this before. My cardiologist (doctor Nguyen) told me Saigon fell the day he graduated from medical school. His family were boat people and he ended up in Clarksburg West Virginia. I said “I grew ip Twenty miles from Clarksburg”
we need to take the afghans in now
Yutsano
The best that we could possibly do is get out as many translators, their family, as much of the current government, and as many refugees as we can out. We don’t know how much time there will be until Kabul falls. Evacuation needs to be the order now.
Suzanne
And Raytheon, don’t forget Raytheon.
And toxic masculinity.
WaterGirl
@Yutsano: I’m pretty sure Biden already ordered the evacuation.
WaterGirl
@Suzanne: So many wrong turns.
Gin & Tonic
@Honus:
I’m not trying to be a smartass, and I know it’s not your point, but can anyone look at modern Vietnam, its economy, its relationship with the US, and tell me what “fell” means?
Betty
I don’t know if you have read this one, but Barbara Tuchman’s March of Folly gives a good historical context to foolish enterprises like this one and the invasion of Iraq. Just tragic that people can’t learn from the past. Bush/Cheney and company were so full of hubris.
Bard the Grim
It wasn’t for nothing, John. For a generation, millions of people had a better life. Not great, not what we and they hoped for, not what it could have been, but better, and for awhile, and that’s worth something. Maybe a lot, at least for some lucky ones.
Martin
We will not learn from it, because we still believe in the inherent inferiority of people like the Afghans to rule themselves. Shit, half this country doesn’t even believe Democrats have the capacity to do it.
Starfish
@Suzanne:
Warlords also made a lot of money.
Chetan Murthy
@Gin & Tonic: I’m no apologist for communism. It means that the elites we supported lost, and the elites we opposed won. And sure, those latter elites were drawn somewhat from the poorer classes in Vietname. But still, by the time they won, I strongly doubt that North Vietnam was some socialist paradise.
It turned out, those elites that won, had nearby enemies (like the PRC). Eventually, they saw the value in having the US as an ally, and of course, they saw other East Asian countries embracing capitalism and got in on that, too.
waspuppet
I’m sure the Sunday shows will explain to me how this is all the fault of the America-hating anti-war hippies and the Incredibly Smart And Realistic Pro-War Guys are Incredibly Smart and Realistic and the fact that their 20-year project fell apart in a week just proves all that somehow.
Martin
@Gin & Tonic: They’re not capitalists. You’re not even allowed to buy an AR-15 in Vietnam! Can you imagine?
Chief Oshkosh
The only way we “learn” is if GWB and his crew are arrested and prosecuted for war crimes.
bbleh
Can’t argue with any of it, but I’m not at all hopeful — see under “Vietnam, US withdrawal from” — in part because I think the “we” in this post is doing a lot of lifting.
I don’t know how much “learn”-ing is to be done by the front-line soldiers, airmen, et al., or how much good it would do even if there were a lot and it were all done. I think they got screwed almost as badly as anyone in this sorry episode. One hopes the junior and mid-level officer corps does some serious learning, since they’ll likely be in more senior roles the next time one of these situations develops, and maybe they’ll be able to do (or stop, or at least slow) something. But where I think the real problem lies — where most of the blame for this situation lies, and where there is unlikely to be any learning at all, since they probably don’t think they did anything wrong — is among the senior officers, the civilian policy-makers, and the political class who approved it and enabled it and sold it to the voters. I expect they’ll blunder right on in the next chance they get, thumping their chests and waving flags in all the approved ways (white papers and policy memos, staff meetings, campaign speeches, etc., all with lots of harrumphing), and for all the same reasons: career, the Iron Triangle, the approval of their peers, fame, and did I mention career. And they will dutifully feed the next generation of soldiers, airmen, et al, to the meat grinder, destroy villages in order to save them, and create a whole new generation of enemies, six months at a time, because light at the end of the tunnel just around the corner etc. etc.
Sorry just not very optimistic about any learning. This lesson-book is kind of tattered already.
Another Scott
Great piece. Cosign.
When I was a lad growing up in Cobb County GA, I was in middle school before the ’72 election. One of our classes had a debate between a McGovern side and a Nixon side. I got assigned to the McGovern side. Learned a lot and it helped me to see things differently. (The Nixon side won the debate, of course.)
In music/choir class one of the songs we sang was Ballad of the Green Berets.
