So we spent 20 years in Afghanistan training their troops and advising their politicians, we lost 2,312 soldiers killed and 20,066 wounded, killed somewhere between 35,000 and 40,000 Afghan civilians, and spent about $824 billion dollars. Now, within weeks of beginning the withdrawal of our troops, the Taliban, now increasingly equipped with captured US Humvees and M16 rifles abandoned by fleeing government troops, have retaken more than half the country, and the US is shipping in 3000 troops to hold the airport at Kabul while we evacuate most or all of the staff from the new $750+ million US embassy in Kabul.
Clearly the whole effort has been a disaster, and while Biden will probably get blamed, unfairly, for most of the inevitable fallout, in truth he finally did the right thing - what previous presidents in both parties couldn’t bring themselves to do – end an unwinnable war.
Like Vietnam, the American public were bombarded throughout most of these 20 years with optimistic press briefings about how we were just about to turn things around, about how the Taliban were almost defeated, about how soon Afghanistan would become a modernized democratic nation under American tutelage. Like Vietnam, we were assured several times that just one more “surge” of American troops would solve our problems. Like Vietnam, the civilian politicians refused to listen to their military advisors. Like Vietnam, there was plenty of historical precedent (the French efforts in Vietnam, the Russian efforts in Afghanistan) to warn of the difficulties, which Washington experts and politicians ignored. Like Vietnam, Washington politicians had almost no understanding of the culture of their opponents, nor apparently any interest in learning.
There is plenty of blame to go around. This wasn’t a Democratic failure or a Republican failure – this was a profound failure of the American foreign policy establishment in Washington, all the worse because they apparently didn’t learn the lessons of Vietnam. The press were outraged that Trump drove out so many of the experienced people in the State Department and in the foreign policy establishment. From my point of view it may have been one of the few things he did right.
Progress, they say, is making new mistakes, not repeating the old ones. We need a new generation in Washington, making new mistakes, not repeating the old ones.
Posts
