Lessons learned from decades in Afghanistan

After 20 years of closely watched war, it would be only normal for Americans to wonder if as we withdraw all of our troops from Afghanistan, a nation of 34 million, whether it has been worth it.

My conclusion is the usual diplomat’s yes-and-no. We had to do it in the first place. The Taliban, from a solid but somewhat thoughtless base in Afghanistan, had delivered on 9/11 a crushing blow to the United States, changing literally everything in a nation that had practically never been attacked at home. (I include Mexican incursions and Pearl Harbor which, unlike the Twin Towers in New York City, were easy to see as “offshore” or hard to see as homeland.)

Now, a doorman had to be seen as front line and perhaps needed to be armed. Ordinary citizens needed to be constrained in their behavior with new measures described as “after 9/11” as adequate explanation.

So what’s different now? First of all, for Americans the question is what is different at home? One answer is, whoever is president now does not have to cope at every Cabinet meeting with baying from the military and other national security-oriented folks for more money or more troops (the same thing) for

Afghanistan, which is falling apart, or is almost redeemed. We had better concentrate on climate change, or, more difficult, infrastructure, unless we can conflate them.

Strategically, Afghanistan doesn’t really matter. It’s just one more “stan.” Neither the United Kingdom nor the Soviet Union collapsed when they broke an eyetooth on Afghanistan. Nor will we. As a Muslim country, it will not easily fall under Chinese hegemony, as it did not under Soviet rule. Nor ours.

We will have to watch it closely, from the air, or space, to see that it doesn’t give birth to another costly 9/11 attack on us, sponsored by someone -- Russia, China or the Islamists.

Another problem with withdrawal is the fate of the Afghans who put their money on us across the administrations. Not very many of those Afghans who are closely identified with us can easily scramble away. Most can say, “I did what I did as best for the country at that point,” with some honesty.

Our other position, with respect to cooperative Afghans, is to adapt our immigration policy, fortunately currently under review. We should admit Afghans who helped us as we did Koreans, Vietnamese, Nazis, Hungarians and who knows who else when it suited our purposes.

Women present a particular problem in an Afghanistann that will have a different configuration with us out the door. It hasn’t always been like it was when the Taliban were preeminent. Afghans themselves have to decide what role women are to play.

The Afghans are fools if they re-shelve them, half their population. I remember an Afghan woman, the wife of an Afghan diplomat in Sofia, Bulgaria, who was a skilled physician. This was before all the craziness of war in Afghanistan.

It is not a bad thing, whatever happens next, that Afghans have, with respect to the whither-the-women issue, the American period for reference.

One must lament for the Afghans the division of their history into British, Russian and Mercian periods, although they are probably used to it and are not unique among nations in that regard.

For us, we should have whacked them substantially after the 9/11 attack and then left, having clearly punished them by the end of 2001. Staying 20 years was probably due to no American president since 2001 wanting to take the licking for having left Afghanistan unfinished. I guess “unfinished” was like Vietnam, our last debacle, also in Asia.

There should be a lesson in this for us, but one we don’t want to learn. One lesson might be, don’t try to remake a tribal, Islamic, economic wasteland into Delaware. Also, learn from history. There had to be a reason why the British and Russian empires ended up crawling away from Afghanistan, concluding that its leaders were not actually leaders, and that its people’s wiring was incompatible with ours.

Maybe we did a little useful building there, but that’s about it.

Save some money, American blood, and forget about the place, except to watch it, which is what we should have done years ago. Grieve the people we lost there, and the Afghans. They really didn’t take advantage of the possibilities our presence and attitude offered them. Of course, why should they?