Maybe I’ve done enough angry tweeting this week already about the shameful incoherence of major American journalistic outlets in their coverage of the end of America’s disastrous war in Afghanistan.
Though it’s not getting any better: the US press just keeps gyrating so hard between contradictory takes that they’re getting fed by their prize sources and the knowledge they’ve got in their own archives that reveals the mendacity of official sources and military spokespeople all the way back to 2001. And now politicians on all sides are starting to get their cues straight as they try to figure out how to rain down anger on somebody while covering their own guilty asses, while the press also sifts for “man on the street” archetypes that will let them control the content of the conversation: the parent whose child served in the military and died in Afghanistan, the veteran who came home maimed, the Afghani woman who is a journalist or a teacher or a government minister, the local GOP official who is glad to have something to talk about besides covid-19.
It’s all very “You give the governor a harrumph!” and the press should know better.
The thing is, you just cannot be telling the history of the American-led war in Afghanistan with full knowledge of just how badly it failed from an early point onward and at the same time be full-throatedly complaining about how it didn’t have to end now, it didn’t have to end this way, there had to be a better plan, there had to be some way to make all those lives worth something. This is like watching the entirety of Macbeth and saying, “Honestly, Macbeth should just have left the castle before the army got there and then tried to negotiate with Macduff. Plus, if only he’d just struck a deal with Banquo instead of murdering him, that was a mistake.” It was always going to end that way once he listened to the witches. That’s the point.
The American involvement in Afghanistan was always going to end with a collapsing regime and chaos. The US built nothing. We were told this again and again by people who knew Afghanistan. The developments that Americans are hubristically attributing to their own beneficience—educated Afghan women with prominent roles in urban civil society, for example—were accomplished by those people themselves using the resources and possibilities that slopped over the edges of the money and infrastructure raining down alongside the weapons and soldiers. But those cosmopolitan men and women who came of age in wartime Kabul and other cities needed a state built up out of what Afghanistan actually is rather than the unreal Afghanistan seen by successive uncomprehending waves of American military planners and officials. Those new elites didn’t achieve that, so they’ll have to flee or find a way to work out an understanding with the new rulers that shelters some part of what they have become.
The war went wrong when George W. Bush’s pack of feckless liars and paleoconservative brutes decided that they weren’t content with the support of the entire world for a highly focused military mission in Afghanistan that would scour the country of al-Qaeda bases and knock over the intensely unpopular Taliban government of 2001. No, they had to go to war in Iraq as well, a country they knew had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. And they couldn’t just focus on a specific mission with an achievable goal in Afghanistan. They decided, on purpose, to make it a forever war, part of “global war on terror”. And at the outset, only a single American elected official had the courage to vote against giving them the open-ended authority to wage that kind of war, for which she received abuse and threats from the editors of major newspapers, from both political parties, from every grandstanding asshole that this country of grandstanding assholes can provide.
Bush’s people decided to keep anybody in the federal government who might actually know anything about Afghanistan or Iraq away from those wars, because everybody knows that eggheads who speak languages and know histories will tell you, truthfully, that imperial occupations don’t build nations and they don’t end in peace. They will tell you, truthfully, that if you find yourself blowing up weddings and killing young men with drones just because they’re young men and might be insurgents, you’re not going to build a secure and peaceful community protected by an army you helped to build. They will tell you, truthfully, what military fetishists like Robert Kaplan or Michael Kelly couldn’t understand, which is that when you buy loyalty from local people and train them to fight for a government they have no stake in or connection to, their willingness to fight lasts right until the moment you stop paying and not a second more. They will tell you, truthfully, that you can’t kill your way out of the situation if your approach to fighting just replenishes your opponents in numbers and resolve.
So no wonder they kept the eggheads out of the picture as much as possible.
It went wrong when Barack Obama decided to defer to his generals and when he decided he wasn’t going to be the guy who lost the war that had already long since been lost. It went wrong when Donald Trump almost decided to be the guy who had the guts to end it but couldn’t quite get himself there—but got close enough to quitting that the Taliban leadership knew the final retreat was coming soon and started preparing themselves for it.
If you’ve gotten this far and you’re the guy who says, “But we could have planned the retreat better”? And you’re the guy who says, “But we should have known it was going to collapse this fast—why didn’t Biden realize that?” Well, here’s some more eggheaded truths to chew on, then.
The only time you get to retreat from a battlefield—or end an occupation—in an orderly fashion is when you have battlefield superiority or when the occupation has succeeded in completely pacifying a territory and constructing a friendly administrative regime that facilitates the occupier’s gradual exit. These are exceedingly rare circumstances in comparative world historical terms. Armed forces that have a strategic need to retreat while still in control of a battlefield are generally only those that are being redeployed to greater strategic need somewhere else. If you’re leaving because you’re losing, there’s only so much you can do to prevent losses in the process and only so much order you can impose as you go. If you’re ending an occupation because it’s failed, you don’t get to exert a territorial control that you never managed to have in the first place on the way out.