I remember thinking – why it was that we only heard about horrible things happening in Viet Nam (2 words back then) and why it was taking so long to win? We won WWII in 4 years, why was it taking so long? Was I going to be drafted or end up fighting over there too?? …
There are lots of lessons to learn and to remember about 9/11 and the reaction to it. Including Afghanistan. I do hope we do so.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
bbleh
@Yutsano: I’ve asked elsewhere about this, and the only reasonably authoritative answers I’ve seen suggest strongly that this just isn’t legal, thanks to restrictions on immigration — including by refugees — enacted by the Republicans during the last administration. Happy to be wrong if someone knows better …
Damned_at_Random
@Betty: I read March of Folly and A Bright and Shining Lie within the past y ear and I guess I see the “loss” of Afghanistan as inevitable. I understand why we went in, but time after time we end up supporting extremely corrupt governments that are incapable of achieving popular support. I guess we buy the guy who says he has a plan because it means we won’t have to hard work of developing a stable society from scratch.
Martin
@Chetan Murthy: I think it’s fair to say that post-war Vietnam wasn’t great. Cambodia’s worst shit was postwar. Vietnam has suffered through a LOT of corruption.
I don’t know if a postwar democratic Vietnam would have gone any better, and the corruption is better than ongoing bombing, but I think Vietnam and Afghanistan are both illustrative of problems that have no good solutions. It was going to be shit no matter what you did – you’re just choosing between more and less odious versions of shit. That doesn’t mean to not act. A flooded house is arguably better than one that’s burned to the ground. The only good option is to not set it on fire in the first place.
Mike in NC
Invading a foreign country is never a good idea. The invaders are seldom greeted as liberators. Quite the opposite, actually.
Martin
@bbleh: A lot of them didn’t want to leave. That may have changed in the last week.
Cermet
@Chetan Murthy: Before we got involved those same ‘North’ Vietnam elites, supported the US and wanted us to be allied with them against the French.
Chetan Murthy
@Damned_at_Random: In Vietnam, at least there was -one- faction that we could support. -One-. In Afghanistan ? Hah. From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kabul_(1992%E2%80%931996)
It was “warlords all the way down”. And nothing we did could change that. We talked about standing up a national goverment. Piffle. What we were doing, was bribing warlods to play nice. The minute that stopped, they’d to back to being warlords. And the Taliban? Remember the last time they invaded? Took Kabul by storm. The newpapers were all agog with how fast they rolled-up the country *last time*. This new rapid invasion isn’t new: that’s what they did *last time*. And why? B/c they’re actually disciplined and united: something the people we supported *never were*.
And all of this was known. None of it was hidden, none of it.
NotMax
20 years distilled into 5 words: Kabul in a china shop.
E.
The reason Rome was so blindingly successful at taking and holding territory is the instant they conquered someone they made everyone an automatic Roman. Seems maybe we could learn something from that.
ellie
@Chief Oshkosh: This.
Bard the Grim
@Bard the Grim: I should clarify that I’m not saying we belonged there or should have stayed for 20 years, just that the people who sacrificed so much shouldn’t think it literally was for nothing.
Chetan Murthy
@Cermet: Indeed. I remember the of Ho Chi Minh visiting Truman (IIRC) and getting thrown out.
I remember when McNamara went back to Vietnam for a reconciliation conference (Parade magazine wrote it up). He asked his Vietnamese interlocutors: “Why did you fight so long? We were killing millions of you!” And they responded “It was our war of national liberation”.
debbie
This country needs to stop thinking that everything can be solved by military action.
Mike in NC
@Honus: I just saw where we lost Neil Sheehan this year. RIP.
Mai Naem mobile
Right wingers can blame Afghanistan on Biden but the general public doesn’t give a shit about Afghanistan. Too many other stories/issues for the media to cover. Obviously evacuate the folks that helped the US not of some altruistic reason but because you won’t have people helping you in our next big adventure if you abandon these people. And,hey, its not like we don’t need labor here. Especially lower skilled labor. The kind of stuff many new immigrants do.
Another Scott
@Gin & Tonic: You know doubt know the following, but to further the conversation…
The arguments back in those days were based on Chaing’s defeat in China, the USSR marching into eastern Europe, and the argument that if ASEAN didn’t fight in Vietnam then Australia and NZ and ultimately Japan and SK would be next. “Dominoes!!1” Too many people bought into the “inevitability” of Communism, so according to them, (“… we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.”), it had to be fought and prevented from getting new footholds.
