The (non-COVID) story of 2021...
On the disgrace of America abandoning the Afghans.
I suspect that I’m far from alone in opening a blog post with a comment about how crazy 2021 has been. For many, this year has been dominated by the SARS-cov-2 novel coronavirus pandemic, now entering its third year. For others, economic turmoil, inflation, or surprise election results have been the most memorable elements of this tumultuous year. All of these are worthy of reflection, and I have had many a conversation with my friends and family about these topics. But I want to take a moment reflect on what I believe is the most consequential event of this year. It’s the same topic about which I have been writing since I was compelled to start this blog. It’s the administration’s decision to declare defeat in the Afghan campaign.
The shambolic abandonment of our mission, our allies, and our national credibility resulted in the deaths of thirteen Marines, sailors, and soldiers, in the immediate, personal sense. These lives were lost in pursuit of an utterly unworthy objective, and it is impossible for me to see their sacrifice as anything other than a disgraceful and unnecessary outcome that was made unavoidable by incompetent and feckless authority figures. In past entries, I have outlined my more detailed criticisms of the choice to give up on our campaign. Among my repudiations are the following:
The ‘blood and treasure’ argument rings hollow, given that the sum total expense of the Afghan Campaign from beginning to end was less than what the American federal government spent in February of 2021 on assorted domestic things (treasure). Also, America hadn’t lost a single uniformed soul to combat prior to the disastrous withdrawal fiasco for nearly two years; for the last decade, American combat casualties were extremely light (blood). We were not spending ourselves into oblivion on this campaign relative to other federal expenditures and the U.S. never lost a major engagement in nearly twenty years; we were not bleeding ourselves to death prosecuting the campaign against the Taliban and their vile allies.
Afghanistan was an inherently defensive action, given that it was al Qaeda, supported by and overwhelmingly intermarried with the Taliban, who had spent nearly a decade prosecuting a terror war against the United States, resulting in the murder of hundreds in embassy bombings, an attack against an American warship, and eventually 9/11, which killed nearly three thousand people on American soil, most of whom were civilians. Arguing that repeated acts of war against the United States would not warrant a bellicose response is culturally suicidal and speaks to a mindset that can see no appropriate role for applied hard power. If thousands of murders isn’t a valid causus belli, nothing is.
Having already been politically outmaneuvered by Vladimir Putin into departing our other central Asian bases (such as Manas in Kyrgyzstan), surrendering Afghanistan removes any ability for American or other Western governments to project power in between China and Iran. Voluntarily ceding the strategic Sword of Damocles of having a few thousand troops on borders with actively hostile illiberal foreign powers in an era in which geopolitical tensions with both of these bad actors are intensifying, not relenting. This is shortsighted foolishness and may well allow China to connect Iran overland, via their Belt and Road Initiative, to the North Koreans, effectively making it even more impossible to prevent Kim Jong Un from accessing Iranian nuclear scientists.
All of the braying about the tragic fate of civil liberties that has now well and truly befallen the Afghan people were conspicuously disinterested during the nearly two decades in which women’s suffrage was a constitutional right in the now-destroyed Afghan state. It is upon this last point that I intend to dwell for some time…
The ability for the press to choose what it covers and how it covers it is a boon of a free society. However, the initial (maddening) shock that the mainstream corporate press exhibited during the final weeks of the collapse of the Afghan government has long since been replaced with a notable incuriosity. While journalists’ access to Afghanistan has been substantially curtailed (again, free access by a free press in what was technically a war zone was taken for granted, and the resurgence of repression by evil men reducing journalistic access is also near-laughable. The inane surprise exhibited by the various educated, erudite, coastal urbanites in corporate media suddenly realizing that Western liberalism was—it turns out!—preferable to medieval barbarism is dark comedy) creating a selection bias effect, it strikes me as conspicuous the degree to which the plight of the Afghans has been unreported.
This may have something to do with my firsthand interest in the story and be more a reflection on my own biases, I fully concede. Yes, the novel coronavirus is still running amok and there are limitless hot-takes by pop culture figures and politicians that need to be amplified as ‘news’ and the economy isn’t great and inflation is rampant. But it still strikes me as noteworthy that the press has spilled so little ink on the millions of Afghans who are likely going to starve and freeze to death this winter due to the collapse of rudimentary services. It still seems jarring that the perpetual stymieing of relief and evacuation efforts for the Americans and Afghan allies still (STILL!) trapped behind Taliban lines by our own Department of State doesn’t seem to receive any attention from the Tucker Carlsons or the Joy Reids or the Brian Stelters of the media ecosystem. I’m sure that permanently re-litigating the conspiracy theories about stolen elections or re-enacting the U.S. Capitol riot in pornographic detail are much better at stoking the stupid tribalistic impulses of the average cable news viewer. At least the unspoken consensus is clear enough to me: The only tacit bipartisan policy agreement anymore is that American military engagement overseas is a universal bad. The details about why are hazy; it’s a veritable Rorschach Test in which “American first” isolationists on the right and anti-American head-in-the-sand progressive utopian collectivists on the left project their equally flawed priors onto a complex real world that doesn’t give a shit about their preferred culture war bugaboos or wild misunderstandings of the historical record.
While I’m usually at home on the political right, I also hold a number of more liberal perspectives on a variety of topics. I would describe myself as a conservative in most senses of the word, but among the most disappointing cultural shifts in recent years for me has been the hollowing out of the American political right’s defense of muscular foreign policy. Luke Thompson once opined on National Review’s The Editors podcast that the modern day Republican Party is only able to do two things at the federal level: Cut taxes and kill terrorists. Well, within a couple of years of uttering that pithy takedown of the dysfunction of one of the United States’ two major political parties, we’re out of taxes to cut and nobody wants to fight jihadists anymore within the Grand Old Party. Sure, there are occasional voices like Representative Dan Crenshaw who still go to the bother of articulating why we were in places like Afghanistan in the first place and why it mattered at all, but it’s increasingly clear to me that the voice that says American should win wars is an echo, if anything.
