Kabul In 2021 Looks A Lot Like Saigon In 1975

Democrats AND Republicans own this mess...and should be working together to fix it

Do or do not. There is not try.

• Yoda

The more stupid one is, the closer one is to reality. The more stupid one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence squirms and hides itself. Intelligence is unprincipled, but stupidity is honest and straightforward.

• Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Who knew that Kabul, Afghanistan, was a distant suburb of Saigon and that 46 years on, America would be reliving its failure in Vietnam all over again? Yet, here we are, almost to the 20th anniversary of 9/11, and we’re seeing Afghanistan reverting once again to its brutal ungovernable glory.

The country that has resisted being conquered by the British, the Russians, and now the Americans has, unsurprisingly, fallen back into the hands of the Taliban. Yes, that’s as awful as it sounds…and it was completely and utterly predictable. But, for reasons known only to themselves, Afghanistan is a country that inspires normally lucid, intelligent policymakers to believe they can overcome historical precedent. In the case of American policymakers from BOTH parties, people with Ivy League degrees and brains to spare have looked at Afghanistan and thought, “Pffft…It’s a buncha rocks and uneducated peasants; we can fix that.”

Yeah…how’s that working out for y’all?

The war in Afghanistan is America’s longest-running war. It’s also a war that was going to end at some point. The question, of course, was when, how, and- most importantly- who would end up being blamed. No one who knows anything about Afghanistan ever pretended that American military superiority had “conquered” the country.

The short version is remarkably artless and characteristically American. After 9/11, we were a country furious over having been sucker-punched. Almost to a person, Americans wanted to hit back. We were angry and wanted retribution. American intelligence believed Osama bin Laden, the architect of the 9/11 attacks, to be somewhere in Afghanistan. Before you could say “Morning in America,” American airpower was turning mountain ranges into yet more rubble.

It was glorious, and it made for great television. America was blowing shit up on the 6:00 news. Toby Keith wrote a song about sticking our collective boot up the collective ass of those responsible for knocking us down. Then, slowly but surely, Americans began to get their swagger back…even though nothing of consequence actually changed stateside or in Afghanistan.

The American military settled in for what turned into a long, drawn-out, and debatably fruitless, almost 20-year-long adventure in propping up the American defense industry. We were in Afghanistan for so long that the American military and civilian presence created and maintained a de facto, if false, Pax Americana.

Successive American governments spent untold billions building roads, bridges, schools, and other projects they thought would make Afghanistan a better place over the long term. Unfortunately, what went unrecognized and/or unacknowledged were the billions lost to a spectacularly corrupt Afghan government. Yes, America contributed a great deal to Afghanistan’s long-term well-being…but it changed nothing when it came to the country’s culture of corruption and graft.

So now we’re coming to understand that getting into Afghanistan was the easy part. Few in the political world had any real problem with that part of the equation…but there were always those voices who warned about potential consequences when America decided to leave.

Now here we are…and guess what? The heretics were spot-on. Who could have known, right?

Donald Trump and his merry band of True Believers spent the run-up to the 2020 Presidential campaign promising to do exactly what President Joe Biden is doing now. The difference, of course, is that because the withdrawal is totally FUBAR’d, and Biden is in office, it’s all his fault. No one seems willing to point out that Trump drew down the American military presence to the point where it was no longer sustainable, nor could it support the Afghan military.

Casting blame is easy…and accomplishes nothing. I listened to an interview on Fox News in which former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pompously held forth that “I wouldn’t let my 10-year-old” engage in such blame-shifting as he accused the Biden Administration of being mired in. But for a few months and the results of a Presidential election, the same thing probably would’ve been happening to a Trump Administration.

There’s no doubt that what’s currently happening in Afghanistan generally- and Kabul specifically- is sad and tragic. What’s also true is that it was bound to happen no matter which party was in power in Washington. There are many complex reasons for this- some historical, some practical, some religious- but no matter how long America was the dominant power in Afghanistan, chaos was destined to be the outcome. It’s what happens when you wade into an unwinnable war with no exit strategy.