But even the story about fighting Communism was far too pat and simplistic, because China and Vietnam have been adversaries for hundreds of years. (The even fought a brief war in 1979 and China basically lost.) Vietnam basically ended the Khmer Rouge regime (but it took a nearly 11 year war to do it). There were, as any student of history knows, lots of national and regional issues that would never be subsumed by some sort of Maoist or Stalinist Communist International Superstate. The NVA/PAVN wasn’t going to march on Sydney (though OZ troops did fight alongside the US in Vietnam)…
tl;dr – Vietnam has lots of reasons not to be too closely tied to China, and the US is a natural partner (huge market and a counterweight), even considering the hugely destructive war.
Cheers,
Scott.
The Moar You Know
One more time: Dr. William Brydon.
The lesson still hasn’t been learned. It was there for all to see for a couple of hundred years.
MoCaAce
You misspelled Shit.
Brachiator
There is a lot that could be said about Afghanistan. I don’t know what could be done to help the people there if the Taliban do their worst.
But I have to commend Biden for doing the hard, best thing in ceasing operations there. Once again he seems to be committed to doing the right thing and ignoring all the BS political and military punditry.
Robert Sneddon
@Mai Naem mobile:
Just think of all the new ethnic restaurants that will sprout up in the big cities.
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
Amen. Dead on.
namekarB
Basically the U.S. backed government fell and the
TalibanCommunists took over.You do, however, make an excellent point that we never should have invaded either country in the first place. Vietnam sort of built its own economy without help from any superpower
Chetan Murthy
@E.: Actually, not true. The grant of citizenship to every free person within the ambit of the Empire happened pretty late (not going to look it up). The reason they were so successful was
Immanentize
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
@John Cole:
That fucker O’Hanlon is still a fucker:
namekarB
@Chetan Murthy:
Pretty much Rome would send a government an ultimatum. You can submit to Rome, be the local ruler and we’ll take control of your army and train them – or – we invade, kill or capture and enslave your people. You have until Friday to decide.
Lyrebird
@John Cole: Thanks for another excellent post.
For all o’ these guys, imnsho unless they campaigned their hearts out for Kerry, they are partly responsible for the tragedies that will go with our withdrawal of troops. Youngun might have been too young, but if so he should be reading up and taking notes rather than pointing fingers.
currants
@Damned_at_Random:
Several years ago (LOL maybe…10?) I read “The Places In Between” by Rory Stewart–I knew very little about Afghanistan, and my nephew, a Ranger, was about to be sent there on a mission. The book was a good read (even if it did result in dried fruit and nuts for dessert for the next 8 months or so), and made plain to me how unlikely any western involvement (as I understood it at the time) was to be able to “unify” or “clean up” (or draw into the present era) a country like that.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Immanentize: : blinks :
when you have to “clarify” your stance on ethnic cleansing….
justaboomer
What particularly bothers me right now are talking heads saying how “affordable” it would be to keep American forces in Afghanistan. The only reason it has been “affordable” recently is in Trump’s deal to withdraw American and foreign troops the Taliban committed to not attack the American and foreign troops. And they have kept that part of the agreement while waiting for us to leave. The last American combat deaths were in February 2020. Stick around and they will show how expensive more Afghan lessons can be.
Immanentize
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: And in that clarification, say, “BUT….” Oof.
As someone once said: all the words that come before a “but” really don’t mean anything.
currants
Also, heard this on NPR Friday as I’m sure many of you did, but the closing was so sad. “If this is my last conversation with you….” There will be a terrible cost to women and girls, in particular.
Jager
Cole mentioned Bernard Fall’s book, “Street Without Joy” published in 1961. It didn’t become required reading at the Army War College until after the Viet Nam War ended.
laura
If you want to improve the lives of women and children in areas of the world where Shit’s Fucked Up and Bullshit, give funds to women and women’s organizations. If your want to perpetuate misery, give money and arms to men. The soon to be murdered leaders in Afghanistan are easy to identify by their fancy watches.
DropKicker1
@Gin & Tonic:
Oh, yes, and please give me a refresher on what “domino theory” means.
Mike
Viva BrisVegas
You can’t have a democracy without a civil society and you don’t get a civil society at the point of a gun.
