I am not a student of Afghanistan, but I do have a good hypocrisy detector. And it is quivering at the current narrative of the talking heads and the media.
When we went into Afghanistan after 9/11 it was to eliminate a safe haven for terrorists, their training ground and their base of operations. That goal was accomplished pretty quickly.
Col Owens
The kill Osama Bin Laden goal was, from my standpoint, added as a separate goal later, after it was accomplished. Interestingly, not in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan.
In any event, goals accomplished either very early on, or at least after the first ten years. Time to come home.
But that didn’t happen. Mission creep. While people said we weren’t nation building, that was exactly what we were doing. While assuaging those who like America to be at war.
For example, bettering conditions for women. A wonderful thing to do. But not eliminating training grounds or a safe haven for terrorists.
So we stayed. Over time we got better at doing more with less, or at least the same with less, and reduced American casualties, which reduced concern about the war. We continued to engage in nation-building.
People settled into the comfortable pattern of low-level occupation.
But it was still a war.
We were spending a lot of money, to support what we deceived ourselves into believing was a viable government. (A government which collapsed in 24-48 hours after we began the evacuation.
Trump began the end-the-war process. It was muddied, according to many. Set date certain, effectively handed control to Taliban, released thousands of prisoners, including ISIS fighters.
I don’t pretend to understand all of the issues and decisions made over the last months by the Biden Administration. I don’t know how much the complete and immediate collapse of the government, the government we had poured so much money into for so many years, upset the Administration’s plans. Interestingly, one hears virtually nothing about that from the hand-wringing talking heads.
What I do know is heroic work when I see it.
The Taliban, which has been castigated over and over again by the media and its experts, showed amazing restraint during this exercise. For which it has been vilified, as somehow deceiving us to get rid of us.
Maybe. But people should heed what some others are saying, that they – the Taliban – need, more than anything else, international support. Money. There remains leverage.
So we are now out of the war. It’s now a matter of diplomacy, like almost all of the rest of the world.
There will be much analysis over a long period of time, about the decision to leave and the way it was executed.
But when the dust settles, and history delivers its verdict, I am fairly confident it will be kinder to President Biden than are present pundits and the media.
Col Owens is a retired legal aid attorney who teaches poverty law at Chase College of Law. He is the author of the recently-released book Bending the Arc Toward Justice (Cincinnati Book Publishing, 2020) available at colowensbooks.com.
I voted for the President last November and given the same opposition, I would gladly vote for Biden again. All that being said, I am extremely disappointed about how this administration handled the pull-out. I agree, we should get out of the country. Trump’s administration, Miller specifically, tried to throw wrenches in plans to issue visas to those Afgans that helped us during the war. There was little “turn-over” of information from the Trump administration to the Biden administration. Trump set an impossible time limit for us to leave. The new August 31 time limit be damned; we should stay as long as necessary to fulfill our obligations to the remaining Americans and eligible Afgans that want out. I suspect the average American Grunt there had a better handle on the fragility of the Afgan army than did the senior officers reporting up the line. Either our intelligence sucked or was ignored. We should find out.