Leaving Afghanistan

Between the below article (and others like it recently) and a brief, but intense discussion I had with someone yesterday, I have been prodded into writing about Afghanistan. It is not something I really care to write about since it is not something I have much passion for. I will also admit that my thoughts on the matter are rock solid and I am not really open to persuasion anymore. I may have been many years ago, but after 20 years there that time has passed.

Simply put, I am glad we are leaving there and what happens after that is not for us to be concerned with nor is it our responsibility. The Taliban looks like it will almost certainly take over, at least for the time being. I have no doubt it will be awful for many people there. I also have no doubt it was inevitable. Had we left years ago it would have happened and if we left in 5, 10, 15 or 30 years from now it would still happen. In the end, people there will have to fight for the place they want. Seeing that we have been there for 20 years now (under 4 presidents) and the forces we trained were so quickly defeated, I don’t see how staying there any longer would have changed that.

Looking to the below article, let’s start off with what is wrong with it. The key word it uses is “credibility.” In the foreign policy context, that is a word I have learned to utterly despise. Remember how often that word was used to justify invading Iraq and staying there? Remember how many times it has been used to encourage intervention all over the Middle East, particularly Syria? If you read up on the history of our misadventure in Vietnam, you will also find that word used repeatedly, both to justify invading and staying there. How did invading Iraq and Vietnam go?

I find laughable the idea that for the US to have any “credibility,” we need to stay indefinitely in a place whose geopolitical importance to the US is marginal at most. I highly doubt there is a single country or group in the world whose leaders are thinking, “I totally trusted the US, but now that they have abandoned a pointless war after 20 years of going in circles, I just don’t know.” If there are any reasons to worry about US “credibility,” Afghanistan is not one of them.

The article claims US security guarantees can no longer be relied on. That is flatly wrong. We have made security guarantees for decades and will continue to. What leaving Afghanistan says is that our security guarantees are not absolute and unconditional. When a country is unable or unwilling to fight for itself, the US cannot do that for them forever nor should it. I am all for making security guarantees for places like South Korea and Taiwan, but I expect them to pull their own weight, too, and have not seen anything to make me think they are not. The same is true with NATO. Despite many foreign policy errors in the past, the US still has almost all the same allies we have had for the last 70 years. We still work well with plenty of other countries around the world and will continue to no matter what happens in Afghanistan.

The article says that since the US will not commit to Afghanistan, our allies will question our willingness to go to war with China or Russia. Maybe I am out of touch here, but I really do not want to die in a nuclear holocaust. That is what going to war with either of those countries will end in. Maybe the author has a death wish, but I sure as hell do not and I think that is true for almost all of us.

With respect to Russia, the only thing they have done militarily is to try to take back places that were part of the USSR. Beyond former satellite countries, I am not worried about Russia invading anywhere else. To be clear, I think what Russia has done is bad and I support non-military means of deterring that, i.e., sanctions. I hope that can be a deterrent, but in the end if Russia is that hellbent on taking back those places and the only way to stop them is going to war, count me out.

Regarding China, anyone who has ever read anything I have written about their government knows what I think of them. As with Russia, I am not suicidal. I think we should be supporting Taiwan and other Asian countries against China. I am not opposed to our military presence there at all. That said, we are not going to war with them. I am all for decoupling our economy from China and trying to isolate them as much as possible. Doing so will require working with allies, but is going to be an economic endeavor, not a military one. We need to hold their government accountable for their atrocities, including unleashing a pandemic on us, but we need to do so while not wiping ourselves out.

The second half of the article does get better. China may be facing problems from a Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan. One problem China might face is if Uighurs get support from the Taliban. They may also face a dilemma of deciding whether to intervene because of it. How likely that is to happen is far beyond my expertise, but if China winds up taking our place in Afghanistan, I am all for it. Let them get bogged down there and throw away money, lives and resources. If they want to take our place in the Middle East, too, more power to them. Let them have to worry about that place.

True, our leaving Afghanistan all but guarantees the government we helped set up will be done for. But as the article notes, that was probably going to happen anyway. That is key here. Despite our efforts, the government we set up was incapable of sustaining itself. It does not seem to have any popular support or legitimacy among the general public. If people in Afghanistan will not accept a government, no foreign power is going to change their minds.