Like everything else in Islamic countries a civil society in Afghanistan will have to come out of Islam. I’ve no idea how that happens.
namekarB
Said differently, the women and girls in Afghanistan will be treated the same as in other parts of the Arab and Muslim worlds
Chetan Murthy
@namekarB: “as in the worst parts of the Arab and Mulsim world”. The Taliban are epsilon away from Salafists and Takfiris: the worst sects of Muslims, the equivalent of our FLDS combined with Westboro Baptists and the Oath Keepers.
H.E.Wolf
@Betty: I don’t know if you have read this one, but Barbara Tuchman’s March of Folly gives a good historical context to foolish enterprises like this one
Barbara Tuchman is both an historian of stature, and a terrific writer with a dry sense of humor.
If you want a representative sample, here are the opening sentences of her 1972 address to the US Army War College on the subject of Generalship:
“My subject tonight was suggested by your Commandant with no accompanying explanation; just the word “Generalship,” unadorned. No doubt he could safely assume that the subject in itself would automatically interest this audience in the same way that motherhood would interest an audience of pregnant ladies.”
https://content.grantham.edu/academics/GU_HS315/tuchmanarticle.pdf
dr. bloor
@Gin & Tonic:
Here you go.
Vietnam is better for having chased us out, but the fate of many Actual Humans are chained to the “fall” of Saigon.
Honus
@Gin & Tonic: well, the North conquered the South and he and his family would have been imprisoned or executed. And they had to flee to avoid that. So thats what I understand “Saigon fell” to mean.
if you have a different understanding please enlighten me.
A Ghost to Most
“Never start a land war in Asia.”
craigie
@debbie:
This.
James E Powell
@Martin:
The best option in Vietnam was to let Ho Chi Minh take over the country. But US domestic politics made doing that political suicide.
Honus
@namekarB: bullshit. You don’t know anything about how women are treated in arab societies. i am an arab and i grew up in a home dominated by professional independent arab women.
gwangung
The lesson of Vietnam is the lesson of Afghanistan.
It’s not about us. Center the people there—without the bullshit ethnocentric lens.
And top down doesn’t work.
debbie
@currants:
Yes. ?
HumboldtBlue
@Honus:
Helluva book, in fact, I need to re-read it.
Here’s part one of an excellent documentary on the West’s history in Afghanistan. The Great Game
HumboldtBlue
@Cermet:
Ho Chi Minh approached the US more than once in search of support for a Vietnamese-people led government, and we turned him down each time.
Ryan
I’d love to say that I said in 2001 that we were engaging on a multigenerational project, but I can’t. When people say we came together as a nation, it papers over the fact that any voice calling for lashing out faced harsh criticism, and voicing any criticism in 2001 was deeply scary, even among people you otherwise thought to be like minded. It makes me appreciate Barbara Lee all the more for voicing her concerns during that awful time when we were all united.
Ken
@Chetan Murthy: @namekarB: Historian Bret Devereaux recently did a series of posts on Roman identity, including their policies for the socii and later the provinces. Link to last in the series (which has links to the others).
Chetan Murthy
@Ryan: Going after Bin Laden (and going thru/over/under anybody who stood in the way of that) was the right thing to do. What wasn’t right, was sticking around in Afghanistan afterwards. But when Dubya and his imbecile horde decided to shift to Iraq, they *had* to stick around in Afghanistan, b/c they hadn’t actually hunted down Bin Laden.
I -do- think (like others) that Obama could have gotten out in 2013 for basically no real political cost. Ah, well.
West of the Rockies
So essentially the Taliban is composed of evangelical/fundamentalist, misogynistic, homophobic, morons who are evidently afraid of science, education, the arts, and modernity.
I don’t see how any interventions change that. I guess they must rule until the locals themselves rise up and demand change.
Ken
Hmm. I’m going to have to do some tuning on my personal predictive model for language. Your next paragraph did not go in at all the direction that I was expecting after that lead-in. Let’s see, maybe if I turn down the “everything is about American politics” weighting….