Trillions of American tax dollars and untold thousands of person-hours were spent equipping and training the Afghan Army to defend their country from the Taliban. And what happened virtually instantaneously once the American military handed off primary responsibility for combat operations? Predictably, the Afghan Army melted away, leaving billions in war materiel behind for the Taliban to claim.

Who’s going to explain to Joe and Ethel Sixpack that they paid for the weapon systems the Taliban are pointing at American troops?

My wife is a nurse practitioner in an oncology practice at a hospital in Portland. One of the basic philosophies she endeavors to impart to her patients is that she can’t help them any more than they’re willing to help themselves. She can’t save them. She can provide the tools and the treatments while they’re in her office, but she can’t impact or control what they do when they’re not.

The same concept applies in Afghanistan. The American military can’t save the Afghan Army from itself. It can’t defend the country from a malevolent force when the people of Afghanistan aren’t willing to defend it. There’s already been enough American blood and treasure devoted to/wasted on the war in Afghanistan.

Now too many on the right side of the political/ideological spectrum are gleefully piling on the Biden Administration. They’re blaming Joe Biden for a problem whose ultimate failure was set up on the day former President George W. Bush stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln in front of a “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED” banner on May 1, 2003.

Afghanistan is a clusterfuck 20 years in the making…and ownership is shared equally by Republicans AND Democrats. There’s plenty of blame to be spread around- lack of planning, lack of foresight, lack of historical awareness, lack of political courage- and we should be acknowledging that.

History will not and should not be kind to the American involvement in Afghanistan. “Mission Accomplished?” Not even close.

What’s “absolutely shameful” is people like Meghan McCain thinking they have something trenchant to add to this conversation by politicizing it even further. Republicans created the problem that is Afghanistan. It has been managed and (mostly) mismanaged by Republicans AND Democrats. The beginning of the end was thoroughly FUBAR’d by the Trump Administration and further boogered up by the Biden Administration.

Instead of casting blame, we should be trying to figure out how to minimize the loss of life among our Afghan allies. We should be trying to keep the Taliban at bay for as long as it takes to evacuate those who assisted the American effort during our 20 years there.

This is not one of America’s finest moments. We should be embarrassed and furious over what is transpiring and how it’s unfolding. That said, there was never going to be a quick, easy, and clean way out.

As President Biden said, he’s the fourth American President- two Democrat, two Republican- to have presided over the American presence in Afghanistan. But, as he said, he was dealt an unwinnable hand by his predecessor. Donald Trump and his Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, legitimized the Taliban to the point of excluding the Afghan government from negotiations.

There was nothing to be gained by remaining in Afghanistan, which was always destined to collapse once American support disappeared. The sad thing is the collateral damage, the Afghans who worked with Americans and will now suffer and, in many cases, die because of that service.

America has an obligation to those who assisted it during its 20-year war in Afghanistan. Yet, tragically, it’s beginning to look as if we’re going to see our government fall short of meeting that obligation because of bureaucracy and a lack of will.

Innocent, courageous people will die because America cannot live up to its moral obligations. Regardless of which side of the ideological divide they call home, no one should be OK with that.

When you strip away the politics, the artifice, and the blame-casting, the truth is that our involvement in Afghanistan was always destined to end this way. America went into Afghanistan to kick ass and take names…but it neglected to develop an exit strategy. As anyone who’s ever spent any time as an officer in the American military (I did) can tell you, failing to plan is planning to fail…and there was never a plan for our departure.

Were the 6,118 American military and civilian deaths and the unknowable thousands of wounded worth it?

That’s not a Republican or Democratic failing. That’s the United States of America dropping the ball.

There are lives to be saved. There are lives America SHOULD save. But, instead, it seems too many ambitious political animals are far more interested in political turd-polishing and blame-casting than in doing the right thing for the right reasons.

We should be better than this. But, tragically, it seems that we’re not.

“No man left behind”…unless taking them with you is politically inconvenient.