You can’t keep your timetable for leaving a secret—or make it open-ended—if you’re also going to start evacuating people on a mass scale. The moment the first cargo plane loads up is the moment that your opponents know that you’re beginning the retreat in earnest. All your choices at that point are bad. The people who are saying “Well, we should have kept Bagram intact and withdrawn people from there!” don’t get it. How are you going to get the thousands of people who want to be evacuated from Kabul to Bagram? You’re going to have to protect the entire route from a city that your allies are losing control over as soon as you begin the evacuations to an airbase that you’re also trying to strip down and empty out. You’re going to have to defend a base that at the height of the occupation was still subject to occasional attacks but is now essentially open to attack on all sides if your adversaries choose to do so.
If you understood the country well enough to understand how fragile and uncommitted its nominal government really was, then you’d have been a different kind of occupier all along. Biden didn’t understand because the American military and the American government has lied so often and so thoroughly to itself about Afghanistan that there’s no capacity left to hear the truth. And it is not as if understanding the truth of the collapse to come would have provided any strategic insight anyway. Accelerate the withdrawal earlier? The collapse comes earlier. Put more military resources in to counter-attack the Taliban and create security for a later withdrawal? You end up putting off the withdrawal for months, years, forever: the time will never be right, because when the time is right, you’ll end up in the same wretched situation with people clinging to plane wheels and Taliban soldiers using exercise machines in a US military’s former gym.
Americans in general never wanted to hear that they were at war, or understand what their forever wars were costing people in those places, or even what they were costing Americans in terms of lives and resources and money. Support the troops! But don’t make me actually think about them! So maybe they don’t want to hear about what happens at the end of a failed war, either—or they want to find someone to blame besides their own complacency and ignorance, their own complicity. The press co-wrote the lies and wrangled the disconnects, the generals kept vainglorously thinking they were going to be the guy who cut the Gordian knot with some new doctrine, the politicians decided that somebody else later on would eat the shit sandwich that was being gloriously built up, Dagwood-style, to a mountainous fecal pile. The citizens squinted at the obscure names on the maps and fake-smiled at the hero soldiers getting fitted for their prosthetics and voted patriotically for American strength and determination.
Almost everybody owns a piece of those crowded planes and those fearful faces. Some a lot, some a little. Don’t fear: no one was called to account during the war and likely they won’t be after it. Somebody will get named as scapegoat so everybody else can dump their stake in it: you can join in now and help figure out who it will be. (The press seems to have settled on Biden and he seems fairly willing to go along with it.)
And who knows? In a few decades time, some asshole journalist will get to blithely rattle sabers again and call for the bombs to rain down, some feckless President will get to redeem America’s honor, some scumbag political appointees will get to pretend that they’re immune to the constraints that apply to power, and some citizens will get to wave flags again at parades and imagine they are on a crusade for freedom. Just give it a while, if you’d like to be the next Robert Kaplan or George Bush or Donald Rumsfeld or Stanley McChrystal or John McCain. Or just to be able to go to sleep at night safe in the thought that your country’s soldiers are killing other people somewhere to no productive end. Your chance will come. Empires have to forget, just like nations do, so that they can go on making the deadly mistakes that are their birthright.
Image credit: "Afghanistan patrol" by The U.S. Army is licensed under CC BY 2.0
You know which side I’m on here, Tim. Each regime since 9/11 made mistake after mistake, and nobody (much) bothered to look at what Afghanistan has been to successions of would-be conquerors since, I don’t know, the days of Alexander. The United States can get in line. Oh, wait. We’ve been in line for decades, and we just reached the front of it. You get no disagreement from me about the part US stupidity and cupidity played in where we are now. (Frankly, Biden can take the lumps, since he was in Congress and by Obama’s side for so many of those years.) But, but…there’s a callousness in the first part of this piece that does disturb me: So Afghani women who cobbled together an education or professions for themselves should now just hang in there, waiting for their “male guardians” to escort them to the weddings of girls under thirteen who used to be their students and still are their sisters to the new bosses (who are, of course, the oldest of the old bosses)? Tough luck for them, I guess, that they were once journalists or teachers or doctors or nurses (just noting that the first thing the triumphant Taliban did in the provinces was to shut down girls’ schools and women’s health centers). They’ll have to learn to get along, I guess. Sometimes you let your disdain for the recipients of neoliberal benefits get the better of you. And, just in the spirit of gender equality, you couldn’t have named Condi Rice in your rogue’s gallery there at the end? There weren’t many women at her level in the Bush 2 regime, but she surely ought to be recognized as one of the imperialists.
The Taliban were surprised at how quickly and easily they were able to take over. I'm not sure if this counts as everyone having an intelligence failure.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQtV9Pi0gM8
From what I've been reading, the Afghan military collapsed because they weren't getting food and ammunition. It wasn't a question of their loyalty being for sale. The Afghan *government* didn't have sufficient loyalty to even try to have a functioning military.