Let me be perfectly clear, to borrow a Nixonian phrase, when it comes to military matters I am no Sun Tzu. When the great Tom Lehrer wrote, “he doesn’t know a shelter half from an entrenching tool,” he could very well have been referring to me.
But, by God, I know a disaster when it’s playing out before my eyes and Afghanistan is nothing short of Vietnam Jr., from the ill-advised involvement in someone else’s civil war to the horrific, ongoing exit stage left of American troops.
President Biden was the target of harsh criticism this week for the chaos surrounding the ordered withdrawal of American military personnel from Afghanistan after almost 20 years in country. Regardless of who was in charge or how well-planned the departure might have been, leaving Afghanistan was sure to result in a dreadful, heart-breaking scenario. Under Biden, it has been uglier than it needed to be as a result of the U.S. yet again underestimating the talent and intent of the opposition Taliban. The U.S, was no sooner loading up the planes to go home than the Taliban was knocking on the palace door to assume power in Kabul.
The NKyTribune’s Washington columnist Bill Straub served 11 years as the Frankfort Bureau chief for The Kentucky Post. He also is the former White House/political correspondent for Scripps Howard News Service. A member of the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame, he currently resides in Silver Spring, Maryland, and writes frequently about the federal government and politics. Email him at williamgstraub@gmail.comThe result, of course, was a frenzy among those who aided the U.S. and Afghan Armed Forces in the ill-fated operation, interpreters, guides and others, who likewise sought a hasty retreat to a safe haven rather than trust their fates to the Taliban. Understandably so. Now it’s up to Biden to right the situation or face the consequences.
But targeting Biden for abuse, some of which certainly is deserved, misses the point. There’s plenty of blame to go around in this terrible, misbegotten saga that cost the U.S. at least $2.261 trillion, according to a Brown University study. More than 800,000 American service members were shuttled in and out of the mountains and plains that constitute Afghanistan, resulting in at least 2,352 American deaths and more than 20,000 wounded. The cost to the Afghan population and armed service is incalculable.
The big question that revolved around Afghanistan for better than two decades – America’s longest experience in any war – could be found in an old Clash tune, “Should I Stay or Should I go?” The hostilities were initiated by President George W. Bush, a Republican, in wake of the infamous al Qaeda 9/11 terrorist attack that resulted in the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York and extensive damage to the Pentagon. Afghanistan and the ruling Taliban were targeted by Bush at the time because they provided a safe haven for al Qaeda and refused to turn over the terrorist group’s leader, Osama bin Laden, without proof of his involvement in the atrocities.
Biden’s successor, President Barack Obama, a Democrat, followed by President Donald Trump, a Republican, considered getting out while the getting was good but failed to stand and deliver.
It took Biden to pull the trigger.
There were arguments for staying. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, of Louisville, has consistently endorsed that route, arguing that remaining would “prevent terrorists from operating in a safe haven.”
“I was a part of arguing against that (withdrawal), both to President Obama and to the previous president, President Trump, as well as to the current president, not because I thought we were ever going to see in our lifetimes some modern democracy in that part of the world, but because I thought it was in our own interest to prevent it from becoming a haven again and providing a victory for terrorism,” McConnell said during an address in Jeffersontown this week.
“So, against everyone’s advice, including the current president’s own military, he decided to withdraw and to withdraw rapidly,” he said. “What we have seen is an unmitigated disaster, a stain on the reputation of the United States of America. Every terrorist around the world, in Syria, in Iraq, in Yemen, in Africa are cheering the defeat of the United States military by a terrorist organization in Afghanistan.”
The McConnell argument would seem to, initially at least, carry some merit. But it runs counter to what was occurring on the ground. Any American interest in successfully battling terrorism in Afghanistan would grind to a halt as a result of the inevitable Taliban victory. American presence was already down to about 2,500 troops and the U.S. had handed over security to the Afghan forces in 2014.
The resurgent Taliban was advancing with abandon on U.S. trained and equipped Afghan Armed Forces troops. As of last week it had gained control of two-thirds of the nation’s territory and a number of provincial capitals. It displayed no signs of pulling up short of Kabul.
As Biden noted in his speech to the nation, the previous administration reached a deal with the Taliban to withdraw U.S. troops, with May 1 the targeted date. In return, the Taliban promised to reduce violence and guarantee that they will not host al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups.
Biden, then, could either withdraw the remaining U.S. military personnel or dispatch thousands of troops to relaunch hostilities. He chose the former.
“So what’s happened?” Biden asked in an address to the nation. “Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight. If anything, the developments of the past week reinforced that ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision.
“American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves,” he said.
Fair enough. But the resulting chaos exposed yet another failure of the U.S. intelligence, which failed to anticipate the rapid, all-consuming advance of the Taliban trampling over what remained of Afghan security forces, and our government’s inability to properly plan for complex international developments. There appears to have been no anticipation of a worst-case scenario, which, of course, occurred.
There is no reason to believe any of Biden’s predecessors would have fared any better given the shortcoming of American intelligence gathering. But he’s in charge now. Further withdrawal could have been delayed with the arrival of a more convenient season when hostilities were in a lull or the administration could have re-engaged in some manner with the Taliban. Biden chose not to do so. Therefore, under the common rules of American political engagement, any mess falls on his shoulders.
What this shows, finally, is that the United States has learned nothing over the years. It blundered into Vietnam after the French failed to maintain control. In Afghanistan, it entered after the British and the Russians suffered embarrassing setbacks. In both states this nation had no real concept of the cultures it was dealing with and became embroiled in two civil wars. It lied to the American public about the engagement – the Pentagon Papers established that the U.S. realized for years the Vietnam War was unwinnable. In 2019, The Washington Post ran a series titled “At War With the Truth,’’ based on “a confidential trove of government documents’’ establishing that “senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan…making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.”
In both Vietnam and Afghanistan, the U.S. military invested billions of dollars to train and equip local personnel to assume combat duties. In both instances, those endeavors failed miserably.
No winners, only losers, those killed or maimed on foreign battlefields.
In Afghanistan, it’s obvious that U.S. interests would have been better served by a series of counter-terrorism operations to obliterate the camps of al Qaeda and others. Now the nation must face the prospect of bombing the Bagram Air Base into the stone age to prevent the Taliban from commandeering key security documents and securing American military equipment.
It is indeed ironic that a film, The Princess Bride, from 1987, should prove prescient about the whole, sordid mess:
“You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is to never get involved in a land war in Asia.”