I am not sure how much I like comparing Afghanistan to Vietnam. As hard as it was to prop up and support a government in Vietnam, there may have been a chance. That is because Vietnam is a country with defined borders and its people see themselves as Vietnamese. Afghanistan is a collection of different tribes who do not see themselves as Afghans. It is basically a country on paper only. People’s loyalties are to their tribes, not to Afghanistan as a country, let alone to a government dependent on a foreign power. That is how it has always been there and the US cannot change that no matter how long we stay there.

My brief discussion

In the discussion I had with someone yesterday, they made an argument against leaving Afghanistan that drives me off the wall almost as much as arguing about “credibility.” That argument is that we are fighting “them” over there so do not have to fight “them” over here. Remember that line when we were in Iraq? Remember how we had to stay there forever to keep “them” from coming over here? The person I had the discussion with said we will have more 9/11s and that those we are fighting in Afghanistan will come here.

Where to begin? I don’t even know how literally to take that. I was unsure if that person was saying that our presence in Afghanistan somehow compels our enemies to all go over there so they do not come here or if our presence there creates some kind of magic forcefield that keeps “them” away. In any event, it is patently absurd. We have been out of Iraq for years. How many Iraqi terrorist attacks have happened here since? The answer is none. I do not know how Afghanistan would be any different. If the Taliban wanted to fight us here, they could try to do so while also fighting us there. I think they understand the concept of multitasking.

That argument gets at a broader problem I have noticed many in the US have, which is that we think we are way more central to things than we really are. The reality is your typical Islamist militant in the Middle East spends little to no time thinking about the US. Groups like ISIS do not care about conquering the US. If they have any major ambition, it is to take over the Middle East. At the rate they are going, they might accomplish that in 10,000 years. In reality, they are fighting to control a few neighborhood blocks in Iraq and Syria and are far more concerned about that than the US.

The Taliban has no interest in fighting the US on its own soil. They want us out of Afghanistan. They may fantasize about ridding the world of infidels, but that is it. The same was true of the Iraqi insurgents. Their only concern with the US was to get us out of Iraq. How many of them have shown up on our streets? How many Vietcong showed up here? If you guessed zero, you are correct.

Obviously, the US is an important player on the world stage and I am very glad for that. I want us to continue to do that because we are absolutely essential in so many ways. We also have to recognize that not everyone in the world spends every waking moment of their lives thinking about us. In fact, very few do. Just read about any dispute abroad that the US is not involved in. The odds that we are a main concern of the parties involved are likely zero, whatever the issue is.

Some ugly truths

I am very much in favor of democracy promotion. I want to help pro-democracy movements everywhere it is feasible. Belarus is one such example and hopefully Cuba soon. If there was a movement like that in Afghanistan, I could certainly reconsider my position. Sadly, there is not, never has been and probably never will be in my lifetime. Most people there have probably never even heard that word and would look at you like you are from another planet if you tried to explain it to them. I am not calling them dumb, just pointing out that they come from a radically different world than I or anyone reading this comes from. Any government that takes hold there is going to be some kind of dictatorship.

What I find most frustrating about those opposed to leaving Afghanistan is that none have set any kind of clear goals that would not involve us being there indefinitely. That is the elephant in the room. If we are not going to withdraw, then we really will stay there for a long, long time, maybe even for the rest of our lives and beyond. If there was ever any hope of creating a lasting government there that had popular support, it would likely take many decades, maybe even centuries. 20 years of trying seems to have gotten us nowhere. I cannot imagine another year or two would have done the trick. For those arguing that there is a middle ground between leaving completely and staying there indefinitely, there really is not.

At a certain point, you just have to cut your losses. The only thing our staying there was accomplishing was putting the atrocities we are seeing and will continue to see on hold. Sooner or later, it was going to happen. I hate saying that, but that is the ugly reality of it. Whatever good we accomplished, especially with respect to women’s rights, will vanish under the Taliban. But that’s just it. What we accomplished was unsustainable because people there are not willing to fight for it. If people there really valued our contributions, they would be willing to fight for them against the Taliban and they clearly are not.

In the end, our options were to withdraw as we are doing now or stay there indefinitely. 20 years of our presence there is being undone in a matter of months, which just goes to show how unsustainable it was. It is clear that the government we have supported is toothless and lacking any real support. What is happening now was always going to happen the second we started leaving. It is awful to see it happening right in front us and even more awful to know that we cannot stop it. The US can do many things, but we are not the world’s savior. We cannot solve every single problem there is. Nobody can do that. If Afghanistan is ever going to become something more than what it is today, it will have to come from within. No foreign power is going to alter its DNA.

https://www.ft.com/content/71629b28-f730-431a-b8da-a2d45387a0c2