Geminid
@HumboldtBlue: James Michener’s Caravans is set in Afghanistan of the late 1950s. Michener is sympathetic to the Afghan people, not so much to the social and legal mores they lived under. I like Michener, and this novel is one of my favorites. It’s a little sad to read, though, knowing what Afghanistan would go through later.
randy khan
One thing that never happened in Afghanistan was that the Taliban never were defeated. There are several reasons for this – lack of commitment (in part because of the Iraq misadventure), the difficulty of rooting out the Taliban, and more – but there never was a time when they were gone. That made what’s happening now inevitable. And, while the speed with which the Taliban seem to be retaking the country seems surprising, it’s really more of an indication that the current government never really had control of the country.
But my heart aches for all the people who will be devastated by this, women and children and those who helped the U.S. in particular, but really all the regular people in the country, too.
Geminid
@Gin & Tonic: “Fell” means “was conquered.” This is actually a very common use of the word.
HumboldtBlue
@Geminid:
Thanks for the tip.
Here’s the actual link to The Great Game
A heads-up WaterGirl, links are not working in the text box.
Another Scott
@West of the Rockies: It’s more complicated than that, as you know.
There’s the Pakistani Taliban that wants to overthrow the Pakistan government and doesn’t get along with the Afghan Taliban:
Chaos is chaotic. One shouldn’t assume that the Afghan Taliban will have an easy go of it if/when they take Kabul.
It seems to me that a lot of these groups are more interested in power, and maintaining the support of larger regional powers, than in particular abstract policies.
But we’ll see.
Cheers,
Scott.
E.
@Chetan Murthy: You’re missing my point but anyway there were many Romans who did not have what the Romans called citizenship. Slaves, to name one example. But Romans could trade with each other, intermarry, even become consul, and Romans were protected by Rome. Obviously I meant it’s a smart move to load the place up with as many enemies of the Taliban as you can and give them safe haven and yes I mean citizenship here.
West of the Rockies
@Another Scott:
Thank you for an informative response, Scott. I was not aware of the distinction between the two neighboring Taliban groups. Nonetheless, the Afghani group (to me) seems utterly loathsome.
Chetan Murthy
@West of the Rockies: IIUC, “Taliban” merely means “students” in (IIUC) Pashto, the language of the Pashtuns (on both sides of the border with Pakistan). I think the name emerged from the Afghan students of extremist madrassas in Pakistan, who were recruited by the (Pakistani) ISI to go retake Afghanistan.
phdesmond
@Chetan Murthy:
212 C.E.
The Edict of Caracalla (officially the Constitutio Antoniniana in Latin: “Constitution [or Edict] of Antoninus”) was an edict issued in AD 212 by the Roman Emperor Caracalla, which declared that all free men in the Roman Empire were to be given full Roman citizenship and all free women in the Empire were given the same rights as Roman women, with the exception of the dediticii, people who had become subject to Rome through surrender in war, and freed slaves.[6]
Kay
If they could have come up with a strategy to get out without it collapsing they would have done it years ago. All of these liars pretending that any of them had a way to get out or wind down or in any way end this short of remaining forever is insulting.
They didn’t know how to get out. That’s why they stayed 20 years. The same set of people who couldn’t figure out a less than catastrophic exit were somehow going to discover one in the next 6 months? It’s magical thinking.
I’m willing to give them that they put their absolute best effort into trying to figure out how to get out for the last 20 years but they need to admit they don’t know how. Joe Biden is the only one of them willing to admit it and he will take the entire blame for it, which is fine, he’s the President, he takes the blame.
But they need to stop telling us they knew or know how to do it- if they did they would have done it.
laura
@Kay: The only way out is to never play the game. Mistakes made, messiness, arms traders enriched, military budget grown, misery on the march, women and children, well, you know….
Soprano2
@Kay: This, all of it. If we had left 10 years ago or 10 years from now, the same thing would have happened. The Afghan government we enabled was a mirage that wasn’t supported by the majority of the Afghan people, or it wouldn’t be collapsing like this. I only wish Trump had done this, so a Republican could get the blame, but even then all the usual suspects probably would have found a way to blame Obama. We should have armed the women, they have the most to lose.
TriassicSands
In 2001, I opposed the U.S. attack on Afghanistan for the very simple reason that I didn’t trust Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld to wage any military action on anyone under any circumstances.
Biden could undoubtedly have done this better, but it seems pretty obvious that the non-Taliban Afghans simply lack the will to effectively oppose the barbaric religious zealots. The disaster has always been about when, not if.
