The American withdrawal from Afghanistan has attracted conservative criticism (such as here and here), but what I’ve read is operational criticism of the withdrawal, or that we’ve left at all. Liberal journalist Jonathan Rauch takes the longer view, suggesting that our failure to install a permanent Western-style government in Kabul (the President of Afghanistan has already fled) does not mean we’ve wasted our time, money, and lives in Afghanistan, particularly if our ideas have spread throughout the country:
Those are a lot of lives saved and improved. Even at their most monstrous, the Taliban cannot roll back all the gains of the past 20 years. In fact, back in power, they would find a different country than the one they left: one with a substantial Western-educated elite and a population that has known peace and progress. “That’s what’s going to challenge the Taliban or anyone who comes in to take over leadership,” Shuja Rabbani, an Afghan expatriate and son of a former president, told me. “They’re going to have a very different kind of fight to put up.”
Indeed, assuming this WaPo report is accurate …
Some of the restrictions the militants are imposing — burqas for women, long beards for men, forced attendance at mosques — hark back to their rule of the late 1990s. But new restrictions are intended to rein in 21st century technology and advances in women’s rights.
Mah Jan, who taught under Taliban rule, said militants monitored teachers and their relationships with aid groups before they were toppled in the 2001 U.S. invasion, but they were not coercive. Now, she said, “the Taliban have grown very brutal.”
… suggests the Taliban may be painfully aware that the population of Afghanistan, exposed to Western ideas and technologies for twenty years, may not be as easy to control as they were prior to the Western invasion. That might contribute to the explanation for what appears to be greater brutality in their rule.
So President Biden decided to end a war that, incidentally, Trump wanted to end. Biden must be aware of the problems of simple humanity in the machine of war: an evasion of responsibility, just as credit is unjustly pursued when available. Here’s Kevin Drum:
There’s no question that the US policy class has a lot to answer for here, but the bulk of the blame has to be placed on the army. They were the ones on the ground. They were the ones who built an Afghan military that was completely unsuitable to the country. They’re the ones who apparently never grasped the full extent of the corruption they were up against. They were the ones who advised four different US presidents that things were going well if they could just have a little more time and a few more troops.
The US military is hardly the only organization that hates to be the bearer of bad news. Nor are they the only organization that hates to admit they can’t do the job they’re being asked to do. But an unwillingness to do these things was one of the primary reasons we lost Vietnam, and our military leadership at the time swore it would never happen again.
But it did, just as soon as they found themselves in a similar situation. I remember years and years of blathering about counterinsurgency during the aughts, with army officers insisting that we could learn how to do it and skeptics pointing out that there were practically no examples of successful Western counterinsurgencies in the entire era since World War II. But after David Petraeus left the scene everyone got tired of this stuff and the nation’s op-ed pages moved on to other things.
If Biden was uncertain that he was getting accurate information, given the fog of war, along with deliberate misleading reports, he may have decided to stop trying to perform a miracle and get out. The fact that the Afghan government forces are collapsing like dominoes may not – may not – suggest a Biden botch, but that we, as a corporate intelligence, really didn’t understand the situation.
Rauch’s conclusion:
For all of those reasons, I am resolutely agnostic on Biden’s withdrawal decision. Anyone who thinks the answer is obvious hasn’t thought seriously about it. Given the many imponderables and unpredictables on both sides of the equation, the intuitions of the president and the public may be a better guide than any stack of white papers.
Regardless, consigning Afghanistan to the “lost wars” category is a mistake. Even if withdrawal brings chaos, that does not mean the operation was a failure. Decisive triumphs like victory in the Cold War are grand but rare; more often, liberal countries succeed by muddling through, temporizing, and preventing the worst rather than achieving the best. In Afghanistan, the U.S. did not achieve the best, but a generation-long dividend of security, stability, and decency is something to appreciate and learn from, not something to condemn and dismiss.
I am inclined to agree. Jumping to conclusions, such as that Biden should resign!, strikes me as a rush to judgment, especially from the right, who have been trained since the Reagan era to rush to judgment whenever that judgment can be thrust upon a Democrat. Rauch notes that the war achieved a number of objectives; a populace brought under Taliban rule is already known to be losing much of its younger generation, and it may find its remaining subjects to be restive. Given the number of arms available, the Taliban may find itself suffering unexpected losses as it attempts to clamp down.
I could be wrong. The immediate collapse of the Afghan government forces is a bit shocking and suggests they were never really ready. Time will tell.
