There are some things no amount of guns and money can fix. That should not be an earth-shattering revelation. Just last week, I recalled John Kerry’s famous coda to the Vietnam War, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”
After 20 years, the Graveyard of Empires has claimed another. U.S. diplomats this morning are evacuating our embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan by helicopter:
Helicopter after helicopter — including massive Chinooks with their twin engines and speedy Black Hawks that had been the workhorse of the grinding war — touched down and then took off loaded with passengers. Some dispensed flares overhead, a new addition to Kabul’s skyline.
Those being evacuated included a core group of American diplomats who had planned to remain at the embassy in Kabul, according to a senior administration official. They were being moved to a compound at the international airport, where they would stay for an unspecified amount of time, the official said.
Finger-pointing is inevitable. Memories are too short. That which we would rather forget, we forget.
At the time of our exit from Vietnam, untold numbers had been killed. Millions of civilians and combatants. After decades of U.S. training and investment, the South Vietnamese Army was soon in disarray. The U.S. left behind as much as $5 billion dollars in U.S. equipment (in 1970s dollars). Tens of thousands of abandoned M-16s ended up in the hands of revolutionaries across the globe.
As the Taliban swept across Afghanistan in the last weeks, it will happen again. Somewhere in the last week, I saw a photo of Afghan Army personnel in U.S. military vehicles supposedly fleeing for the Iranian border. The U.S. has attempted to destroy or extract what it can, but the speed of the Taliban advance means we will inevitably repeat the mistakes of Vietnam. Already the Taliban are seizing billions in U.S. military equipment.
David E. Sanger and Helene Cooper write in the New York Times:
If there is a consistent theme over two decades of war in Afghanistan, it is the overestimation of the results of the $83 billion the United States has spent since 2001 training and equipping the Afghan security forces and an underestimation of the brutal, wily strategy of the Taliban. The Pentagon had issued dire warnings to Mr. Biden even before he took office about the potential for the Taliban to overrun the Afghan army, but intelligence estimates, now shown to have badly missed the mark, assessed it might happen in 18 months, not weeks.
Commanders did know that the afflictions of the Afghan forces had never been cured: the deep corruption, the failure by the government to pay many Afghan soldiers and police officers for months, the defections, the soldiers sent to the front without adequate food and water, let alone arms. In the past several days, the Afghan forces have steadily collapsed as they battled to defend ever shrinking territory, losing Mazar-i-Sharif, the country’s economic engine, to the Taliban on Saturday.
Something else our short memories have forgotten: The U.S. sent troops into Afghanistan to hunt down Al Qaeda, not to spend 20 years fighting the country’s civil war. But we did.
President Biden issued a statement addressing that history on Saturday:
America went to Afghanistan 20 years ago to defeat the forces that attacked this country on September 11th. That mission resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden over a decade ago and the degradation of al Qaeda. And yet, 10 years later, when I became President, a small number of U.S. troops still remained on the ground, in harm’s way, with a looming deadline to withdraw them or go back to open combat.
Over our country’s 20 years at war in Afghanistan, America has sent its finest young men and women, invested nearly $1 trillion dollars, trained over 300,000 Afghan soldiers and police, equipped them with state-of-the-art military equipment, and maintained their air force as part of the longest war in U.S. history. One more year, or five more years, of U.S. military presence would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country. And an endless American presence in the middle of another country’s civil conflict was not acceptable to me.
Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute takes Biden to task for the manner of our withdrawal:
Reasonable people can disagree about the wisdom of keeping American military forces in Afghanistan indefinitely, even at very low numbers. I and others have argued that the investment, including the risk to American personnel, is worth it to prevent militant groups from once again overrunning the country.
Mr. Biden believes that further expending U.S. resources in Afghanistan is “a recipe for being there indefinitely.” He rightly notes that President Trump had left him few good options by making a terrible deal with the Taliban. That’s a fine argument, but it explains neither the hastiness nor the consequences we are now observing: the Taliban overrunning swaths of the country, closing in on Kabul, pushing the Afghan security forces and government to the brink of collapse and prompting the Pentagon to prepare for a possible evacuation of the U.S. embassy.
A responsible withdrawal needed more time and better preparation. History will record Mr. Biden, a supposed master of foreign policy for decades, as having failed in this most critical assignment.
And yet, for all our best intentions, that failure was inevitable the moment the U.S. engaged in nation-building in a country that is not a nation but cluster of regions governed more by tribal leaders and warlords than by Kabul.
Recently, I watched a hair-raising film chronicling a real battle between U.S. and Taliban forces. The Outpost (2019) retells with frightening realism the Battle of Kamdesh in 2009. As Wikipedia tells it:
In 2006, PRT Kamdesh – later renamed Combat Outpost Keating – was one of several U.S. Army outposts established in Northern Afghanistan. Located in a remote valley surrounded by the Hindu Kush mountains, the base was regarded as a deathtrap; the troops stationed there faced regular Taliban attacks, culminating in one of the bloodiest American engagements of Operation Enduring Freedom. The film tells the story of the 53 U.S. soldiers and two Latvian military advisors who battled some 300 enemy insurgents at the Battle of Kamdesh.
Most staggering was that at one point we learn that local villagers did not know the U.S. troops were not Russians. They were just the latest foreign occupiers.
What happens next in Afghanistan could be an unspeakable tragedy. One simply delayed by 20 years of futile U.S. efforts to forestall the inevitable.
How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for the inevitable?
UPDATE: This.