I feel deeply for the girls and women, who will suffer the most. The men? Some have undoubtedly fought bravely, but that doesn’t seem to be the norm. The men will probably fall in line with the Taliban and oppress and abuse the women. A tragedy, but one we can’t realistically prevent.
It’s terrible.
The corruption at the top could never have led to a sustainable (democratic?) government. We had no way to force the existence of honest leaders.
HeartlandLiberal
@MoCaAce:
@namekarB:
Anyone who has studied Roman history knows this is true in spades. The Romans were incredibly brutal. They executed a couple of Gallic tribes in the north completely to make a point. Caesar, after battle of Alesia and defeat of Vercingetorix, chopped off the hands of all surviving men and send them home, as a message not to take up arms against Rome again.
Chris
We’ll see a lot of blame thrown at Joe Biden over the next couple of months, and no doubt right-wingers will blame him for “losing” Afghanistan, but most of it is bullshit.
As with Obama and Iraq, Biden’s great crime appears to have been abiding by the withdrawal agreements signed by the previous Republican administration. (Although if he’d completely abided by them, this would actually have already happened back in May).
Geminid
@HeartlandLiberal: I recall a comment a historian made about the strict laws the Romans imposed on themselves. The laws were needed, the historian said, because Roman men knew they had to bridle their cruel and violent culture. The paterfamilias had power of life and death over his family as well as his slaves. A male citizen, though, had the right to a trial if accused of a capital offence.
Inside of Rome, a Consul was attended by ten Lictors. The one who led carried a bundle of fasces, large staffs with which to beat people. Outside the city limits, though, an axe was added to the staffs, and this axe wasn’t just for show.
Chris
@bbleh:
But where I think the real problem lies — where most of the blame for this situation lies, and where there is unlikely to be any learning at all, since they probably don’t think they did anything wrong — is among the senior officers, the civilian policy-makers, and the political class who approved it and enabled it and sold it to the voters. I expect they’ll blunder right on in the next chance they get, thumping their chests and waving flags in all the approved ways (white papers and policy memos, staff meetings, campaign speeches, etc., all with lots of harrumphing), and for all the same reasons: career, the Iron Triangle, the approval of their peers, fame, and did I mention career.
I came back to DC in 2016 after three years away from there, and when I started going back to public events at the universities and think tanks and the like, one of the things that really struck me was how universal the “Obama’s Failed Foreign Policy” consensus was – because he’d retreated too much from the world, and our enemies were taking advantage everywhere, etc. In late 2012 when I left the city, they were still reeling from Dubya’s catastrophic management enough that that consensus wasn’t happening yet. By 2016, they were all back to normal, just craving a Strong Republican Daddy to come back and Make American Foreign Policy Great Again.
The foreign policy establishment does not learn.
Chris
@laura:
If you want to improve the lives of women and children in areas of the world where Shit’s Fucked Up and Bullshit, give funds to women and women’s organizations. If your want to perpetuate misery, give money and arms to men. The soon to be murdered leaders in Afghanistan are easy to identify by their fancy watches.
McMaster’s whinefest of “where are the feminists? Where are the humanitarians?” is probably the hot take that’s pissed me off the most so far in this whole mess. Humanitarian and women’s rights groups were operating in Afghanistan at enormous personal risk for years before the U.S. military involved itself, and they’ll continue to operate there for years after it’s gone.
Chris
@namekarB:
Said differently, the women and girls in Afghanistan will be treated the same as in other parts of the Arab and Muslim worlds
Yeah, no.
Chris
@Kay:
They didn’t know how to get out. That’s why they stayed 20 years. The same set of people who couldn’t figure out a less than catastrophic exit were somehow going to discover one in the next 6 months? It’s magical thinking.
There’s a moment in The Hunt for Red October (completely irrelevant to the main plot) when Jack Ryan and Admiral Greer are waiting for someone to get back to them about the submarine business and, in the meantime, start going over the Soviet situation in Afghanistan. Jack’s assessment is “the Soviets moved in there by mistake. They don’t know what they want to do now. … In this kind of situation, the bureaucratic mind finds it easiest to do nothing.”
It’s a line that really sticks out to me every time I reread the book, because that’s exactly what the U.S. has been doing in the same country since, essentially, January 2002.
