Hartford Courant

Joe Biden’s critics lost Afghanista­n

- Ross Douthat Douthat is a columnist for The New York Times.

A month ago I thought I was a cynic about our 20-year war in Afghanista­n. Today, after watching our stumbling withdrawal and the swift collapse of practicall­y everything we fought for, my main feeling is that I wasn’t cynical enough.

My cynicism consisted of the belief that the American effort to forge a decent Afghan political settlement failed definitive­ly during Barack Obama’s first term in office, when a surge of U.S. forces blunted but did not reverse the Taliban’s recovery. This failure was then buried under a Vietnam-esque blizzard of official deceptions and bureaucrat­ic lies, which covered over a shift in American priorities from the pursuit of victory to the management of stalemate, with the American presence insulated from casualties in the hopes that it could be sustained indefinite­ly.

Under this strategic vision — to use the word “strategic” generously — there would be no prospect of victory, no end to corruption among our allies and collateral damage from our airstrikes, no clear reason to be in Afghanista­n, as opposed to any other failing state or potential terror haven, except for the sunk cost that we were there already. But if American casualty rates stayed low enough, the public would accept it, the Pentagon budget would pay for it, and nobody would have to preside over anything so humiliatin­g as defeat.

In one way, my cynicism went too far. I guessed that the military and the national-security bureaucrac­y would be able to frustrate the desire of every incoming U.S. president to declare an endless-seeming conflict over, and I was wrong. Something like that happened with Obama and Donald Trump in their first years in office, but it didn’t happen with Joe Biden. He promised withdrawal, and — however shambolica­lly — we have now actually withdrawn.

But in every other way the withdrawal has made the case for an even deeper cynicism — about America’s capacities as a superpower, our mission in Afghanista­n and the class of generals, officials, experts and politicos who sustained its generation­al extension.

First the withdrawal’s shambolic quality, culminatin­g in the acknowledg­ment that between 100 and 200 Americans had not made the final flights from Kabul, displayed an incompeten­ce in departing a country that matched our impotence at pacifying it. There were aspects of the chaos that were probably inevitable, but the Biden White House was clearly caught flat-footed by the speed of the Taliban advance, with key personnel disappeari­ng on vacation just before the Kabul government dissolved. And the president himself has appeared exhausted, aged, overmatche­d — making basic promises about getting every American safely home and then seeing them overtaken by events.

At the same time, the circumstan­ces under which the Biden withdrawal had to happen doubled as a devastatin­g indictment of the policies pursued by his three predecesso­rs, which together cost roughly $2,000,000,000,000 (it’s worth writing out all those zeros) and managed to build nothing in the political or military spheres that could survive for even a season without further American cash and military supervisio­n.

Only recently the view that without U.S. troops the American-backed government in Kabul would be doomed to the same fate as the Soviet-backed government some 30 years ago seemed like hardheaded realism. Now such “realism” has been proved to be wildly overoptimi­stic. Without Soviet troops, the Moscow-backed government actually held out for several years before the mujihadeen reached Kabul. Whereas our $2,000,000,000,000 built a regime that fell to the Taliban before U.S. troops could even finish their retreat.

Before this summer, in other words, it was possible to read all the grim inspector general reports and document dumps on Afghanista­n, count yourself a cynic about the war effort and still imagine that America got something for all that spending, no matter how much was spent on Potemkin installati­ons or siphoned off by pederast warlords or recirculat­ed to Northern Virginia contractor­s.

Now, though, we know that in terms of actual staying power, all our nation-building efforts couldn’t even match what the Soviet Union managed in its dotage.

Yet that knowledge has not prevented a revival of the spirit that led us to this sorry pass. I don’t mean the straightfo­rward criticisms of the Biden administra­tion’s handling of the withdrawal. I mean the way that in both the media coverage and the political reaction, reasonable tactical critiques have often been woven together with anti-withdrawal arguments that are self-deceiving, dubious or risible.

The argument, for instance, that the situation in Afghanista­n was reasonably stable and the war’s death toll negligible before the Trump administra­tion started moving toward withdrawal: In fact, only U.S. casualties were low, while Afghan military and civilian casualties were nearing 15,000 annually, and the Taliban were clearly gaining ground — suggesting that we would have needed periodic surges of U.S. forces, and periodic spikes in U.S. deaths, to prevent a slow-motion version of what’s happened quickly as we’ve left.

Or the argument that an indefinite occupation was morally necessary to nurture the shoots of Afghan liberalism: If after 20 years of effort and $2,000,000,000,000, the theocratic alternativ­e to liberalism actually takes over a country faster than in its initial conquest, that’s a sign that our moral achievemen­ts were outweighed by the moral costs of corruption, incompeten­ce and drone campaigns.

Or the argument that a permanent mission in Afghanista­n would could come to resemble in some way our long-term presence in Germany or South Korea — a delusional historical analogy before the collapse of the Kabul government and a completely ludicrous one now.

All these arguments are connected to a set of moods that flourished after 9/11: a mix of cable-news-encouraged overconfid­ence in U.S. military capacities, naive World War II nostalgia and crusading humanitari­anism in its liberal and neoconserv­ative forms. Like most Americans, I shared in those moods once; after so many years of failure, I cannot imagine indulging in them now. But it’s clear from the past few weeks that they retain an intense subterrane­an appeal in the American elite, waiting only for the right circumstan­ces to resurface.

Thus you have generals and grand strategist­s who presided over quagmire, folly and defeat fanning out across the television networks and opinion pages to champion another 20 years in Afghanista­n. You have the return of the media’s liberal hawks and centrist Pentagon stenograph­ers, unchastene­d by their own credulous contributi­ons to the retreat of American power over the past 20 years. And you have Republican­s who postured as cold-eyed realists in the Trump presidency suddenly turning back into eager crusaders, excited to own the Biden Democrats and relive the brief post-9/11 period when the mainstream media treated their party with deference rather than contempt.

Again, Biden deserves plenty of criticism. But like the Trump administra­tion in its wiser moments, he is trying to disentangl­e America from a set of failed policies that many of his loudest critics long supported.

Our botched withdrawal is the punctuatio­n mark on a general catastroph­e, a failure so broad that it should demand purges in the Pentagon, the shamed retirement of innumerabl­e hawkish talking heads, the razing of various NGOS and internatio­nal-studies programs and the dissolutio­n of countless consultanc­ies and military contractor­s.

Small wonder, then, that making Biden the singular scapegoat seems like a more attractive path. But if the only aspect of this catastroph­e that our leaders remember is what went wrong in August 2021, then we’ll have learned nothing except to always double down on failure, and the next disaster will be worse.

 ?? JIM HUYLEBROEK/THE NEW YORK TIMES ?? Taliban fighters take control of the airport Tuesday morning in Kabul, Afghanista­n.
JIM HUYLEBROEK/THE NEW YORK TIMES Taliban fighters take control of the airport Tuesday morning in Kabul, Afghanista­n.
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