The New York Times’s Ross Douthat has an excellent column that argues President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan was disastrous, shameful, and a long time coming.
For more than 20 years, our institutions pushed the American public to believe that our military presence in Afghanistan was not only necessary, but good. We were rebuilding a war-torn, corrupt, and hellish region and turning it into a functioning democratic society, according to the Bush and Obama administrations, which found support in just about every nook and cranny of Washington’s power-hungry establishment.
Of course, this was a delusion, as our withdrawal has proved. The Afghan government collapsed in less than two days, the Taliban retook Afghanistan, and any progress we made was destroyed overnight.
But here’s the kicker: our government knew this would happen. The military knew the Afghan government was a failure and the region itself was ungovernable, but lied to the public for years and claimed our mission was succeeding.
Eventually, it became impossible to deny that the war in Afghanistan could not be “won,” so the strategy quietly changed, Douthat says: No longer were we pursuing the kind of regime change that politicos such as Bill Kristol dreamed of; the best we could hope for was an indefinite stalemate that would allow us to maintain our national interests in the region.
He writes:
But defeat was inevitable, and everyone knew it. Which is why the military-industrial complex dragged out our occupation for as long as possible, relying on the goodwill of Americans and the naive belief that we really were powerful and great enough to remake any country, even one as culturally and ideologically different as Afghanistan, in our image.
From Douthat:
He’s right. The resignation letters and forced retirements should be numerous, not just because our elites botched the actual withdrawal, but because they sent us to Afghanistan in the first place. Biden certainly deserves the blame for the chaotic and disorderly way we pulled our military presence, but his instincts were right: It was time to get out and put an end to the nation-building policy that cost everyone but the war-hawks who were too busy lining their own pockets to notice what we were doing was unsustainable.
Unfortunately, it’s looking more and more unlikely that we’ll get even one resignation — because that would require someone to admit being wrong. And we already know no one in our federal government is capable of doing that, because if they were, we would have left Afghanistan a long time ago.