PJ
@Gin & Tonic:
I know you know this, too, but the “Fall of Saigon” is shorthand for the fact that South Vietnam, which was a separate country, with a separate government, from North Vietnam, was conquered by it. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were sent to re-education camps, where they were starved and tortured. The re-united Vietnam was an economic basket case for the next decade until the Communists decided that maybe a full-on socialist economy was not the way to go. Vietnam remains a political dictatorship run by the Communist Party, and there is no freedom of speech, of assembly, etc.
PJ
@E.: That was not true at all. It took centuries (the Edict of Caracalla, 212 AD) for most residents of conquered territories to become Roman citizens.
PJ
@Chetan Murthy:
Plutarch estimated that one million Gauls were killed in the conquest of Gaul, and another one million were enslaved.
PJ
@randy khan:
The Taliban were never defeated because they could just hang out in Pakistan, and we were never going to invade Pakistan.
Soprano2
@Chris: I’ve heard this from conservatives since 2002, as if feminists didn’t give a rat’s ass what happened there because liberals love “terrorist Muslims” so much. I’d always reply that I’d known what was happening there since the mid-90’s because of articles by feminists in women’s magazines highlighting the Taliban’s brutality towards women. I remember an appearance by Mavis Leno on the Tonight Show sometime in the late 90’s where she talked about this topic and begged people to help these feminist groups. After 9-11, one conservative woman I knew online had the gall to get offended when I reminded her that in August of 2001 when I brought up this very topic her attitude was very dismissive, saying something like “Afghanistan, no one has heard of it, that’s an irrelevant country”.
debbie
@randy khan:
The Taliban was never defeated because the group in charge was the group pushing the bullshit about readiness to conduct two wars simultaneously. They wanted to prove their point, whatever the cost.
Kay
@Chris:
The only rational pro-remain argument I have heard is that the war was mischaracterized to the public and should have been presented as a “cold war”- a long, long process to discredit and marginalize the extremists until they were in a box and no longer growing.
I wouldn’t have supported a cold war, but that at least is a plan or a model and an admission of error by the planners and supporters.
It’s shocking to me that some of them are saying leaving 3000 troops there was the plan. 3000 is even worse than 25,000. 3000 is just ass-covering while they wait for the political figure to step up and take the blame. Well, Biden stepped up. They now have their scapegoat.
Mitt Romney out there with his ridiculous vague Tweets about what could have been done. What bullshit. Hypothetical success has many fathers. There isn’t any “one neat trick” or magical super smart general who could fix it. They had the best people thay have trying to solve it for 20 years and they don’t have a solution.
Nettoyeur
@West of the Rockies: That also describes the Trump base of the GOP, who are actively trying to erase democracy (to say nothing of women’s rights) in the US. Maybe we need to fight off the American Taliban at home first.
Matt
You know what would’ve helped after Vietnam? If the clowns responsible had been prosecuted for their actions, and their subsequent involvement in Iran-Contra. Then they wouldn’t have been at the planning table shouting BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD when 9/11 happened.
Geminid
@PJ: What the Romans would do is grant Roman citizenship to the elite leadership of countries that came under their contol. Republican Rome was run by it’s wealthiest families, and Rome leaders relied upon their counterparts to maintain order in the provinces.
This principle broke down later in the Republic, when rapacious governors indisciminately plundered the wealth of their provinces, Outraged foreign citizens could sometimes get justice in Roman courts. One of the young Julius Caesar’s notable achievements was his successful prosecution of Dolabella, the cruel Roman governor of an Asian province.
Kay
Well, I may be the only person in America who thinks this, but having the courage to make the decision makes me admire Biden more.
Someone had to do it. The ass-covering and pretending someone, anyone knew how to get out of there without a catastrophe had to end. It’s really past time for someone to tell the truth.
Chris
@Soprano2:
And feminists were literally the only group in Washington that was applying any pressure against the Taliban. As I recall, one of the few big fights that occurred over Afghanistan in the nineties was a deal to run a pipeline through the place, after the Taliban had taken it over. The Clinton administration had its heart set on it. The women’s rights lobby managed to sink it. The entire right wing, as usual, was out to lunch.
Chris
@Kay:
As near as I can tell, Afghanistan is a case of “go all-out or go surgical, but for fuck’s sake pick one.”
You want to say that our problems in Afghanistan are limited to Bin Laden and his posse specifically and that we’re only going to send in what it takes to wipe them out, fine.
