President Joe Biden’s disastrous execution of our withdrawal from Afghanistan has made it much more difficult to defend the initial decision to exit the region. But it is still true that leaving Afghanistan was necessary and long overdue.
Our troops had been in Afghanistan for more than 20 years, helping build up an Afghan government that could fend off terror threats in the region and support itself with its own military. Biden was right to argue that, at a certain point, the Afghan government needed to act independently, without the United States propping it up. What was the alternative? An indefinite occupation of a foreign land that has proven time and time again that it is incapable of being governed?
To quote a friend of mine, there’s a word to describe what the American military establishment would have liked to do in Afghanistan: It’s called colonialism.
The fact is that the post-World War II goals of “regime change” and “empire building” were never achievable. Afghanistan was in a state of civil war long before the U.S. invaded and will continue to be even if we were to return to the region. What the U.S. military establishment refuses to admit is that there are certain countries and certain peoples with values that are so different than ours that attempting to democratize or Americanize them is just not possible. I’m reminded of economist Friedrich Hayek when he said that it is man’s “fatal conceit” that he thinks he can “shape the world around him according to his wishes.”
Our mission in Afghanistan, then, and the reasoning behind it, was doomed from the start. So I fail to see how remaining there would have been a worthwhile investment of American lives and resources. The best we could hope for is a stalemate. And while this might have made our military experts in the beltway feel a bit safer, and definitely more powerful, the fact is that they were asking American troops to keep putting their lives on the line for a mission that had lost justification a long time ago.
There is no question that the way Biden went about our withdrawal was a catastrophic failure and national humiliation. But he was right to want to get out. And he was right to recognize that America can still be a superpower without trying to change other countries and remake them in our image by force.
