Maureen Dowd of the New York Times calls out the “experts” who say now is not the right time for the US to leave Afghanistan. My opinion is that this is the right strategic decision for the US and is a no-brainer political win for Biden. Ignore people like Lindsay Graham who’s love affair with STRATCOM is second only to his torrid romance with Lord Lardbutt, Charlatan-in-Chief. Getting out will likely lead to a bloodbath and many Afghans will pay a horrible price, especially girls and women. The US should do what it can to help the Afghans most at risk but indefinite war with zero chance of “victory” (however one might try to define it) — is simply untenable.
The endless wars of Iraq and Afghanistan showed the strategic contradiction at the heart of military adventures: the objective is to eliminate the threat of attack by hostile countries or terrorists (recall the “domino theory”), but by spending billions and sacrificing thousands of soldiers — and continuing to do so year after year after year — we’ve ended up sapping national strength far more than the cost of any potential attack ever could. I was a supporter of both wars and I was wrong. Our country has been severely weakened — by forever wars, by Big Tech causing us all to hate each other, by resurgent racism and Jim Crow policing (in Minnesota), by four decades of absurdly pro-rich economic policy, and by a pandemic that’s killed half a million Americans. We simply cannot afford to stay in Afghanistan. The American people know this even if the neo-cons don’t.
Biden Ditches the Generals, Finally
Another casualty in the graveyard of empires.
Opinion Columnist
WASHINGTON — Afghanistan has a complicated relationship with time. And America has a complicated relationship with revenge. Between these two truths, tragedy blossomed. Awash in grief and anger, we invaded Afghanistan after 9/11 to hunt down Osama bin Laden and punish the Taliban for letting him turn a maze of caves into a launching pad to attack America.
But, despite the lessons the Soviets learned in 10 hard years there fighting ghostly warriors who disappeared into the mountains, American officials and generals never absorbed this simple fact: Even the battles we won, we lost in a way. As we grasped for our own revenge, what kind of revenge quest did we inspire in those who watched daisy cutter bombs rain hellfire or a wedding party disintegrate in a flash from an American airstrike? How many enemies have we spawned trying to help Afghanistan?
Taliban leaders say Americans have all the clocks, but they have all the time.
The Bush administration was arrogant and ignorant about occupying this medieval moonscape. Officials thought they could bomb the bejesus out of the people who hated us, so that they would never look at us cross-eyed again. We would be the swaggering hyperpower. Even Barack Obama, once so prescient on the futility of invading Iraq, was suckered by the military into a pointless surge in Afghanistan, a near tripling of troops, in 2009.
I remember touring Afghanistan and Iraq with Obama’s defense secretary, Robert Gates, at the time, flying over the snow-capped mountains that make Afghanistan a natural fortress and sinkhole for empires. I asked him if the president had been rolled by the generals. “That’s ridiculous,” Gates snapped, adding: “Anybody who reads history has to approach these things with some humility because you can’t know. Nobody knows what the last chapter ever looks like.”
Well, we seem to be at the last chapter, and it looks just as grim as all the other chapters of this misbegotten occupation.