You want to say that Afghanistan is a breeding ground for terrorism and that you want to go the full Central Asian Marshall Plan nation-building package and commit to staying there as long as it takes and putting in as many resources as it takes until it’s become a stable country that’s no longer an jihadist safehouse, fine.
(Either option has its problems and might not have worked, but they’re not obviously insane).
Instead, we did too much for the former and not enough for the latter, and ended up staying in a two-decade-long shit-show that accomplished nothing.
Geminid
@Chris: Your analyses is essentially correct. I would just add that the Marshall plan worked in European countries that already had civic cultures where corruption had been limited and penalized. In Afghanistan, corruption had been embedded in governance for generations. When the Taliban first won power, many Afghans were relieved not only because this brought an end to years of a destructive civil war, but also because the Taliban were seen as uncorrupt. After the U.S. drove the Taliban from power, the corruption of the succeeding government and military was probably the biggest cause of their downfall.
nasruddin
This is sort of a myth. Plenty of empires have overrun Afghanistan in the past. Persian, Turkish, Mongol, even a Buddhist one (Asoka). It’s true that the tribes and groups in the Hindu Kush are hard to hold on to (It’s a tough area) and some of those empires didn’t last, but empires usually have a lot of internal and external problems.
In recent times Afghans have done a fair amount of the overrunning and conquest of neighbors themselves, which should make people in Pakistan & Xinjiang & Tajikistan sit up in bed. We’ve left behind a lot of nice toys for them to play with.
Why the US client state failed and the Taliban succeeded now should be an interesting story. This version of the Taliban is way more successful than the one we tossed out in 2002. They have something going on in every constituency and ethnic group in the country, it seems. Why the US client state failed probably has significant roots back in Washington DC (just like the Russian failure was rooted in Moscow & the British in Calcutta if not London). Decisions are made with a political calculus in the imperial court & with about zero input from whatever is happening in the locality. I of course don’t know this for a fact but that’s how we do things in the US, over and over and over.
Chris
@Geminid:
My general take on Marshall Plan type massive postwar reconstruction (and, in Germany and Japan’s case, transformation) is that there may very well be cases where even that isn’t going to work… but your postwar reconstruction sure as hell isn’t going to work without it either way.
Basically, Marshall Plans may not be sufficient for success, but they’re absolutely necessary for success.
smintheus
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: O’Hanlon, ignoramus opportunist insta-expert of 9/11/01. I used to excoriate that son of a b*tch every possible chance, as for example in this old blog post:
http://smintheusblog.blogspot.com/2006/12/operation-yellow-gasbag.html
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Soprano2: Trump DID do this. He made the agreement. All Biden did was honor it, which was the right thing to do. When Republicans act horrified, they need to be reminded that this was what Trump negotiated. He (as usual) did this the wrong way, but he was right that we needed to leave.
smintheus
@Soprano2: That was exactly George Bush’s attitude toward misogyny and human rights abuses of the Taliban, during his first 8 months in office. He waived international outrage away, and invited Taliban representatives to Washington in the days just before 9/11. All Bush and Cheney cared about was the opportunity to work with the Taliban on an oil pipeline. Then after the terrorist attack, Bush held a dog’n’pony show in which he pretended always to have ‘cared’ deeply about the Taliban’s abuse of women and girls.
Karen
@Honus: Am piggybacking on you Honus and hope it’s OK. Have been reading this blog off and on for ten years. Thank you John Cole for stating a piece.
Gemina13
@HeartlandLiberal:
Same with Carthage. Terrified of their one-time rival for control of the Mediterranean regaining their former glory, Rome sent Scipio Aemilianius (related by adoption to the great Africanus) to destroy Carthage and raze the city to the ground. Sulla devastated Athens during the Mithridatic War (spurred by its leader’s taunts concerning him and his wife). Rome itself experienced the terrors of civil war in the streets, when first Marius, then Sulla, took the city and slaughtered their opponents, with Sulla publishing proscription lists daily for several months. Roman brutality in war was linked to early defeats and invasions (the Battle of the Allia, the Caudine Forks, and others), and other disasters such as Cannae and Arausio hardened the attitude of, “Let’s make sure they never fvck with us again.”
And truthfully, while Caesar has been hailed as a great general due to his Gallic campaigns, a modern-day commander who acted as he did would be hauled to the Hague to be tried as a war criminal. Same with Aemilianus, Sulla, Lucullus, and any number of Roman generals.