The Afghanistan Errors

Or how Hunter Biden's cocaine addiction, Hillary Clinton's Benghazi and AOC's crappy bartending caused the defeat of the US military throughout all the solar systems

Does my title make my ass look cynical? It sure feels cynical.

The Afghani temporary outcome that’s causing such a caterwaul in the all-knowing mainstream media is as predictable as the current collapse of its Kabul-based puppet government.

US war planners, the military-industrial complex, the incestuous foreign policy think tankers, the super duper smart George Packer - writing in the Atlantic - the entire Grand Old Poopies of the Brit-USA world and the recently defeated crook will blame it all on Sleepy Joe and his pedophile cannibals.

I’m pretty sure a script doctor’s needed to rewrite the plot as the planned movie will become the next Ishtar without it. From IMDB:

The reality? Ishtar had a lot of wit and humor but was a massive financial flop largely because it was over the head of viewers in the final years of the Reagan dementia. I need to see it again after 44 years of accepting old premises.

Another:

And we need to review a lot of conventional wisdom about Afghanistan, as well. Conventions, after all, are best known as places where a lot of serious serious business gets done by day and a lot of boozing and poorly scripted sexplay occurs by night.

About the invasion of Iraq, Packer wrote a worthy obit of the Bush league team in his 2005 book, The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq :

"Swaddled in abstract ideas, convinced of their own righteousness, incapable of self-criticism, indifferent to accountability, they turned a difficult undertaking into a needlessly deadly one" and when "things went wrong, they found other people to blame."

Not bad. But then he ruined it by adding:

"The Iraq War was always winnable; it still is. For this very reason, the recklessness of its authors is all the harder to forgive.”

Winnable? Part of the problem is that few can define what a win actually looks like. Another key part is in the thinking that the purpose of war is to win, good over bad, with grateful villagers tossing bouquets at the military forces that emancipated them.

Villagers who have never experienced full freedom aren’t exactly sure what positives are gained from foreign fighters occupying their lands. Afghanistan is not France in 1945.

I don’t write as a Gandhi-esque pacifist. The invasion of Afghanistan is the first war that I supported, though my support had two certain well defined caveats:

1) It had to have a definable goal. A short term one. In this case, the capture or elimination of Al Qaida leader Osama Bin Laden and the further destruction of as many strategic leaders/planners of Al Qaida in Afghanistan and globally.

2) Once that was achieved - and both were - we had to exit quickly, declaring victory. This is where we failed.

Foreign policy is never a zero sum game for those in charge of running an empire. Mistakes will be made and every president will make at least a few. Some have been notoriously bad, with John Foster Dulles, Robert McNamara, Henry Kissinger and Dick Cheney as architects of some of the worst decisions made in the past 75 years.

The invasion of Iraq was a far worse error than the decisions in Afghanistan. Biden is absolutely right to stop propping up a corrupt puppet government of Kabul that wasn’t doing much for Afghanis elsewhere in the country. Yes, the pace of bureaucratic paper-pushing left many pro-US Afghanis vulnerable at this exit point. Biden can be faulted for that, as he apparently overlooked similar events when we left South Vietnam.

But there’s far bigger errors deserving much more criticism in the conduct and outcome of our war there. Team Bush/Cheney failed to get Bin Laden quickly. They subsequently put greater emphasis on overthrowing Hussein in Iraq, leaving Bin Laden at large for the 7-1/2 years after 9-11. Obama took him out in 2 years and 72 days, destroying the myth of Bin Laden’s invincibility. Big win there. But, instead of privately notifying the propped up government in Kabul that we would have all troops out by the end of 2011, he made the error of maintaining our occupation for the next 5-1/2 years. Which became 9-1/2 years since Trump/Pence achieved no foreign policy wins there or anywhere. (Negotiating with the Taliban when they held the better hand? Puh-leaze.)

Biden took less than 7 months to end it and should be lauded for doing what none of his three predecessors did. The short term optics look bad because the exit was not done seamlessly, but the political players and media stars are beset with their own motives to make Biden the Villain Du Jour.

Ultimately the biggest and repeated error of foreign policy planners is to overlook what historian Howard Zinn tried to make clear: people matter. You can analyze the political and social and business leaders of another country but if you ignore the perceptions and realities of the general population, you’re likely to make big errors.

Afghanistan as a country has a long history of foreign invasions and occupiers. But it’s notable that anyone there older than 45 has a shared memory of 11 years of Soviet occupation followed immediately by 12 years of civil wars, followed by 20 years of US occupation. That’s 43 years of continuous war.

So the population is war weary. It’s perfectly understandable that they are most skeptical of foreign occupiers, whose interests include motives that may not align with what Afghanis want.

And let’s not forget or underplay some of the key wins the world has gained:

1) Bin Laden and multiple leaders of Al Qaida are gone.

2) Other extremists exist who will continue acts of terror, but they clearly understand that it’s no fun to create such a global response that will take them out too. Attacking global superpowers in a big way has personal consequences.

3) Major marginalized populations in Afghanistan have a taste of what freedom can mean. Especially women. They’ll likely fare worse in the short term with our departure. But they won’t forget and won’t likely accept going all the way back to what the Taliban gave them before. It’s a start. Seeds take awhile to germinate and longer to harvest.

We didn’t win nothing. We won all that was ever available to win. But it could have been achieved in Bush’s first term, with the right planners in place.

Biden has grown wiser than he was in 2001 and he did the right thing as president with immediacy. Some of the closing details were fudged and that’s all. Let’s hope future politicians focus on the right lessons from this war.

Especially that people matter more than their leaders and that bad leaders can be eliminated without war if foreign policy planners are smart enough. War should be the last option - in this case the 9-11 attacks precluded war aversion - but a quick end to war is also critical.