Escape from Afghanistan

"A vote for Joe Biden is a vote for forever war in the Middle East. A vote for Donald Trump is a vote to finally bring our troops home."

Tweet by Donald Trump, Jr. September, 2020

The troops are finally coming home, but Joe Biden is president.

Now Americans will decide how we really feel about the war there, and its end.

President Joe Biden honored the February, 2020 agreement the Trump administration struck with the Taliban. We had agreed to leave by May, 2021; they agreed to stop killing American soldiers.  February 8, 2020 was the date the last Americans died in battle in Afghanistan, Army Sgts. 1st Class Javier Gutierrez and Antonio Rodriguez.

The leave-taking is televised and there is no hiding or sugar-coating it. It looks terrible--chaotic, disorganized, frantic. The Afghan army we spent two decades arming and training essentially disappeared, turning the country over to the Taliban almost overnight.  The president of the U.S.-backed Afghan government, Ashraf Ghani, fled to Tajikistan. 

We are not watching an orderly retreat. We are watching an escape, and even that is going badly because the collapse of the Afghan government has been so sudden. The Afghan failure is another iteration of Ernest Hemingway's comment about bankruptcy: It happens gradually, and then suddenly.

My age cohort was of draft age during the war in Vietnam. My college classmates and I have spent 55 years discussing the limits of American military power.  The discussion continues.

Weisbard

Alan Weisbard is a college classmate, and a graduate of Yale Law School. He had a distinguished career as a policymaker at federal and state levels. He is now an emeritus professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin. This is the first of several perspectives I expect to share about America's "forever war."

Guest Post by Alan Weisbard

There is an ongoing calamity in Afghanistan. The Taliban has taken over. The government we supported for two decades has collapsed. The consequences will be tragic for those Afghan people who relied on us, especially women. I have read several commentaries by Afghan women who insist that for most Afghan women in most of the country, conditions for women under the present regime  are pretty awful, not significantly better than under the Taliban. That may be less true for some  women in Kabul and maybe a few other big cities. On these accounts, helping Afghan women is not a sufficient justification for for keeping our military in country indefinitely.

This feels so familiar. We have been here before, so I raise some questions in frustration and anger: 

With the possible exception of the successful strike on bin Laden (technically in Pakistan), what have the past nineteen years (beyond the initial strikes on Al Qaeda) bought us?

How many lies were fed to the American public —and perhaps to chief Executive Branch officials—about our supposed successes in training Afghan forces to defend their country, and in shoring up the Afghan government?

Why do we persist in these losing engagements overseas, at great human and economic cost,  when it becomes apparent that we are not achieving anything worthwhile or lasting?

As we approach the impending fall of Saigon—er, Kabul—how do we evaluate the repetition of errors that should have been learned from our failures in Vietnam some fifty years ago?

Why do we support corrupt and incompetent foreign governments?

Why was there so little public opposition to this tragic and foolhardy war?

Why did the military brass persist in supporting this fiasco?

Why did civilian leadership not pull the plug on this misadventure long ago?

Where was the Daniel Ellsberg figure when we needed him, a decade or more ago?

Why do we invest so much treasure in a military that is unable to honestly assess the state of affairs in a foreign conflict?

Why can’t we get some kind of do-over? Or is this indeed the do-over of Vietnam, in the mountains rather than the jungles?

I suspect President Biden will take a lot of blame for what is happening now. But most of the blame should be placed earlier. Biden is at the back of a long line of policy failures over two decades, under both Republican and Democratic Administrations. I for one am glad he is bringing this horrible misadventure to a close. I see no reason to believe that further temporizing or delaying the U.S. withdrawal would have yielded a better result. Those policy mavens who supported the war and are now criticizing Biden should be put out to pasture. Or something worse.