We Are Not The Saviors Of Afghanistan

You might think Biden's "pull out method" is a bit messy, but it's the only option we have. The Afghan people must save themselves.

Aug 21, 2021

Every day we hear some grim news out of Afghanistan, a country that suddenly everyone cares about now that U.S. troops have pulled out1, leaving the Taliban to run amok. Every day a new city falls. Kabul has fallen. All is lost. The Afghan people are terrified. Women and gay people in particular fear the return of the fanatical war cult, and with good reason. Resistance is already forming. There will be blood.

For 20 years the United States tried and failed to root out the Taliban and the terrorists they harbored from a country that has fought off every invading force since time immemorial. Our one tangible success—the killing of Osama bin Laden, architect of the 9/11 attacks—was carried out in Pakistan.

Everything about the Taliban is repugnant to Western sensibilities and to our notions of human rights, women’s rights and so forth. Its members were schooled in extremist madrassas in Pakistan and the organization was and remains funded on the deep coffers of Saudi Arabia and its oil fields. The strict Sharia law that the Taliban upholds is a direct result of Saudi influence. And it is deeply disturbing—chopping off the limbs of thieves, executing adulterers, treating women like second class citizens.

It sounds a bit like Saudi Arabia or Iran, two other Middle Eastern countries ruled by religious dictators (though from two radically different factions of Islam). We are allies with the former and sworn enemies of the latter, but we have no intention of going into either country and toppling governments and spreading human rights and freedom™ to the people of those nations.

Every day the news out of Afghanistan is grim and let me assure you it will remain grim long after the news cycle breaks and Americans flitter off to some other fresh outrage. We’ve barely spoken about Afghanistan for fifteen years but now that we’re finally out, finally walking away from this horrific waste of time, blood and treasure, now we care so very deeply.

The talking heads and generals and angry Fox commentators and Lindsey Graham are all very upset with Biden, despite Biden only carrying out what Trump initiated when he reached a peace / withdrawal deal with the Taliban. Plenty of liberals are also upset because the Taliban is genuinely a force antithetical to all we hold dear and it’s awful to think what will happen to anyone who strays from the very strict, very narrow path Sharia allows (though no doubt the Taliban’s leaders enjoy whatever they please behind closed doors). I’ve read The Kite Runner. I’m not overjoyed that these fanatics are taking back Afghanistan. I wish a democratic government that gave a damn about human rights had been established. I wish our withdrawal had been more humane, that we’d gotten everyone out that needed to get out, that we’d at least brought our damn guns along so they didn’t fall into the hands of religious fanatics who will no doubt put them to bloody use.

But we are not the rulers, nor the saviors, of Afghanistan. We spent twenty years achieving virtually nothing. Ten months more will not change that. Ten years more will not change that. The Taliban rose to power in the Taliban’s own country. They have more right to rule it—no matter how awful they may be—than we do. The only people who can stop them in the end are Afghanistan’s own.

We cannot shape these lands to our own liking, we cannot mold them like clay, force our liberal, democratic notions upon them at the barrel of a gun. There is nothing American about Afghanistan. It is an old country with old ideas. Its institutions have no grounding in modern thought. The Taliban rose to power because they brought order to chaos, safety to previously unsafe areas, and because they were the biggest, toughest, most organized group among many. Other warlords have their territories also. We were never going to bring our civilization to the Afghan people. Anyone who thought otherwise was naïve or a liar.

Image by ejbartennl from Pixabay

The Taliban only “ruled” for a few years before we invaded. Many of its leaders fled to Pakistan where they directed operations from a safe perch while we played a long and losing game of whack-a-mole. They have now returned and they will set up their own version of a religious state. We should let them. It’s not our business to stop the formation of governments in other lands. It wasn’t our business when we backed fascist coups in South America and helped overthrow democratically elected socialist governments. It’s not our business to topple Middle Eastern dictators, either. It is geographically and culturally impractical.

I often turn to Daniel Larison when it comes to matters of foreign policy because he, unlike the majority of foreign policy pundits, is a consistent voice of reason and prudence. He writes:

Biden understood that the choice was between getting out or being stuck there with no end in sight, and he rightly judged that the former was better for the United States. The fact that the Afghan government has lost so much ground so quickly proves that the U.S. failed in building a functioning state that could fend for itself. Our government has been propping up this state for all these years at considerable expense, and it turns out that the structure was bound to collapse as soon as we left. Far from showing the folly of Biden’s decision, it confirms the wisdom of it. A state as rickety and incapable of protecting itself as this one would not have been saved by delaying withdrawal a few more months or even years. Under those circumstances, Biden’s withdrawal was not hasty. If anything, it took longer than it should have.
None of the hawks complaining about the withdrawal has good answers to a few basic questions. What vital interests are served by keeping troops in Afghanistan for a longer period of time? If the Afghan government isn’t even putting up a fight to defend itself, what difference would a few thousand more American troops for a few more months have made to the final outcome? Why should the U.S. assume any responsibility for defending a government when their own forces won’t fight for it?

Indeed. We cannot babysit the Afghan government forever. If the Afghan people cannot stand up and fight for themselves, why should we? What difference will it make if, in the end, the same thing happens but more American soldiers die in the process? Even assuming that Trump blundered the peace deal and Biden blundered the withdrawal, why should we assume a later withdrawal (either under Biden or his successor) would be less bungled? How much more money should we pour into Afghanistan before we decide that enough is enough? How many more lives?

