This, apparently:
Ezra Klein has a smart column in the NY Times today about our ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan:
Focusing on the execution of the withdrawal is giving virtually everyone who insisted we could remake Afghanistan the opportunity to obscure their failures by pretending to believe in the possibility of a graceful departure. It’s also obscuring the true alternative to withdrawal: endless occupation. But what our ignominious exit really reflects is the failure of America’s foreign policy establishment at both prediction and policymaking in Afghanistan.
“The pro-war crowd sees this as a mechanism by which they can absolve themselves of an accounting for the last 20 years,” Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, told me. “Just think about the epic size of this policy failure. Twenty years of training. More than $2 trillion worth of expenditure. For almost nothing. It is heartbreaking to watch these images, but it is equally heartbreaking to think about all of the effort, of lives and money we wasted in pursuit of a goal that was illusory.”
Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, phrased it well. “There’s no denying America is the most powerful country in the world, but what we’ve seen over and over in recent decades is we cannot turn that into the outcomes we want. Whether it’s Afghanistan or Libya or sanctions on Russia and Venezuela, we don’t get the policy outcomes we want, and I think that’s because we overreach — we assume that because we are very powerful, we can achieve things that are unachievable.”
It is worth considering some counterfactuals for how our occupation could have ended. Imagine that the Biden administration, believing the Afghan government hollow, ignored President Ashraf Ghani’s pleas and begins rapidly withdrawing personnel and power months ago. The vote of no-confidence ripples throughout Afghan politics, demoralizing the existing government and emboldening the Taliban. Those who didn’t know which side to choose, who were waiting for a signal of who held power, quickly cut deals with the Taliban. As the last U.S. troops leave, the Taliban overwhelms the country, and the Biden administration is blamed, reasonably, for speeding their victory.
Another possible scenario was suggested to me by Grant Gordon, a political scientist who works on conflict and refugee crises (and is, I should say, an old friend): If the Biden administration had pulled our allies and personnel out more efficiently, that might have unleashed the Taliban to massacre their opposition, as America and the world would have been insulated and perhaps uninterested in the aftermath. There have been revenge killings, but it has not devolved, at least as of yet, into all-out slaughter, and that may be because the American withdrawal has been messy and partial and the Taliban fears re-engagement. “What is clearly a debacle from one angle may actually have generated restraint. Having spent time in places like this, I think people lack a real imagination for how bad these conflicts can get,” he told me.
Let me offer one more: Even though few believed Ghani’s government would prevail in our absence, and the Trump administration cut them out of its deal with the Taliban, there’s widespread disappointment that the government we supported collapsed so quickly. Biden has been particularly unsparing in his descriptions of the Afghan Army’s abdication, and I agree with those who say he’s been unfair, underestimating the courage and sacrifice shown by Afghan troops throughout the war. But put that aside: Americans might have felt better seeing our allies in Afghanistan put up a longer fight, even if the Taliban emerged victorious. But would a multiyear civil war have been better for the Afghans caught in the crossfire?
Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, put it simply: “I think there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance and smart people are struggling with how to rationalize defeat. Because that’s what we have here in Afghanistan — a defeat.”
I will not pretend that I know how we should have left Afghanistan. But neither do a lot of people dominating the airwaves right now. And the confident pronouncements to the contrary over the past two weeks leave me worried that America has learned little. We are still holding not just to the illusion of our control, but to the illusion of our knowledge.
Ezra’s last point is one I cannot stop screaming about internally as I watch and read the coverage of this event. We all knew that withdrawal was on the table. Both presidential candidates said they would do it. An agreement was in place. (Whether Trump would have had the guts to actually do it is another story — he had four years, after all.) But the intention was clear. I don’t remember anyone putting up much of a fuss over it. There were numerous debates and months of campaigning and everyone knew it was happening.
Fast forward to the withdrawal and everyone is suddenly upset about the plight of the Afghanistan people, which is understandable. It’s a horror. But either they never thought about the consequences of withdrawal until now or they thought that the Afghan Army would fight off of the Taliban (with whom we were directly negotiating, remember) for months or years, resulting in a blood civil war that would kill massive numbers of Afghans. Is this really the outcome we wanted, because that’s the real counterfactual? Essentially, it just would mean that the US could get out clean and then blame the inevitable defeat on the Afghan army, which is grotesquely self-serving.
The media, which is leading the hysterical reaction to the complicated withdrawal, should have understood this better than anyone. Their apparent shock is inexcusable.
Update: there was a bombing at Kabul airport this morning.
A couple of days ago, Matt Yglesias tweeted this:
On 8 September, 2009, at around 8:22 AM, a suicide bombing took place near the entrance of the airport’s military base
On 3 July 2014, Taliban fighters fired two rockets into the airport, destroying four helicopters. One of the four helicopters belongs to Afghan President hamid Karzai
On 29 July 2015, three American defense contractors and one Afghan national were killed by a gunman outside the airport in the late evening
On 17 May, 2015, a suicide bombing by the Taliban near the entrance of the airport occured, killing three and injuring eighteen
The point, of course, is that we have been dealing with violence at the very location where the violence took place today, for a very long time with nobody paying any attention to it.