MICHAEL BRENDAN DOUGHERTY
It’s a conservative cliché to imagine state-run enterprises as versions of the DMV — frustrating, inefficient, an experience that leaves you enraged. You enter in line in order to be told the next line to line up in. The DMV isn’t like that in many states now — often the DMV runs through kiosks and databases. But the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, now gives you something of the old experience, spiced up with the threat of abandonment, mutilation, and death.
Finally, in Afghanistan we are almost getting to the truth of our involvement there. People have gotten too used to lying about the war in Afghanistan, but the pictures from Afghanistan and the reactions to them here at home are making it harder and harder to lie about our defeat there.
Here’s the sort of thing pundits say now that sounds true, but is a lie: We’re choosing to lose this war now. America was suffering almost no casualties for years. We had a small, sustainable footprint in Afghanistan. And we must honor the Afghan friends who have adopted our cause as their own. We’re only doing this because of silly sloganeering against the “Forever War.”
This is mostly bunk. You should trust me because I’m not a foreign-policy expert or adviser to the Pentagon — yet was able to write five years ago that “there is no plausible ending where America gets out of Afghanistan entirely, without the Taliban putting the government in Kabul into mortal danger almost immediately.”
Here’s the big truth: America lost this war years ago. Truly we lost it when we misconceived the war as something other than achieving a military objective. We decided that defeating the Taliban and making them agree to a settlement acceptable to us was too bloody, too impolitic, and too likely to destabilize Pakistan, our longtime regional “ally” that has supported the Taliban — for reasons of ethno-religious solidarity and cold-blooded regional interests.
What we have witnessed in the last few weeks is not our defeat but the Afghan National Security Forces losing their war against the Taliban, which is leading to us evacuating thousands of Americans who provided the state capacity of the government run out of Kabul.
For years, the Afghan Security Forces have been getting slaughtered by the Taliban. The Taliban began taking more territory of Afghanistan the moment Barack Obama’s surge there ended, and they haven’t stopped. The last few years have been very bloody.
So that brings us to a few common lies circulating for months: (1) We have only a light footprint of 2,500 soldiers in Afghanistan. Well, it turns out that wasn’t even true. We had a larger number of troops there. And their presence was augmented by over 10,000 others — highly paid contractors, NGOs, and all manner of humanitarians and chancers besides those. Some brought in to kill, others to redesign the Pashto and Dari languages to help the people internalize concepts such as gender equality. No really. (2) This was a low-cost mission. It wasn’t for the Afghan forces whose losses in recent years were completely unsustainable. Where were all these experts’ tears for our Afghan allies going back to 2013 when the pace of civilian deaths in this ongoing war began to pick up precipitously? It’s enough to make one wonder if what is being mourned is not Afghanistan, but something else — the lost illusions, or maybe the lost consulting contracts.
Meanwhile, in the other depository of expert regrets — northern Syria — our not-so-moderate rebel allies, an offshoot of al-Qaeda itself, are celebrating the Taliban’s victory.
For the better part of two decades, our top military brass have made careers lying about the state of things in Afghanistan. They have lied about the capacity of the Afghan security forces. They have lied about the progress of the Taliban — or simply hidden it; those famous heat maps of Afghanistan started to be classified a few years ago. The rapid collapse of the Afghan national government and the fall of Kabul are the final bitter fruit of these lies.
But perhaps there is one more lie: that our super hawks cared about democracy. For nearly two decades, the government that resulted from the U.S. mission in Afghanistan was infamously and notoriously corrupt by our standards. Some of this was due to just the lackadaisical way a third-world nation will be governed when so many palms are greased by cash appropriated years ago by a Congress sitting in Washington, D.C. But the majority of it is due to the social structure of Afghan life. Almost half of marriages in Afghanistan are consanguineous. A huge portion of Afghans living like this will find it impossible to conceive of themselves as equal citizens; they know themselves to be members of their tribes. Political Islam is adaptable to a society like this; Madisonian government isn’t.
And as this has slowly dawned on our expert class, we have seen how those who wanted to support the American mission indefinitely — indefinitely, because we aren’t allowed to say forever — have instead turned their rage on the American people. They accuse the American people, rather than the political and military leaders, of losing the war. They lament that the American people, in their states, have elected three consecutive presidents who promised to finish and wind down the mission in Afghanistan.
The truth is that conservatives no longer have to argue against “idealism in foreign policy”; we are confronting sheer stubborn and spiteful madness. This madness was guarded by lies for too long. The chaos we see in Kabul is the pitiful result of it.
Courtesy: (nationalreview)
