The ‘good’ war’s lesson in restraint
The chaos and extremism unleashed in Afghanistan in recent days offer another awful demonstration of the limits of American military power — and a harder one for Afghans than for Americans. If any good can come of the disturbing scenes unfolding, with worse sure to come as the Taliban restores its backward-gazing theocracy to Kabul and the rest of the country, it will spring from learning the lessons we have repeatedly forgotten or ignored.
After 20 years of war, which made it America’s longest armed conflict, the Taliban seized the country in about two weeks, meeting little resistance as the capital and its presidential palace fell, President Ashraf Ghani fled into exile and the U.S. withdrawal remained unfinished. The Afghan forces and government that coalition forces labored to stand up across decades melted away in days.
Contradicting the coalition’s expressions of confidence in their handiwork even on the brink of the pullout, it was
an astonishingly rapid collapse of all that was gained at a monumental cost: the lives of nearly 2,500 American military personnel, twice as many allied contractors and forces, and over 100,000 Afghan military, police and civilians.
The United States has spent an estimated $2.3 trillion on the war, a figure expected to multiply as the nation continues to pay down associated debts and care for the war’s veterans. More incalculable costs will be borne by Afghans, particularly women and girls, at the hands of the restored regime.
It’s an outcome no one can defend, and yet one on which Donald Trump and his nemeses, President Biden and Barack Obama, ultimately agreed in substance. Afghanistan was supposed to be the better, more justified of George W. Bush’s post-9/11 wars, but it’s culminating with the same impression of misadventure and futility as Iraq. Every president since Bush has been preoccupied primarily with finding a way out, but neither failing nor succeeding in that endeavor could correct the original error of American arrogance in attempting to spread democracy across the globe at gunpoint.
We haven’t lacked for warnings. Biden promised the withdrawal would not remind us of our infamous exit from America’s second-longest war, Vietnam, only to watch desperate Afghans throng U.S. planes leaving Kabul in an eerie echo of Saigon. Afghanistan itself was a renowned graveyard of superpowers even before the United States marched in behind the Soviet Union and Britain.
One of the few political reputations burnished by recent events is that of Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, the lone vote against the broad post-9/11 authorization of military force and a oncelonely advocate for repealing the congressional carte blanche. More recently, Lee’s cause has won support from the House, the Biden administration and a Senate committee. The precipitous fall of Kabul represents one more grim recommendation for Lee’s restrained approach.