A month ago I thought I was a cynic about our 20-year war in Afghanistan. Today, after watching our stumbling withdrawal and the swift collapse of practically everything we fought for, my main feeling is that I wasn’t cynical enough.
My cynicism [was]...that the American effort to forge a decent Afghan political settlement failed definitively during Barack Obama’s first term...This failure was then buried under a...blizzard of official deceptions and bureaucratic lies, which covered over a shift in American priorities from the pursuit of victory to the management of stalemate, with the American presence insulated from casualties in the hopes that it could be sustained indefinitely.
Excellent point by Douthat. Keep American casualties under the public's radar and strive for the military-industrial complex' wet dream--perpetual war.
[In this shift] there would be no prospect of victory...no clear reason to be in Afghanistan, as opposed to any other failing state...But if American casualty rates stayed low enough, the public would accept it, the Pentagon budget would pay for it, and nobody would have to preside over anything so humiliating as defeat.
In one way, my cynicism went too far. I guessed that the military and the national-security bureaucracy would be able to frustrate the desire of every incoming U.S. president to declare an endless-seeming conflict over, and I was wrong. Something like that happened with Obama and Donald Trump in their first years in office, but it didn’t happen with Joe Biden. He promised withdrawal, and — however shambolically — we have now actually withdrawn.
But in every other way the withdrawal has made the case for an even deeper cynicism — about America’s capacities as a superpower, our mission in Afghanistan and the class of generals, officials, experts and politicos who sustained its generational extension.
First, the withdrawal’s shambolic quality, culminating in yesterday’s acknowledgment that 100 to 200 Americans had not made the final flights from Kabul, displayed an incompetence in departing a country that matched our impotence at pacifying it. There were aspects of the chaos that were probably inevitable, but the Biden White House was clearly caught flat-footed by the speed of the Taliban advance, with key personnel disappearing on vacation just before the Kabul government dissolved. And the president himself has appeared exhausted, aged, overmatched...
At the same time, the circumstances under which the Biden withdrawal had to happen...[w]as a devastating indictment of the policies pursued by his three predecessors, which together cost roughly $2,000,000,000,000 (it’s worth writing out all those zeros) and managed to build nothing in the political or military spheres that could survive for even a season without further American cash and military supervision.
...our $2,000,000,000,000 built a regime that fell to the Taliban before American troops could even finish their retreat.
Before this summer...it was possible to read all the grim inspector general reports and document dumps on Afghanistan, count yourself a cynic about the war effort and still imagine that America got something for all that spending, no matter how much was spent on Potemkin installations or siphoned off by pederast warlords or recirculated to Northern Virginia contractors.
My son and I looked up the story on "Private Military Companies (PMC's). It is shocking. It's a multi-multi billion per year industry. In 2003 PMC's were a $100B industry. Official U.S. defense and intelligence agencies outsource their dirty work to companies like Blackwater--to get around constitutional and legal restraints. Titan was involved in the Abu Ghraib crimes. Think we withdrew from Iraq in 2011? We did not. In FY 2019 the Defense Department spent $7.366B on PMC's in Iraq--which was less than half the 16.385B spent in FY 2018. As to the numbers of these soldiers of fortune, security guards, and hit men in Iraq: "DOD...ceased reporting data on DOD-funded private security contractor personnel in Q4 FY2013." Some local municipalities, Palm Bay, Florida is one, now use PMC's to get around laws on their police! PMC's are a U.S. off-the-shelf military. Trump pardoned four Blackwater employees convicted in the Nisour Square Massacre that killed 17 Iraqi civilians. "The New York Times reported in March 2020 that in recent years Prince had recruited former intelligence agents to infiltrate "Democratic congressional campaigns, labor organizations and other groups considered hostile to the Trump agenda."[66]. Trump could easily have outsourced his 1/6 coup d'etat to PMC's.
Yet that knowledge has not prevented a revival of the spirit that led us to this sorry pass. I don’t mean the straightforward criticisms of the Biden administration’s handling of the withdrawal. I mean...the political reaction...
The argument...that the situation in Afghanistan was reasonably stable and the war’s death toll negligible before the Trump administration started moving toward withdrawal: In fact, only U.S. casualties were low...Afghan military and civilian casualties were nearing 15,000 annually, and the Taliban were clearly gaining ground — suggesting that we would have needed periodic surges of U.S. forces, and periodic spikes in U.S. deaths, to prevent a slow-motion version of what’s happened quickly as we’ve left.
Or the argument that an indefinite occupation was morally necessary to nurture the shoots of Afghan liberalism...after 20 years of effort and $2,000,000,000,000...
...these arguments are connected to a set of moods that flourished after 9/11:...overconfidence in American military capacities, naïve World War II nostalgia and crusading humanitarianism in its liberal and neoconservative forms. Like most Americans, I shared in those moods once; after so many years of failure, I cannot imagine indulging in them now. But...they retain an intense subterranean appeal in the American elite, waiting only for the right circumstances to resurface.
Thus you have generals and grand strategists who presided over quagmire, folly and defeat fanning out...to champion another 20 years in Afghanistan. You have the return of the media’s liberal hawks and centrist Pentagon stenographers, unchastened by their own credulous contributions to the retreat of American power over the past 20 years. And you have Republicans who postured as cold-eyed realists in the Trump presidency suddenly turning back into eager crusaders, excited to own the Biden Democrats and relive the brief post-9/11 period when the mainstream media treated their party with deference rather than contempt.
Again, Biden deserves plenty of criticism. But like the Trump administration in its wiser moments, he is trying to disentangle America from a set of failed policies that many of his loudest critics long supported.
Our botched withdrawal is the punctuation mark on a general catastrophe, a failure so broad that it should demand purges in the Pentagon, the shamed retirement of innumerable hawkish talking heads, the razing of various NGOs and international-studies programs and the dissolution of countless consultancies and military contractors.
Small wonder, then, that making Biden the singular scapegoat seems like a more attractive path. But if the only aspect of this catastrophe that our leaders remember is what went wrong in August 2021, then we’ll have learned nothing except to always double down on failure, and the next disaster will be worse.
