Just when we think we’re out they pull us back in. Or at least they try. Lord, how they try. In a Washington Post op-ed Madiha Afzal does her best to persuade the Biden Administration that we’ve got to stay in Afghanistan:
Biden, as the Economist put it, seems to have “little time for a losing cause.†His decision also reflects his administration’s foreign policy for the American middle-class paradigm, which focuses on domestic considerations over international ones (and is this so different from Trump’s “America First�). The irony, though, is that the American middle class largely doesn’t care about Afghanistan — their ambivalence gave way to support for this decision once it was announced, but it wouldn’t be hard to visualize the public approving of a scenario that kept a couple thousand troops there for a while longer.
What’s perhaps most disturbing is the narrative the president has presented along with the rationale for withdrawal: that we went to Afghanistan to defeat al-Qaeda after 9/11, that mission creep led us to stay on too long and, therefore, it is time to get out. This takes an incomplete view of U.S. agency in the war in Afghanistan. The narrative implies that the civil conflict in Afghanistan today did not originate with us — that this more than 40-year war began with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, preceded us and will follow our departure.
The fact of the matter is that, by beginning the campaign in Afghanistan in 2001 and overthrowing the Taliban, who were then engaged in their draconian rule, and installing a new government, we began a new phase of the Afghan conflict — one that pitted the Kabul government and the United States against the Taliban insurgency. The Afghan people did not have a say in the matter. That we are leaving Afghan women, children and youth better off in many ways after 20 years is due to us, and we should be proud of that. But that we are leaving them mired in a bloody conflict is also due to us, because we could not hold off the Taliban insurgency, and we must reckon publicly with that.
That is not a new argument. It has been phrased more succinctly as the “Pottery Barn argument”—you broke it, you bought it.
Since 2001 we have had three objectives in Afghanistan:
- Remove Al Qaeda and their hosts, the Taliban
- Leave Afghanistan
- Establish an Afghan government capable of defending itself against the Taliban and keeping Al Qaeda out
and since 2001 I have been arguing that accomplishing those in concert was impossible. In fact the only way to succeed there was for the president to announce to the American people that we planned to stay in Afghanistan forever. And it wouldn’t be under conditions like those in Germany or Japan. Our troops would be facing hostile attacks persistently forever. And we’d need to keep hauling supplies overland across Pakistan while paying off Pakistan’s government to let us do it. That would be far from a V-E Day success.
While I think that President Bush bears a lot of the responsibility for our persistent mess in Afghanistan none of his successors have done much to disabuse the American people of the true nature of the situation in Afghanistan. Did they figure that we couldn’t handle the truth or could they not handle the truth?