I have a less clear view of the internal alignments of the American political left, but their loudest voices have been stridently—and often stupidly and cynically—anti-war for a long time, even as their standard bearers have brazenly stretched the war powers of the executive branch to engage in campaigns unrelated to the war against the Taliban. Not a source of real confidence. Even those whom I like, such as former Representative Tulsi Gabbard, have been staunch in their opposition to American military operations overseas.
The culture in general has turned on the idea of an engaged and vital United States on the world stage. A recent headline from a video game website described the pending remake of a clandestine spy game called Splinter Cell as such: “Cutting edge graphics can’t make American interventionism cool again.” Nobody seems to even seriously believe that the United States can or should discourage dictators from eating neighboring countries (see: Vladimir Putin in Georgia, and Ukraine, and kinda-sorta Belarus or China with Tibet a long time ago, Hong Kong recently, or plausibly Taiwan in the foreseeable future) and the fact that American involvement in Afghanistan was objectively a net benefit to the people that lived there compared to the hells cape that they are now being crushed beneath is invisible like tears in the rain.
I have recently been barraged by a series of advertisements soliciting donations to a variety of organizations that purport to help Afghans. Among my most profound disappointments this year was discovering that most of these outfits do amazingly little to help the people that they claim to be supporting. The million-plus Afghan children trapped in the Taliban’s borders who will starve over the coming months are a marketing prop to a lot of the more prominent philanthropic organizations. Many pay their executives six figure salaries. Some funnel large proportions of their resources to unrelated domestic social justice causes.
It has been small outfits, often manned by veterans, who have been doing the lion’s share of the work to extract Americans and Afghans from behind enemy lines. And for reasons that defy rationalization, it is the U.S. Department of State that has been hindering their efforts for months. I will refer you to Ryan Mills’ recent reporting on this topic for further reading. Of note, it is the constellation of small, poorly-known organizations led by GWoT veterans that have been doing this heavy lifting. Task Force Argo is one such example from my home state of Washington. In spite of being a group that hasn’t exactly been a regular on late night television, they have rescued more than two thousand refugees from Afghanistan.
As a testament to the dedication of a small cadre of men and women, these tales are heroic. As a condemnation of our government for creating the humanitarian disaster that necessitated their actions, it is a historic stain on our national reputation, further exacerbated by the shrugging disinterest of our general population. I’ve been donating to my county' sheriff’s office supply drive, which I can verify is actually supporting the refugees that have managed to escape the Taliban and settle in my community. I’d like to extend a heartfelt ‘thank you’ to the Snohomish County Sheriff, Adam Fortney, for supporting this mission.
So, why do I believe that Western abandonment of Afghanistan is the top story of 2021? Because I don’t think that people will be discussing it in 2022. The coronavirus appears to be a permanent part of life, political polarization isn’t going to ease up on its own any time soon, the economy will likely remain unstable, and we’ll be rolling into an election season in which the worst hot-takes from would-be politicians will dominate the news for the next several months. The ruin of civil liberties in Afghanistan, the incipient mass starvation of children this winter, the invisible struggle of the refugees who managed to escape, and the plight of the Americans still (STILL!) trapped behind Taliban lines aren’t politically expedient. It’s inconvenient for the press to go there. We should navel gaze and spend money here on whatever instead. We will want to forget, so we will. The incentives just aren’t there to learn anything.
As this year grinds to a close, for me, it will be the year that there was a brief, fleeting moment of realization that the world without American involvement can be liberal, hopeful, and worthwhile. Tragically, it will also be the year that we acknowledged this by force, as a tidal wave of religious fundamentalism washed away nearly two decades of progress. It will be the year that we watched the most powerful military in history run away from a campaign it wasn’t losing while desperate, betrayed people fell off of airplanes or died in their landing gear for even the faintest hope of escape. It will be the year that we skulked away in the dead of night only days after taking targeting advice from (literally) the Taliban and blowing up an aid worker and nearly a dozen children. That itself, an amateurish and impotent response to a totally predictable attack that killed over a dozen Americans and hundreds of civilians in a kill box created because a conscious decision was made to surrender all of Kabul outside of the international airport for no legitimate military reason. And all of this because the commander-in-chief wanted a breathtaking political “win” by “ending” the war by 9/11; a failure of optics so severe that it boggles the mind. Metaphorically, this is the year that we decided that the appropriate response to Pearl Harbor would be to surrender the Pacific to the Imperial Japanese on December the 7th. To improve morale.
Everything about this decision was foolhardy, unforced, and unnecessary. This was the year that the most powerful military on Earth demonstrated to the world that it was run by buffoons without an iota of strategic vision, operational expertise, or tactical knowledge. This is the year that we set the stage for the next jihadist attack against the American homeland. It is also the year that we sabotaged our every ability to prevent or respond to it. And by 2022, it won’t be a story in its own right anymore. I’m sure it will be part of the political analysis of why the mid-term elections went the way that they eventually will, that the surrender of Afghanistan is where the president’s poll numbers started decisively falling, et cetera. But the narcissism inherent in that positioning of the fate of Afghanistan and Western influence abroad will not be part of this discussion. That we view everything through a myopic lens of domestic politics is hubris, and I fear that 2021 is the year we began walking down an inevitable path towards bloody humility.
Goodnight, Kabul.