Of course, others will argue that the chaos and horror we see in the wake of US withdrawal from Afghanistan will embolden terrorists everywhere, as though terrorists need to be emboldened to carry out their vile acts. “Embolden the enemy” is a tired but effective cudgel hawks like to use whenever a leader sues for peace.

“When participants in the worldwide Salafist-jihadist movement look at the developments of the last week,” writes National Review’s Matthew Continetti, “they don’t see reasons to quit their mayhem. They see the chaos, panic, violence, disorder, and American retreat as a vindication of their ideology and a spur to further action.” Did they see a reason to quit their mayhem when American troops were still stationed in Afghanistan? Did terrorists everywhere see that debacle play out and think to themselves, “You know what, I don’t think I’m going to get this poor kid to strap explosives to his chest and go blow up a school. Those Americans sure don’t look defeatist right now!”

What a ludicrous notion.

Even if it were true, and even if Afghanistan once again becomes a nexus of extremism and terror, what is the alternative? American forces permanently occupying a hostile nation? Pundits have conjured our military presence in South Korea and Germany as a model for Afghanistan, but these are not countries we are actively attempting to subdue through force. There is no version of the Taliban in South Korea; you have to go to North Korea for that, and clearly the comparison only gets you so far. There may indeed be some Nazis in Germany, but not the type that pose a real global security threat. I understand why American empire needs to strategically position troops in Europe and Asia however much I disagree with our over-arching foreign policy. But we do not need troops stationed in multiple Middle Eastern nations.

The “defeatist retreat” narrative is everywhere. Frederick Kagan echoes the same sentiment over at the New York Times:

And then there are the optics of an American retreat. Mr. Biden has repeatedly emphasized the importance of getting U.S. forces out the door, because he was tied to the peace deal and lest U.S. soldiers come under Taliban attack. Is this really the type of fearful, defeatist message a global leader should be sending out to the world?

I’ll let Larison handle the retort:

Acknowledging reality is neither fearful not defeatist. Keeping U.S. forces in Afghanistan any longer would have meant more dead Americans in a desultory war that should have ended many years earlier. Biden concluded that it was not worth the risk to the remaining U.S. troops to keep them there, and he was right. Ending our involvement in an unwinnable war is prudent statecraft. Of course, someone like Kagan wouldn’t know prudence if it were staring him in the face.
Biden deserves credit for doing it when he must have known that he would face endless caterwauling from the hawkish ideologues that created the failed policy that he is now terminating. It doesn’t say much for our political culture that it takes far more political courage to end a pointless war than it does to start one, but it is fortunate that Biden had the courage to make the right decision and not be cowed by the usual suspects in Washington.

Of course, we’ve reached fever pitch at this point, with Senators like Graham and pundits at all the right-wing rags calling for impeachment, suggesting Biden is not fit to serve as president (but somehow Trump was?) and rattling their sad, tiny sabers in their cold, damp echo chambers.

Much of what we’re seeing in Afghanistan and the Middle East now is the result of decades of meddling. Perhaps the prudent thing to do would be to reassess our foreign policy priorities and capabilities—not so that we can do better next time, but so that there will not be a next time. Enough is enough.

“We failed,” writes Andrew Sullivan. “Everyone who has ever tried this Sisyphean task has failed. We lost the war long ago, and had conceded defeat already. Despite extraordinary sacrifices by Americans and Afghans and Brits and others, a viable, stable, less-awful alternative to Taliban rule existed only so long as it was kept on life support by the West — and not a day longer.”

It’s time to cut our losses and remember the sting of defeat. Such is the price of wisdom, though my hopes for a wiser American foreign policy remain in the gutter. After all, we still have the hawkish punditariat to contend with, and they have more allies than enemies in Washington. Here’s Sullivan again, after admitting that the withdrawal has indeed been a mess (and it has):

But there is something about the unreal huffing and puffing this week from the left-media, the neocon holdouts and the opportunistic Republicans that seems far too cheap and easy. It’s as if they have learned nothing — nothing — from the 21st Century. They are acting now as if we are snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, rather than finally ending the dumbest, longest war this country has ever fought.
They say they’re just decrying the way we left; but of course, this is the motte, not the bailey. Read any of their screeds, and you’ll see they still want us to stay. They still think they are right and that the American people are wrong, still believe they have the moral high ground, even as their morality has led to strategic blunders, and hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths. Bill Kristol — I kid you not — actually wrote another article condemning the withdrawal, quoting Churchill and Munich! How dead can a brain be?

Stone dead.

I am saddened by the return of the Taliban. I am worried about the future of Afghanistan’s people. I wish we could have saved everyone who helped us, but that assumes everyone who helped us wants to leave their homeland.

But remember this, dear readers: We won’t be talking about Afghanistan in a few months anyways.2 The suffering there will continue. The civil war. The Sharia law. And we will forget all about it when the next tragedy comes swirling down.

It’s fine to see a bad situation like this and be moved by it, and gnash teeth and tear garments, but don’t pretend you care enough to go and fight the war yourself. Neither do these pundits and opinion makers who thirst so much for blood but never spill a drop of their own.

Here’s my video on the matter:

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